Of course of women voice. 
This is what men want! ;D
Apparently men listen to womens voices far more earnestly than menās voices - they use a womanās voice to articulate warnings to F16 pilots (āPull up!ā) for this reason. But I think weāll stick to the abstract and find some other way around it. Weāll defintely increase the delay on the text bubbles and popup messages.
Cannon noises - all sound FX are temporary, just pinched from other games.
Sorry about the crash when you die - will fix in the morning when I get home. Currently pissed as a fart and dizzy with man-flu round a mates house in Newcastle. Hurrah!
Cas 
3 October 2007
Did a lot of difficulty tuning last night. Iāve slowed down the gidrahs to half speed. Also Iāve had to unadjust the playerās tile coordinates because it broke too many things - bugger.
Iāve now put in a player freeze too so when a switch effect occurs elsewhere the player cannot move or shoot while the screen is zoomed off looking at it. This is in addition to freezing all the gidrahs as well. Unfortunately bullets and platforms donāt freeze but hey ho itāll do.
4 October 2007
Fixed the crash bug when you die on some machines (I hope) - which was caused by OpenAL.
Added the āLevel Completedā screen which gives you a tally of the number of dots youāve eaten (āmunchiesā), number of treasures you found versus the number actually on the level, and the number of gidrahs you zapped. It needs the Touch of Chaz but you get the general picture. I think itās important to know that youāve missed some treasures in particular - that means thereās secret areas youāve not yet found! (There are quite a few - you need sharp eyes to spot things out of the ordinary)
Unfortunately Chaz has gotten caught up in some project for one of his mates and hasnāt been able to do much recently. I suppose that means Iāll just get on with the moonbase levels in the meantime. Did the third moonbase level tonight. Five more to go.
Thereās a new build to test.
Music: Mr Bungle - California, Cardiacs - a little man and a house and the whole world window, Willy Mason - Where the Humans eat
5 October 2007
Must do something about Message Actions overwriting their messages on the display. Maybe just be careful about where I put them. Or Chaz had a really good idea about having a scientist rez in as if by crackly commlink in the bottom right corner of the HUD and speak to you. I really like that idea so I think thatās what weāre going to do. Iāll probably get around to it next week when Iāve done another couple of moonbase levels.
10 October 2007
Lost a few days there looking for somewhere to live back down in Taunton. It would appear Iām almost completely and utterly flat broke so Iāve sorted out a contract doing the usual tedious J2EE stuff for six months starting in November. Obviously this means the game will take a bit longer to do now 
Fortunately Iām barely doing any coding any more - mostly itās just designing levels and other content, which is a fun way to spend evenings instead of having drivel beamed into the back of my mind by a television.
Need to sort out the gidrahs a bit more still. They do intentionally start off very easy but theyāre not really getting properly hard by the final difficulty level. So to that end Iāve added a couple more gidrahs and a couple more weapons for them. Muahahahaha 
Stuff Done
[] Made it so that you have to actively hold the movement keys down to walk onto toxic tiles for 20 ticks (i.e. lava and toxic waste) so you canāt just accidentally walk over them while ambling about. This is a great improvement; should have done it ages ago.
[] Fixed a few bugs with sprite layers. I need to make it so that item tiles are properly layered with entity sprites too; I noticed that platforms move over the top of items, which looks wrong. Also it looks a bit strange when youāre standing on a scientistās head. I suppose the scientists donāt like it either.
[] The game now executes a āglobal scriptā every time you return to the hub level; whatās more it sets a global variable for each world completed. So we can progress the hub automatically on return.
[] Chaz has redone all the switches and a few other graphics. The new switches look much more obvious when theyāve been toggled. Still canāt tell the difference between one-shot switches and toggleable ones though, so will hassle him in the morning
[] Started work on the fourth moonbase map
[] Made it so that you can tap T in the map editor and the game will begin and spawn the player at the bottom left corner of the current selection rectangle. Very handy!
Music: Gorillaz - Demon Days, 2 Many DJs - As Heard on Radio Soulwax Part 2, David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World
11 October 2007
Weāve added a few different coloured jewels now to make the treasure a bit more interesting. Also, each level will contain a Big Jewel. The Big Jewel will always be the hardest and most difficult to find or obtain jewel in the level. However, itās worth 2,500 points and any subsequent treasure you pick up is worth 1,000 points (until you get hurt and it drops back down to 100).
Iāve been experimenting with the difficulty again and Iāve made the game get a bit harder sooner. A few of the gidrahs are slightly faster, and Iāve removed the bit of code that gives you an extra health dit if you pick up a jewel (now you get a dit every 1,000 points only). This should help focus the mind on not getting hurt as itās very tricky to build up those health dits. I wonder if itās now a bit too difficult. But then again, we do want this game to be a challenge to proper gamers - the kind of gamers that play console games.
