I'm next to absolutely sure that you guys don't care about the making of " * ", my most recent game, but I'm sure there's at least one or two lone human beings out there who give more than a crap about the game, so I figured I'll be doing THEM a favor :D.

Well, I'm going to do this in a little "list" form so it might be more of a "Did you know…?" about the game. Nevertheless, here it is:

-=-This project was supposed to be a 2-week long project, but it simply took WAAAY longer than expected, given I implemented the Shop system. I'm sure most of you agree that the shop system in the game is one of the peaks in the game, so I'm sure the etra time was worth it.

-=-The project was originally for a competition (I forget which one exactly) but became a regular project after the competition deadline was over. I was sure it wasn't going to win anyhow, so I figured it would be better to not rush the completion of the game and take as much time as I needed.

-=-The graphic style I went for was futuristic. There really isn't a reason WHY I wanted a futuristic mood, but I wanted to experiment with a metallic look on Paint Shop Pro.

-=-This game features some of the best graphics that I can currently make. Not to gloat or anything, but I just wanted to let it be known that around 75% of the game development time was spent on making effects and the graphics of course.

-=-The "grid" look throughout the game was actually inspired by a table that has that exact same metal grid surface in a restaurant I go to eat lunch often.

-=-The music was obviously inspired by Seiklus (tingy-sounding mod music). Tapeworm (creator of Seiklus) provided a link to dozens of that type of music that the liked, and I took the liberty to use the best-fitting music in the game. I felt that the type of music also helped contribute to that digital/futuristic feel.

-=-Much to my surprsie, this was probably the "smoothest" project I've ever had. This means I barely had any problems/bugs with the coding or had any aspect of the game that "stumped" me for some time. This is due to the fact that the coding wasn't much complicated.

-=-Believe it or not, the most complicated part was the actual implementation of the item system (not the shop). It took me about a week and a half to implement all properly-working items in the game. If anything, that's where the development of the game gave me most trouble.

-=-Joewoof, who is the guy that I think gave the game the most attention to the game, not only gave " * " one of the longest reviews I've seen in my life at the GMG, but also pointed out a M-A-J-O-R bug that rendered the game unplayable after five minutes. A SUPER special thanks goes to him (pat him on the back next time you see him ;)

).

-=-I got a reg key from my brother for my birthday (FINALLY after around 3 years of using GM), which was in the middle of the development of "*". This game is the first one from me that features things only available in the registered version such as image_alpha and image_angle.

-=-Random Fact about the game: If you look closely at your cursor, you'll notice that it rotates ever-so-slowly. That's my first use of image_angle ever.

-=-All the backgrounds are so large (1024 X 768) that I had to cut them up into 4 and place them as separate backgrounds in the game.

-=-The idea for the game as a whole was the result of playing seeminlgy-endless puzzle games on my cell phone. The idea spent about a month floating on my head before I sat down to actually make it.

-=-My "Dream Project" with this game is to make it as a port to the Nintendo DS, which is the system other than the PC in which the user can play it most effectively.

-=-The sounds were taken from the resource sounds of RPG Maker 2003. To this day I haven't found sounds with better quality than those.

-=-At first, I was going to make the highscore table display the highest score, but I realized that the score does not measure the success of the player. This is because you can modify the score by great amounts through the shop. For instance, you can spend all your score (I don't know why you would do that) when you're at Level 25 and lose but you might have less points than someone who made it to level 10 and didn't spend a single point. Because of this, the Level # reached was the best way to measure the success of the player.

-=-I used extensive beveling effects on the graphic text and the health bar to achieve that "look".

-=-I felt compelled to include that "Seizure Warning" message at the beginning of the game due to the abnormal amount of flashes and effects in the actual game. I got the actual message text from a PDF file of an instruction booklet from some random game by Googling "Seizure Warning".

-=-I intended the game to have 8 items, but the last one was scrapped due to the uselessness of the item. It froze the movement of the orbs completely for 10 seconds, but I didn't see a difference between that and Slow Down. That's why there's that "irregular" look to the item placement in the shop with 3 items on the top and 4 in the bottom, as I intended it originally to have 4 on the top and bottom.

-=-I thought deeply about implementing a multiplayer mode, but I realized that the scoring was going to be too confusing and the gameplay would be too hectic to be any fun. That and it would delay the completion by at least a month.

-=-I changed the "RockyRan's Games" logo beginning with this game because I simply detested the old one. I intend to change the stars from the logo to something else with every game I release, but I'm not sure how that will turn out.

-=-Windows would not let me rename the EXE file " * " because * was an illegal character for a filename, so I decided to renem it "Asterisk" despite the fact that I had avoided doing that throughout the entire development of the game.

=======================

Well I think that's all I have for the development of the game. I hope it provided more than nothing of amusement. If it didn't well, at least I took away a few minutes from your life >:D.