Greetings 64D!

I've sort of been gone for a couple months now. Time for some explanation.

1. For a week or two I was spending massive amounts of time on my projects.

2. Then on top of that, I picked up my guitar again which took away from my comp time (which I still devoted to projects).

3. Now, this shouldn't hold a guy up for months should it??? No, after the first couple weeks, my comp decided to have a freakin' seizure. It stopped working blah blah blah windows was screwed blah blah blah reformatted blah blah. Long story short, I got it fixed, but I lost nearly everything on my hardrive (aside from older versions of a couple things I had strewn across the net.)

Put that last step into the equation and I was pretty much steamed at the comp for a while. I dropped near everything except for AIM/MSN/Skype and the occasional report I had to write. After cooling down (which brings us to last week) I regained my normal love of all things game related, and popped back on 64D. Why haven't I blogged this week? I'm lazy, and had nothing really to blog about :p

So now, on to normal blog content.

Unnamed Shooter:

Figured I'd start back simple and make a space shooter. Perhaps a bullet-hell SHMUP sort of shooter, haven't really decided yet.

Anyway, I've put off this blog until I had a little bit to show for it.

So here are two ships I made within the last 2 days…

The Tra'kad (star sword)

And a basic enemy

The enemies will all be based around that idea. "Infected" ships that would normally be friendlies. Some of them will be totally alien though.

I still need to fix the outline of the enemy. It looks like fuzzy pixels rather then a smooth outline.

The ship that you'll fly in the game is the Tra'kad (star sword). After spriting it, I realized I made it look a lot more like a sword then a ship, but I still liked it so now you get to fly the big sword :p

There will be a primary cannon weapon which you can fire constantly with the space, and a powerful secondary which charges up over time. I'm thinking about adding maybe a 3rd and 4th set of gear you can use, and also making a store to buy upgrades and new equipment.

On the programming front, I discovered how awesome alpha maps are. As you can see, the Tra'kad looks fine on a white background, but as soon as I put it in game, it looks terrible. I knew I had seen something on the interwebz about fixing that, but I couldn't remember what. Then I stumbled across a topic on an Alpha map which also linked to a tutorial. It is now one of my favorite functions in GM =D

Well, I guess that's about all I've got for now.

Later

Also, alpha maps rock!