Stuff Done
[] Tweaked platform radius to 22 pixels so that the player boards a platform sooner. This now works in conjuction with the slight delay that occurs before you are allowed to step on a toxic tile and itās absolutely peachy - feels really ārightā when you jump on and off platforms over lava etc.
[] Put the pushing delay in for crates as well, so you donāt accidentally clip the edges of crates you donāt really want to push but instead shimmy past them
[] More work on the fourth moonbase map - nearly done now
[] Made the text in scripty tiles speech bubbles tick in one character at a time with optional different sound effects for consonants and vowels. Also they fade out nicely now when you activate another one. Monkeyed with the SPGL GLTextArea class so that I could get it to display only a certain number of characters (yay for owning your own framework!). I couldnāt just add characters one by one because the words wrapped as it was animating which looked a bit funny. I didnāt mind it but Chaz moaned.
[*] Had to make the fonts and speechbubbles GL_LINEAR magnification mode textures because they all looked totally awful fullscreen on my rig. The penalty is slightly blurry fonts Never mind.
Music: David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Blur - Leisure, Roots Manuva - Run Come Save Me
12 October 2007
Stuff Done
[] Fixed a whole bunch of bugs to do with player death, like if you were dead and running around as a ghost and jumped down a ladder, your death clock got reset.
[] Finished moonbase3.map. 60 more maps to go, bah.
[] Slowed down turret fire rate somewhat, as theyāre a bit too nasty really.
[] Extended map rendering to a tile offscreen so that emitters have a chance to prime before theyāre brought into view. Did this mainly to support ādecalsā on tiles which Chaz is going to use to do lights. A tile can now have an arbitrary number of ādecalsā which are simply sprites with an associated animation drawn on any sprite layer. We can conceivably do overhangs and stuff with them too.
Music: The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Janeās Addiction - Strays, Led Zeppelin - III & Houses of the Holy
13/14 October 2007
Chaz has been working on doing lights. They look really nice, add a whole new dimension to our rather flat looking maps.
Stuff Done
[] Tweaked bravery adjustment
[] Tweaked gidrah fire rates a bit more
[*] Lots more done on Moonbase 4 - will have it finished on Monday. Moonbase4 sees the first use of the bouncing bullets that I put in the other day. Thereās a little teeny bit of crate pushing too.
15 October 2007
Finished moonbase4.map - quite a nice one this. Adjusted the way gidrahs spawned as it just never seems to produce the right number of gidrahs at the right time in the right place. Also, gidrahs now spawn a little more trigger happy than before.
While playtesting Chaz mentioned a bit on that map where you go through a teleporter to quickly get back to a room with a key in it. Unfortunately heād forgotten to use the key he was already carrying and so he couldnāt pick it up and had to find his way all the way back just to use it up first. It didnāt take much convincing for me to realise that this old hangover from the design of Time Bandit just wasnāt really necessary, so now you can pick up up to eight keys at a time, which stack up in the HUD on the right. Weāll never use more than eight keys on a level so that should do the trick.
Spent half the afternoon doing pointless code. Discovered random arrows didnāt work any more somehow, in fact, couldnāt really figure out how they had ever worked. Spent a fruitless hour trying to fix them and then I decided random arrows were shite anyway and removed them from the game.
Also tried to make it so that the player approached toxic tiles more slowly - at movement rate 1 pixel/frame - instead of just stopping dead for a few frames like it does currently. Wasted half an hour on that before I gave up because it didnāt work right. In the end I added a check to see if thereās a platform 8 pixels in front of the player or so that might collide with him and immediately allow movement if thatās the case. Seems to have made it somewhat better.
Did a bunch of work on moonbase5.map. Not sure what new gimmick to introduce in this map now. Hm. Weāve had more or less everything in the game so far. Except ice. So there will be some ice in this one.
Added the āPERFECT! Bonusā to the end of level screen - you get 1000 points per level if you eat all the dots and collect all the treasures (so, moonbase0.map is 1000 points, moonbase4.map is 5000 points, etc).
Fixed the gobbler powerup so all the gidrahs on the level are turned into ghosts, rather than just the ones you can see in your near vicinity. Also gidrahs spawning at the time of a gobbler powerup activation will turn into ghosts immediately.
Discussed with Chaz about scope of the game again. Iām a bit worried about the amount of work weāve still to do - 59 maps to go and my brain already hurts. Not to mention all the effort Chaz puts in on just a single tileset. So I suggested we went for 7 worlds of 7 maps each instead of 8 worlds of 8 maps - it doesnāt sound much smaller, but itās 49 maps versus 64, quite a difference - and with the hub world technically itās 50 maps. Also Iām of a mind to think that if someoneās going to buy the game having gotten through, say, 14 demo levels, thereās no real need to give them another 50 maps to play on because it probably didnāt influence their decision to buy that greatly by then. And of course, it saves Chaz doing an entire tileset. And gives us some scope maybe for an expansion pack of some sort Business is business!
Time for a new build for you to play with. If you monkey around with the map editor (āMā key on the title screen) be aware that it currently for no good reason saves files to C:\WINDOWS (or wherever Webstart decides is your current working directory - deary me that is awful) unless you put a directory prefix in the filename. Also the last map edited is the one that you start on, so if you want to play the game properly again, you need to load hub.map first. Also note that because of the way itās deployed under Webstart, you canāt actually load or save these maps but itāll still remember the filename you typed in. So if you go into the editor and attempt to load moonbase0.map itāll fail but the next time you try to play the game youāll spawn there for testing. So attempt to load hub.map to get it back to normal.
Maybe itās best you leave the editor alone :
Music: Blur - Blur, Boards of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children; Twoism, Led Zeppelin 2
16 October 2007
Finished moonbase5.map. So if thereās only 7 maps per worldā¦ this is the last moonbase map coming up, which means it needs a treasure at the end of it, and a big badass boss!
Going to have to tune the difficulty quite severely nowā¦ I have a feeling the game is too hard too quickly now, mainly because the nasty robots that appear in the later levels really are nasty. I think Iāll have to make them a bit less nasty, or less frequent, or both.
Music: Quake (yes, the music from the game)
17 October 2007
Started work on the ingame menu now. Seeing as this game is rather more complicated in scope than our other two āminigameā format games, weāre putting in load/save slots and quicksave/quickload. Quicksave/quickload were dead quick to implement - just serialize the TombGameState object to quicksave.dat and vice-versa - and the load/save slots were hot on their heels; just had to implement some sort of GUI to help you distinguish one slot from another. There are hotkeys for quicksave/quickload - F5 and F9 respectively, like in countless games before it. Chaz has to beautify all this lot at some point.
Fixed various little bugs and a whoopsie on moonbase0.map whereby you didnāt actually get the powerup at the end. Chaz has been tweaking maps to make them look nicer.
Going to start on the last moonbase level tonight. These are the levels that are going to be in the demo of the game.
Check out the new stuff here as usual.
Music: Cardiacs - Songs for Ships and Irons, Dandy Warhols - Welcome to the Monkey House; Odditorium, Cool Keith - Mr Nogatco
18 October 2007
Inexplicably got up a 8am and went to the gym this morning. I am completely shagged. Apparently I am going again on Monday morning. Alan says I am anyway. Alan is very big. Even walked the dog in the afternoon for an hour too. Exercised my Soldat muscles too (beware Spas-Tard!, for he shall kick your arse).
Stuff Done
[] Chaz has continued beautifying and tweaking levels. Weāve got some lovely lights in there now. Makes the moonbase all that much more atmospheric. I will be adding ambient sound to things soon enough too.
[] Automatic moving platforms now delay for 16 ticks before changing direction, and 8 ticks when boarded by the player. This stops a lot of those annoying moments where you step in lava or goo accidentally when there really wasnāt any reason that you should have.
[] Fixed a bug whereby if you simply closed the new menu screen, the game appeared to hang.
[] Added the āLight Follows Playerā animation command from Ultratron so we can have some Ultraton-style lights tracking the player in some rooms
[] Put in a sprite Y sort offset into the SPGL sprite renderer so that sprites with identical layers and Y coordinates can be sorted better. The player now stands in front of terminals when using them instead of appearing behind them.
[] Started work on moonbase6.
Kind of a quiet sort of day today on the development front really. Look at our nice new lights in the new build.
Is anybody still reading and trying things out? Is the game too hard? Has anyone got a PERFECT for all 6 levels so far?
Music: Elastica, Mr Bungle - California
Evidently not or youād have noticed you can get stuck in the basement on the fourth moonbase level Fixing & uploading a cureā¦
Cas
Iām going after a PERFECT, so Iāll let you know
Nice game! I like the look. Will windowed mode be supported? The fullscreen completely screwed my multimonitor setup at work
Hm, be interesting to know how it screwed your multimon setup! (Specs, symptoms, etc). Fullscreen mode can be toggled in the Options menu.
Cas
Itās an Acer Pentium M notebook with Windows XP and ATI X700m. The fullscreen mode causes minor size changes in my taskbar and screws windows maximization. After quitting the game, application windows maximize to a invisible desktop border in the middle of the the second monitor. This is with all fullscreen apps, on my setup, so itās not your fault.
Ah ok, thanks for clearing that up!
Cas
Dies after the web start install. Iād attach the log file but itās 1040KB! Is it worth emailing it? Is it just gonna be my rubbish graphics card/driversā¦?
Sys: JRE 1.6.0_03, Win2K, AMD2400XP, GeForce4MX