Arbiter. If you don't know what it means, then, in accordance with ITA 404, section C, I banish you to some dictionary or the other until you discover it's meaning.

That's the name of my game, and I'm sticking with it. Anyway, quite a bit of progress. I managed to fix my collision detection code (It was actually the collision response that was faulty; the detection itself was perfect).

So here's a working snapshot:

And a video to prove that the collision works (And the animations (And scrolling)).

Notice that I've been uploading way more videos lately? Funny that. The way I encode them (MPEG 4 AVC decoder, full sized, usually 30 FPS and a 380KBPS bitrate), turns out videos with miniscule size imprints, even at high resolutions.

I'll put it this way. I have a chiptune I uploaded just now (See below). It's size, after compressing to MP3, is 2.7MB. Both videos I uploaded at the same time, with a total running time of a minute, and at 60FPS (I forgot to switch the recorder back to 30, which is better for the average recording session), weigh in at a total of 1.2mb.

In other news…

Masters of Game Maker competition

Being ye olde typical Mega, I saw another competition (More of a challenge, really) on YYG (I still haunt the place, for no reason other than it was the first community site I joined).

The rules are simple, but strict. You have until the 1st of July to make a game (With GM, of course). You may only use one Object, one Room, one instance of said object, you may only use Scripts, Sprites, Backgrounds (No tilesets), and the Room's Creation Code.

Allowed events in the object are the Game Start, Create and Draw events, if I recall.

Forbidden functions include anything that alters resources (So you can't load external resources), anything that creates rooms/resources/objects, and anything that instances objects. Challenging? Pfft. Been there, done that. C, C++, Java. Assembly.

So here's what I have so far:

So, because I can't use the Room Editor (No loss there ;3), and because GM has a damned stupid set of IO functions, I created an export script for Tilestudio that exports the map into a piece of GML that I can copy+paste into my game.

Each map is an array taking this form: lvl_<identifier>_<suffix>[90];

Then I use execute_string() to dynamically insert the name of the current block (Taken from a ds_grid that stores strings). So the data script looks as messy as heck (Which is to be expected), but it works like a charm.

As a result of the limitations and having to process my own levels, I had to implement my own collision functions. As can be seen in the video, they work perfectly.

Here, have a chiptune that's larger than both the videos I just posted

I made this yesterday, at <insert an hour near midnight here>. :3

http://soundcloud.com/mega1992/return-control

Speaking of midnight, I had something hilarious happen to me a few days ago (In retrospect, that is). I was working away merrily at whatever it was I was working on (Art, I think), and I looked at the time on my taskbar. Only 10 PM? OK. Keep working.

Two hours later, I'm feeling more tired than usual, but it's only midnight, so I go to bed feeling content in the knowledge that I got stuff done.

Next day, I woke up later than normal. And then I went and missed lunch by an hour and a half, even though my computer was telling me it was exactly 1 PM, and that's when we have lunch around here.

No, my BIOS wasn't set incorrectly. Rather, I had forgotten to set the correct timezone information when I had reinstalled Windows last year, so DST.

Anyway, I fixed that. Now I know why my nights were feeling longer than normal.

Well 64Digits, it's time for me to go back to blending in with the Lurkers, and it's time for you to tell me…

> that my artwork is too saturated

> that my chiptune hasn't got enough <insert Yamaha synth chip here> in it.

> that my videos are too short

> …

(Actually, I'm remaking some of my chiptunes with TFMaker. Sounding good so far, but requires a lot more tweaking because of the ADSR instrument setups).