So my Dad's friend died a few days ago. They were really close. It was cancer, but I'd rather not get into all that.

Anyway, he knew I was really into computers, so he left me his complete computer rig. It comes with its own bass and surround sound speaker. The monitor is… humongous for lack of an actual screen res (can't find it?) It's running XP and running off a custom tower, so that's pretty cool.

It also came with a gigantic printer/scanner/gold creator and a complete racing controller including pedals, wheel and stick shift.

I already transferred Game Maker 8 onto this computer as well as my most important game files and what have you.

Speaking of which, some of you may have noticed (I doubt it) my single project which is tentatively titled Chronicles of the Hchrubak (pronounced Hroo-Back). I'll spill some beans about it now…

Well if you've played Iji, it's similar to that in many ways, and is in fact inspired by it. However, I've also tried to make it as different as possible so that I don't get blamed for making an Iji clone, though I doubt with the power of a thousand suns I could even touch that thing.

The game itself is in platform view, and hot damn are platform collisions hard. I'm still trying to work out most of the bugs but it's largely annoying.

The player will eventually gain access to I think it's 36 weapons of varying power and what have you, and I've programmed every one, so that's nice.

Now, to keep the project somewhat fresh, I've included many RPG elements into the game, so while it'll be nice and action-y (hopefully), there will also be an inventory system with its own defense attack and mobility mods. Namely this means you can equip armor that have their own unique stats and draw-backs. I've already programmed all this, and it was actually easier than I thought, considering this was my first time creating an inventory with a 2D array.

The biggest trouble I'm having right now is my stupid textbox engine. It works fine and I've got the whole system done, but I'm utterly frustrated with my line-break system.

To make everything as dynamic and easy to edit as possible I make sure the line breaks after a certain amount of characters, but I'm inexperienced in this area and so I put a simple string_replace function that simply adds "#" after every 65 characters, but this leads to words being split into pieces.

If you could give me some handy pointers as to how to break an entire word rather than split it in half I'd appreciate it.

This project is one I'm very determined to complete. Usually my games fizzle out after a few days, but I've finally figured out that I need to plan plan plan before I start programming and such, which I did. I designed everything, from the entire 16-page cutscene document to the inane chatter of every enemy present in the game, so I'm pretty confident.

Anyway, I've gone on long enough, methinks, so toodles for now.

-Darthvender