'Sup 64D?

In case it somehow slipped past you, Questica finally made it's way through the queue. I don't see how you regulars can stand the ridiculous waits, I could've finished that game in the time it took to get accepted. At any rate, the premier in CIS151 (Game Design) some two weeks ago was actually pretty humdrum. I tried building up momentum by showing the title and level opening screens, but nobody thought it might've been Ball Attak resurrected as I had hoped. I got to show mine last, but the unforeseen disadvantage to that was that by the time mine rolled around, we had already seen three platformers, and without actually playing mine it's difficult to tell just how well it controls comparatively. Doesn't help that I pretty much forgot to elaborate on any of the particular aspects of the controls, like accelerated movement and variable jumping and whatnot…bah. By that time everyone just wanted to get out of there, and I don't blame 'em. Aside from there, I'm not expecting this to drum up a whole ton of fanfare, what with how standard it is.

In other news, I've begun a music project called Project Formingplatz. Not really game design related, but still something. It's a soundtrack to a fictional platformer game with a tropical theme, wherein each song is started out with the same intro based on this ol' piece o' mine. The catch is that each song will be done on a different chip or chip-ish format.

So far, I intend to have one level theme each for these formats:

-2A03, as heard in the NES (2 square wave channels with 3 duty cycles, 1 triangle wave channel with no volume control, 1 noise channel with 2 duty cycles, 1 delta-PCM channel)

-YM2203, with very similar limitations to the Genesis/Mega Drive (6 channels of FM synthesis, 4 operaters each)

-POKEY, as heard in the Atari XL/5200/various arcade games (8 channels; 4 hard left, 4 hard right, selectable between square wave, noise and two different types of filter)

-SID, as heard in the Commodore 64 (3 square-ish channels, cutoff filter madness)

-AY-3-8910, as heard in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K (3 channels, selectable between square wave, noise, a combination of both, or a strange filter-ish sound with no volume control)

-GameBoy sound system (same as the 2A03 but without the delta-PCM channel, and the triangle channel replaced with a 32-sample mini-wave channel)

-Commodore VIC-20 sound system (3 square wave channels seperated by an octive each, 1 noise channel, only one volume control for everything)

Plus the following not-quite-strictly-chip formats with no foreign samples used:

-Lawrence Zitnick's SawCutter 2.0 (4 channels of 64-note polyphonic wave sound, actually drawn into the program; an awesome program by the by, totally worth the $20)

-Studio Pixel's pxtone Studio (…actually, I have no idea how restricted this is, I haven't gotten around to using it yet)

So yeah, nine songs long, and I've only got about halfway through two of 'em so far. I haven't even gotten sound out of a lot of the trackers I'm going to be using yet…who knows how difficult this'll prove to be? Updates for that on my Sheezy account.

And finally, I'm now the proud owner of the sweetest

sunglasses ever:

(erm, that's not me…)

The 3D glasses for the Sega Master System.

Totally RADICAL. It's like you can feel the almighty power of the '80s flowing through you upon wielding these! The 3D effect is actually pretty cool, if headache-inducing for some. Not quite as convincing as the Virtual Boy, either…but then again, what is?

And now…