OK, so the "corrupted" game file thing was alleviated through an incredibly difficult approach that pretty much only a genius would've been able to come up with: restart your computer.

Now that the project's back on track after a quite stressful "halt", the game looks like it's shaping up rather nicely. I've done the rest of the GUI (except the background, I'll be doing something special with that), will have to redo the health bar a second time (the one I've done looks like ass so far), and the Item graphics looks nice as well. I only have to redo the shop and the random banners (like the 'Level Up!' banner) and that'll be pretty much it in terms of visual overhauls. As for actually PROGRAMMING overhauls, I'll have to program three special Orbs that are handled differently (as in, they don't just shoot stars) and that'll be pretty much it.

From there, I'll have to do everything not having to do with the actual gameplay. That is, menus, the stat tracking, and adding a few features that I've planned. Those are the thing's that'll probably eat up most of the "development" time, but I'm doing the "easy" stuff first so that I see some noticeable progress before taking on the hard stuff.

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In other news, I'll be graduating from high school in TWO (count 'em, two) days! I haven't been going to school since Friday, but this is finals week and seniors don't take any finals :P

Anyway, I got a $100 scholarship from French Club and I already know that $100 in college terms is basically $0.01, since college expenses range from 3-digit numbers to 4-digit numbers a year. My parents already know that, and since the college I'm going to is covering all the costs AND giving me like $3000 for this first semester, AND since the college I'm going to is like 20 mins away from my house, I won't have to pay for overpriced and vomity housing. That means that those $100 will be free for me to use in whatever I want, and my siblings are racking up some moolah as a graduation gift. So what can I do with ~$180? Well, do that one thing I haven't been able to do due to me not having extra money like that: Buy a DS! New DS + a ton of used, MUCH-cheaper-than-$50 games = a happy entering college student.

So there I was, working merrily on 2* for a while, getting quite a bit done, and after I decide to start working on the game again, the entire goddamned program starts going haywire. The game takes an EXCRUCIATINGLY long time to load and exit the game, but the best part is that the display is COMPLETELY CORRUPTED. It starts off like at 2 frames per second, then goes upwards of 50ish (it's supposed to run at 60), with a completely messed up background, the game displaying another font other than the one that I assigned to it, and it just looks like an oldass NES game that pisses all over the screen when it messes up.

Better yet, I didn't make a "backup" to go back to, since this is the very first time in 5+ years that I've used Game Maker that this has ever happened to me. I can try to see if I can salvage the project somehow, and I probably will, but it's still very annoying to spend several more hours fixing your game because of something that's GM's fault.

Funny how the more you get done, the exponentially greater a chance of you losing that work. It's like Karma's being bitch or something.

I know nobody's reading these (hell, the last blog got ZERO posts), but I'm still doin' them, so you're gonna have to deal with my blog titles in the "Recent blogs" box! So HA!

'Neways, I've been doing quite a bit of progress. I'm currently changing the look of the in-game GUI (and it's looking mighty nice), I've finished programming the majority of the orbs into the game, and all I have to do is work on two orbs that are treated a little differently than the rest.

One thing that's rather troubling me, though, is the fact that just today, I came up with like 3 more standard orb ideas, and with the 4 directions that they can appear in, that'll make me do a total of 12(!) orbs. I mean, the original game has a grand total of 7 orbs, which means that those orbs alone would almost double the count. On the plus side, I can really make the game diverse with those new orbs. On the negative, it'll take quite a while to get those done, and I fear that all the different types of orbs will overwhelm the player.

Meh, you know what? I'm adding them. Not too big of a deal for me, and I really don't think that there'll be too many with those included. They'll also add a lot of variety and make the game a lot more different (in the good way) from its predecessor.

I've also come up with a "statistics" feature in the game, which works a little like the Smash Bros series. It measures the total playing time, total Orbs destroyed, total points gained from selling health points and points lost from buying them, etc. etc. etc. The main purpose of these is to let the players see how close they are to unlocking features, because the unlockables are things like achieving a certain number of total Orbs destroyed and stuff. It'll all be really easy to implement.

Other than that, the only other thing that I've been thinking about is the unlockables, which to me were very fun things to come up with, and I think they'll be equally as fun to implement. I'll see where the project takes me from there.

So read the post, and comment. Or not.

I finished all the images of the orbs that I'll be doing. Now, I was really, REALLY afraid of my own code, simply because I don't remember exactly how efficiently I coded it. In some of my other (rather finished) projects, moving a room's location set off a bug because some random important variable was defined at the game's startup. Fixing it led into another, and before I would know it, there I'd be spending over an hour just trying to get the damn thing running.

Afraid to even touch the mouse (<--exaggeration), I moved the main screen and BAM! Just that one issue with the music that I could completely ignore and the game worked perfectly. Something so incredibly minor, but I gotta tell you, it's a BIG relief when I realize I don't have to spend hours on doing something as trivial as just getting the game to run like before.

So I imported all the orb sprites to the actual orb objects that were currently available (the orb sprites of orbs that I haven't yet programmed will have to sit back for a while), and set off to do the one thing that I've wanted to do since April 2006. Get rid of that damn aliasing around the spheres. With my new armed knowledge of setting an alpha sprite, I was able to completely get rid of the eyesore after a few adjustments. The end result; it looks BEAUTIFUL with the lack of aliasing and the new, more sophisticated look of the spheres. I really can't wait to get more into the project. Here's to hoping that the game's code will hold up once I get going with the actual code manipulation.

As for the title, still undecided. I like Josea's idea of 2*2, so I'm putting it up for a candidate in my head. If you guys have any more suggestions I'll be glad to take them. Who knows? If I'm undecided by the time I'm done, maybe I can let you guys vote for the title :P

RockyRan out

Today marks the day I start on 2* officially, since today was officially my last AP Test (that I'm gonna bother to study for. After this I only have Spanish Lit and I'm done, but I'm really not worrying about that at all).

I started working on the sprites for the spheres, and I gotta tell ya, they're taking a lot longer than I expected. I mean, they're just random orb buttons that you find anywhere in the 'net, but for some reason I struggled a bit with the tutorial and the recolors of the same orb with the different directional spheres I'm using for the game are definitely taking longer than I want. I've only got the vertical, horizontal and both diagonals of both orbs. That leaves me with about 9 more orbs I need to make. Yuck. Luckily, I'll get those done later.

I'll be making a checklist that I'll be adding to/crossing out to hopefully let me see some more progress. It might work out for me, it might not. I'm just experimenting at this stage. As for the actual game, I'm strongly considering taking out the sphere from the previous * game that spews out stars in random directions, because all too often there were several other spheres in close proximity to that one, and out of pure randomness none of them get hit and you just wasted a click. I dunno. I feel it's putting too much emphasis on luck when I don't want it to.

Another thing I've been thinking about is the title. Which title do you guys like better? "2*" or "**"? My sister suggested **, which I didn't think about but I think it's a possible candidate. The only thing is that ** feels too similar and people may not be able to tell the difference quickly.

So yeah, today it all starts. We'll see how it turns out from here.