Yaaaaaaay
I made a game! This statement is true where “I” is defined as me, John Martz, and Big Giant Circles. Persons rejecting this definition might like to know that a game was made by group of people, of which I am a member. That game is Cumulo Nimblers.
Grab Cumulo Nimblers from the Games page, or follow the jump to read about its development and play some early online builds.
If you’d like to mine some asteroids – and I can’t think why you possibly wouldn’t – you can do so right now. That is, you can do so right now if you’re a captain forever supporter. If you aren’t, you can rectify that right now also!
<3 Farbs
Boom indeed! For years people have asked me to add asteroid mining, and for years I’ve thought yes, that would be great, as soon as I finish the critical features of the game. First I wanted to finish alpha 0.6, wherein players can explore a vast network of sectors rather than the one or two I’ve been releasing with each update so far.
While planning 0.6 I read a book on quest narratives, and realized the value of part of the archetypal hero’s journey – the return home. The way I see it, the point is to show the hero’s metamorphosis by contrasting how they interact with their original environment before their quest with how they interact with it afterward. It also bookends the story nicely, much like a melody returning to the root note or a sitcom episode ending with a reference to the first joke. So, now 0.6 will end with a return to the origin station. Seems good.
The trouble is, by the time the player returns to the origin station their ship is substantially larger, and probably won’t fit back through the cracks and crevices of the first asteroid belt (*cough* threshold *cough*).
So I added mining.
<3
Farbs
The perceived value of indie games has dropped, so I’m trialling a lower price point. For a limited time only, Captain Forever supporter access is discounted from $20 to a mere $9. That’s a saving of 55%, and a perceived difference of an entire order of magnitude! This is an as-long-as-it’s-profitable sale, so as soon as income (sales x price) drops below regular levels the sale will end. If the games sell well enough then the sale could go on indefinitely, but it could also end tomorrow. Buy now or you might miss out!
If you’re already a Captain Forever supporter then you’re a paragon of humanity, a model of perfection to which we all aspire. You’re probably not interested in the $9 as-long-as-it’s-profitable sale, unless you’re one of the incredible few who asked for a Gifting mechanism. I’ve added gifting to the payment system, so now you can purchase supporter accounts for family and friends, each at the probably-temporarily low price of $9.
The third barrel in today’s announcement holds a bullet marked 0.5. I’ve just released the latest build of Captain Jameson – the massive RPGish successor to Captain Forever I envisaged when I first started the CF project. This build smoothes out a hundred rough edges, eases the first step in the difficulty curve, adds another two ship modules, and opens up three new sectors of varying size for you to explore. If you’re already a supporter then you can play it right now, otherwise, you know what to do.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
<3
Farbs
Remember this? I do!
Three years ago I released ROM CHECK FAIL, and it’s haunted me for three years since. Not only is it a fantastic game and debatably the high point of my career, it’s also an idea crying out for further exploration, and a litigation timebomb. I want to do more with it, but I also want to retain ownership of the shirt on my back, the pants I sometimes wear, and the house they all live in. After much ponderance I’ve decided to set the idea free. I don’t mean free as in beer, since it’s freeware already. I mean free as in Free Software Foundation.
Here, download the source code for ROM CHECK FAIL.
To use it simply grab the game from my Games page, install it, extract the source file into game’s install directory, and edit away. You don’t need to compile it or anything, any changes you make to the game source file should be detected and picked up automatically the next time you run the game.
I should warn you – this code be dragons. I wrote ROM CHECK FAIL over two and a bit weeks outside my fulltime job, so it really was just slapped together. Lowlights of particular note are my own atan2 function (because somehow I’d never discovered atan2), several virtual subclasses – and I use the word “virtual” to mean I never bothered to write the superclass, collision detection that works more often than I’d expect but less often than I’d like, repeatedly loading images from disk because it involved less typing, and the fact that the entire source code for the game resides in a single file. I’m so proud. If you’re looking for sample code, either to help you learn to make games or to evaluate my abilities as a programmer, then please, please look elsewhere.
I think I’m all out of disclaimers, and all out of excuses for lingering. Please take this file somewhere crazy. Be awesome, then tell me all about it.
Goodbye ROM CHECK FAIL. Have a good life.
<3 Farbs
