Calfstronaut and the Computer Bug Infection Beta Test

[fletchergames]

http://www.orbitalcows.com/cbi.php

I’ve uploaded the beta test of Calfstronaut and the Computer Bug Infection to my website.

The artist I usually work with made this game himself using Gamemaker, and I’m setting up the beta test for him.

This is a casual game where you click on computer viruses to clear them off of your mainframe. There’s various power ups to use and malicious code sequences that you can’t click on.

There’s screenshots and a preview video at the url. It provides a link for giving feedback. Anyone who sends in feedback is eligible to receive a free copy of the finished game.

The game gets installed to the C:\Games[our directory]\ directory instead of the C:\Program Files[our directory]\ directory because he can’t figure out how to put the save file in the user directory with Gamemaker. So it just gets saved to the directory the game is in, which could be a problem if the program doesn’t have write access to the C:\Program Files\ directory (which depends on the Windows settings for the user playing it). If anyone has an idea about how to fix this, I’ll pass it on to him.

Maybe I shouldn’t post a Gamemaker game to a Java game forum, but I went ahead and posted it to the forum I actually have an account for.

[ra4king]

Ahhhh GameMaker!!

I like the music

[pjt33]

@fletchergames

The game gets installed to the C:\Games[our directory]\ directory instead of the C:\Program Files[our directory]\ directory because he can’t figure out how to put the save file in the user directory with Gamemaker. So it just gets saved to the directory the game is in, which could be a problem if the program doesn’t have write access to the C:\Program Files\ directory (which depends on the Windows settings for the user playing it). If anyone has an idea about how to fix this, I’ll pass it on to him.

On the basis of 10 minutes looking at instances of the word “file” in the GameMaker docs, the guy who wrote it still thinks in Win95 terms of it being perfectly ok to store all your user data in Program Files. Not only are all save files written there, but things like error logs too.

(It does say that the “working directory” is used, but I assume that wrapping everything in a launcher which changes the pwd would break resource loading. And I wouldn’t be 100% certain that the “working directory” is actually the pwd).

[fletchergames]

It does seem to store the save file in the folder the installer assigns as the working directory (which happens to be directory it’s installed to). At least the file is winding up in some weird place, but it seems weird that it doesn’t get stored in the user directory. It should have been that way since Windows XP.

If it weren’t for the installer assigning the working directory, it could think the working directory is anywhere a shortcut to the program happens to be. Or at least that’s what I remember from my own usage of the working directory (in Java - no, I wasn’t putting the save game files in the working directory in the games I make with Java).