Bought a new computer and now people are making fun of me.
I’ve always been a PC person (unless you’re thinking of ‘politically correct’ – in which case I’m doing my best to be politically incorrect) and so I haven’t wasted any opportunities to tell the Mac OSX people what I’m think of their inferior platform choice. It’s the ZX Spectrum vs. C64 discussion all over again. 
Well, about a week ago I bought myself a nice and shiny 15″ MacBook Pro – the new core i7 model, and now everyone I know with Mac’s are making fun of me. Hehe, I guess I walked in to that one.
So, why have a done it? A glutton for punishment?…very likely, but no. A while back I installed OSX on my HP laptop but it only works mostly fine – the USB ports doesn’t work and that’s a bit annoying – especially since the plan is to get into developing software for the iPhone and what good is a dev enviroment if I can’t get my software onto the phone easily, right?
…so I decided to buy a real Mac. Hopefully that means less hassle. 
I won’t be switching completely to OSX though. The PC and Windows will still be my primary enviroment so the Mac will be mostly for compiling OSX and iPhone projects (when I get to that).
Hopefully I will also (finally) get around to making OSX versions of my games. I successfully compiled and played Omega Race 2009 on the Mac a few days ago but that also only works mostly fine. There’s a strange bug that affects the background picture, and my code for online scores doesn’t work on OSX and I’d like to sort that out before doing “re-releases”.
Let’s see what happens, and when…
Overview of current projects.
I don’t post nearly enough but I thought I’d make a post about what open projects I have going on – just so you know I’m not watching TV all the time.
If you look in the menu above there are three titles – Psycho Pigs UXB, X-Quest 2 & Horace in the Mystic Woods, but I have two more titles I haven’t written about yet.
* Star Castle. This is a classic vector graphics game and it’s nearly done. Actually I could probably upload it as it is, but I’m not quite satisfied with it yet so I’ll work on it a little longer. Visually it’ll look like Omega Race 2009 and you can click >here< to see a preview of the menuscreen.
So, Star Castle should’ve been done now, but “unfortunately” I’ve been distracted (again…as usual ) by a new project which I started about a week ago. A new competition over at Retro Remakes to make a PBeM game (Play-By-Email) caught my attention and I thought it could be a fun project to work on.
* ALIEN. I’ve always liked Laser Squad and I originally wanted to remake that for the PBeM competition but I realized it was probably a bit too much to try to remake that in two months. Instead I decided to remake the ZX Spectrum game, Alien – which is a singleplayer game, as a multiplayer game and I think it’s going to work. It’s still early days so there’s not screenshots yet.
When I have something interresting to show I’ll post it in my thread on the Retro Remakes forum >here<.
The game will allow up to 5 human players to play against each other. Well, up to 3 player can play humans and 2 players can play the aliens, so it makes sense to play humans against aliens. The game is set on the Nostromo and will play like a Lite version of Laser Squad. The competition will run for another two months and end on april 1st. so hopefully I can finish this one and get on with Star Castle and then those pesky piggies.
Omega Race 2009: Remake of the month
Wohoo!
Not only do I get a mention in the latest issue of Retro Gamer Magazine,
but Omega Race 2009 is reviewed and awarded ”Remake of the month“.
Me=happy.
Here’s a small scan of the article (I’m not posting the whole article as I don’t want to step on anyones toes).
- Omega Race races ahead.
Meanwhile I’m getting ready for my vacation tomorrow – 2 weeks away from work. I need that. I’m not going anywhere though – just hoping for 2 weeks of rain so I don’t have to feel bad about sitting in front of the computer. One of my plans are to see if I can bang Psycho Pigs into shape by rewriting the AI in (again). I’ll let you know how it goes.
Omega Race 2009: updated to version 1.2
It’s been a fun couple of days. I’ve listened to the feedback I got on the first release and I’ve made a bunch of changes to the game.
The game is now at version 1.2 and can be downloaded here.
Here’s the changes I can remember right now;
- Added a lot of sounds: when enemy fires, when enemy transforms, when shots hits or go through walls, a few others.
- Added a “check for update” option.
- Added mouse control.
- Added an option for better sound on Windows Vista.
- Added the possibility to enter name using joystick, to make the game more cabinet friendly.
- Game will now keep increasing speed and spawing the red enemy if you stay too long on a level.
- Tweaked inertia a bit. Now the ship takes longer to slow down, but loses a bit of speed when hitting the borders.
- Many more minor changes to the difficulty.
Completed: Omega Race 2009
Yes, after 3½ week I’ve finally finished Omega Race 2009.
I think it turned out even better than I’d hoped for and I hope you will all enjoy it too.
Please give me some feedback and tell me what you think of it – is it too easy, too hard, too shiny, too pretty or too-something-else?
Update: May 22th 2009. Just 12 hours after original release I’ve updated to v1.1. This version is a lot easier.
If you have already downloaded the game then download it again if you want it to be less challenging.
I’m also working on a version 1.2. This will appear soon and have many more tweaks and features.
It’s been a fun little distraction from Psycho Pigs UXB, which I’ve been working on for 3 months now, but now it’s time to continue working on that game.
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