Well, I'm leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow morning to look at apartments and visit temp agencies.  Being unemployed sure is expensive!

It's been a busy week, so the only progress I have to show for Starlight is actually zathras' progress.  You may recall I mentioned zath would be doing the music for my game, and in addition to a couple previous pieces that I've repurposed, he sent me this piece the other day:

shell.mp3

It's exactly the kind of creepy, psychologically affective music I had in mind for the abandoned spaceship (or space station, I haven't decided yet).

Don't expect much of an update next week--it's hard to work on a game from a hotel room in Simi Valley.

As predicted, the newly-released Grand Theft Auto IV greedily consumed any time that might've otherwise been spent on Starlight development, so it was a mad dash at the very end to get something done in time for Gruedorf, this week.  It ain't much, folks, but it's something.  It's a sprite, in fact.  Specifically, it's a Nazi truck with a flat tire.

There.  Now I can sleep "the sleep of the just"--the just barely posted in time to save his 0% loss standing on the Gruedorf scoreboard, that is.

Another busy week, another semi-lame update.  I've spent the better part of the last three days just looking for apartments in LA (there are, like, thousands of them).  And with Grand Theft Auto IV coming out in 24 hours, next week probably won't be much better!

Gruedorf after the jump.

It's been a long, strange week, which culminated in one long, strange day.

Speaking of, I took a walk tonight and the moment I stepped out of my apartment building, I noticed something odd. There was an enormous house drifting slowly down the street. Today is, of course, the 20th of April, a date of some significance, especially in a college town like Madison, WI. There were maybe a hundred people standing along Broom Street, staring at the two halves of a big, old, blue house moving along at one mile per hour. They looked predictably bewildered.

Gruedorf after the break.

Just a quick update, today, as I'm in DC for a job interview.

As I mentioned in last week's entry, when Starlight's heroine needs to retrieve a useful object from the floor, she doesn't so much bend down to get it as, well, squat unceremoniously over it.  Even if she hasn't had contact with another living being for over 300 years, that's no reason for her to forgo all decency!

So now, by popular demand, this silliness has been remedied with all new bending animations for the up- and down- facing directions. The up-facing animation is actually not quite finished, so here's the down-facing animation.

Wish me luck today!

Fun fact: each frame of Starlight character animation is 128x256 pixels and there are between five and ten frames per action, each in as many as four directions.  The walking animation consists of a total of 655,360 pixels.  To make a long story short (too late!), character animation is extremely time consuming.

The animations that follow are scaled by half.

Anyone not looking to waste a whole lot of time should probably avoid visiting The Video Game Name Generator.  I had to pry myself away to write this week's Gruedorf entry, but not before coming up with a few dozen genuinely good ideas for short video games (thus the title of this post).  But before I start making "Morbidly Obese Dessert Assassins", there's work to be done on Starlight.

I'm sure you noticed that the title of this post is a line from a Fleetwood Mac song ("Temporary One").  Okay, probably not.  As anyone who knows me well (and probably anyone who's ever met me) could tell you, I love me some Fleetwood Mac.  Anyway, on to this week's Gruedorf entry.

I'd like to start off by apologizing for last week's terrible post.  No, please don't go back and read it to see just how terrible it is.  My only excuse is that I had a migraine and only 30 minutes remaining before the Gruedorf scoreboard deemed me a capital-L Loser.  The pressure got to me!  As of this post, I maintain my 0% Loss, 0% Lame standing--I think that means I win, or something!  Wait, no, I probably have to finish a game first.

Well, McGrue gave me a pass, this week, to fulfill our ancient pact instead of showing progress on my own game, Starlight.  You heard me, an ancient pact.  Is your interest piqued?  Read on to discover how I can stretch out an entire blog entry about a pixel-bridge!

We appear to be living in a world where the average consumer of popular media has developed a finely tuned sense of the hackneyed, clichéd, and otherwise overdone.  I've listened to friends and acquaintances complain (at great length) about how much they hate rip-offs, remakes, and the derivative genre "crap" that the mainstream media has been churning out as of late.  Some people seem to believe that mankind's last original idea was finally thought-up sometime in the 1980's, or whatever decade they spent the majority of their formative years in.  The truth is that there are no new characters, only new characterizations; no new stories, only new storytellers.

My first exposure to the adventure game genre was at Camp Island Lake, in a darkened cabin full of sweaty kids, all grouped around Macintosh Classics.  I can't remember what we were playing.  Honestly, what I remember most was how unbearably hot a closed room full of computers and kids could get in the middle of the Summer in Starrucca, PA.  But despite the heat, we were entranced by the game we were playing.