Oh wow, it feels like ages since I was able to sit down and work on a BYOND game. Between school and work, I've been kept plenty busy these past 10 weeks or so.

But now that I've polished off my last final*, I'm officially on Spring Break! Woo! I don't think it's quite sunk in yet that I'm done with the quarter, but I'm looking forward to getting a full night of sleep for the first time this week.

Well, scratch that--sleep is for losers. I've got BYOND games to catch up on :)

Right now, my plan is to get a beta out of Breach, my unit-pushing strategy game of red-rover. Unfortunately, it's been so long since I've worked on it, I have no idea where I left off. I know it still needs [at least] a lobby system, an AI opponent (or else no one will try it!), and the charging element.

If I manage to get that out, I'll start planning a game to take advantage of BYOND's new features: the new netcode and Isometric maps. Although I haven't decided on anything concrete, I plan to merge several WIPs to create a 4 player Action-Adventure game (ala Gauntlet Legends). I'm not sure yet how I'll merge platforming, combat, creeps, and projectiles into one, smooth gameplay experience, but I'll be darned if I'm not dumb enough to try! I think taking cover will have to play a considerable role.

Well, now that I have my grandiose plans all laid out, I might as well list all of my distractions:

1. My boss asked me to work 30 hours this week. This isn't too much of a problem, since I average about 20-24 hours a week anyway, but I'm guessing it'll end up being more around 40 hours of work.
   
2. I picked up MW2 for the PC, and I'm finding it quite enjoyable. I beat the single player campaign on Regular, and now I'm starting to go through it again on Hardened. I really enjoyed the ending. I got him in the left eye. Felt so darn good after all that had happened. Can't wait to do it again :P
   

Well, two doesn't seem so bad. Although, I'm sure I'll find something else to distract me.


Anyways, a post of mine wouldn't be complete without something for you guys to try out.

I'm not going to post the beta of Forsaken Galaxy, because it turned out like a POS and I got a D on it. If I can stand to work in GML again (I never want to see a with() construction again! Use the dot operator, darn it! And what's with the non-conservative conditional operators?!) I might manage to make a fun game out of it. In the end, I cast too large a net and didn't have time to reel it in :(

That said, the final group project for my Game Dev class turned out much better! Although I wanted to add a bunch of other features, the project lead knocked some sense into me and we managed to produce a decent little game.

Meet Get the Hell Out of Dr. Alvoid's Lab:

Take the role of John Schwann the chemist in this thrilling platformer! Kidnapped and poisoned by the evil Dr. Alvoid, John must overcome the deadly lab experiments and treacherous traps left by his captor and ultimately defeat him to win the antidote!

*Programming in C++ II. It was a take-home final. The last problem was to write a templated function that returned the maximum of a given array of an unknown data type. Oh yea, and the array was already sorted in ascending order. Needless to say, I facepalm'd.