On other news, I’ll be moving away from my parents’ soon, which’ll mean a pause in any updates whatsoever. Not that big a deal, but it’s pretty exciting for me! And then for the games:
Beyond the Black Hole: Yep, still not given up on this! The engine is old and horrid, but I hope that inspiration eventually strikes and I can get it done.
Masjin: I think I’ll make an update to fix the currently existing bigger bugs and then take some time off the project in order to pursue other stuff.
Paradise Fort flash: I recently found a much easier way to handle certain stuff, so expect to see some updates on this eventually!

Then there’re various smaller things I’m working on or at least planning to work on. As Usual, I’ll wait until they’re a bit more ripe before announcing ‘em.

Stuff like this.

I’ll put It’s a Frickin’ Cave for a pause up until I lose my motivation with BtBH again. I’d really want to finish this (and both!).
Here’s still a teaser pic from IaFC:

For some reason I wanted to make a video about BtBH. I hope you like it.

Oh, and this is the third time I use Movie Maker for anything. Sony Vegas looks rather interesting, but its middle name is ‘expensive’.

Anyway, I’ll list here some stuff I’m currently working on and tell a bit about their progress.
Firstly, there’s the world generator I made a couple posts about earlier. After a longish pause, I got around to add rivers and roads to the world. After a lot of struggling with getting the rivers look good, I think I’m getting somewhere. Next I should just make the generation automatic instead of manual click-to-create, and then start working on roads.

They look nice, don't they?

Earlier attempt.

The next thing is of course Beyond the Black Hole. I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with this, since I don’t think I can bring myself to create all the planned 35 levels. A possibility would be to finish the planet currently at hand, and then the last planet to get 20 levels. I continued working on level 13, as you can see in the post below, but currently I’m a bit stuck with the puzzle. For once it’s not just about motivational problems!

After making that Excavatorrr idea I became sad because I realized how much potential was lost in that one: I myself think that the game was really neat, and that it was positively addicting once the player got hang of the controls. That last bit was the problem, of course: Most players don’t want to take their time to learn a random game, much less if the game isn’t all that big and doesn’t take long to beat. So, last night I started pondering a bit if a remake/sequel to the game could be justified. With my new knowledge, I’d be able to create a much better engine, make a flash export, and possibly connect the game leaderboards to things like Kongregate and so on. That’d be kinda neat. Also the slowness and controlling problems of the original could be taken care of.

There’s also a fourth thing I’ve been playing with, but I wont say much about it yet because I’m quite sure it’ll fail like most other projects I’ve started. So pics will come once I know more!

oooOOOOooOOOoo

Anyway, here’s my birthday present to anyone who reads this blog! I’ll just copy the description from other places, too lazy to write everything again! So here it comes:

Ok, so this is the demo of Beyond the Black Hole, a puzzle-platformer I’ve been working on for about half a year now with Multimedia Fusion 2. It’s by far my biggest project, and it’ll sure take a year or so still to finish it. This thing is a sequel to FIG, my earlier ‘big’ game, though there are certain big differences, the controlling system being the biggest.

This demo features 6 of the game’s 35 levels, all chosen from the finished 12 and stuffed to one planet. There’s also the tutorial level on top of that. I’ll stop here and let the readme speak a bit:

“In each level, your objective is to collect all the yellow stars (there’s usually only one, and none should be hidden from view) and reach the exit. Reaching the stars and overall solving the levels requires using the main character to carry things around, and the mouse to interact with other things. Most levels require both methods of interaction. In every level, there’s also a hidden blue star, which requires either extra skill or just common curiousness to be found. Collecting all the blue stars also results in a bonus, though not in this demo!

NOTE! You can adjust volume from the settings.txt!

** CONTROLS **

A & D = move left & right
W = jump
Space = pick up / put down
Left mouse button = throw when aiming, interact, confirm
Right mouse button = aim when carrying an item, return to planet menu
ESC = quit level/game
Enter = restart level

** CREDITS **

Full credits shall be in the finished game!

Idea, design, graphics & programming: Arvi Teikari
Musics: Johan Hargne
Main tester: Looki
Support and sound editing: Nicklas Nygren”

There were other people that should be mentioned there, I’ll list them here later.

GET THE GAME AAAAA

Tutorial pic:

Anyway, apologies for the pause – I started working on many small projects, but it looks like none of them shall become anything. We’ll see. For now I’ll stick to BtBH.

Super-Special-Awesome-Picture: