samsaturday

Considering my 3DS has been sitting around doing nothing for months, sure, I'll take a bunch of free games.

When I last updated, back in February, I had given up on using Gamesalad to make a video game and had switched to learning the Corona SDK. Why has it been five-and-a-half months since I wrote about this? Easy: because nothing much happened in that time.

So around early March I just stopped working on my game and focused on other things (like starting up a book trailer production business). But I kept the hope of making a game or app alive and rethought what kind of app or game I wanted to make. Plus, since I'd been learning some programming by using Corona, I figured I might as well take the horrible plunge of learning Objective-C 2.0, the programming language on which Mac OS X and iOS are based. Start from the ground up! By this point I'd gone back to my original idea of making an old-school text adventure. So most of the programming wouldn't involve graphics or animation, just getting text on a screen, right?

I bought some Objective-C and iPhone programming books, and I also bought a video instruction series. A few weeks ago I started going through the video tutorials (a 15-hour set!) and quickly got confused as all hell. It soon dawned on me that I was in way over my head.

And that, dear reader, is when I went BACK to Gamesalad. I figured that by now they must have fixed what was broken. So I downloaded the newest version (I think they're on 0.9.6; I left when they were on 0.9.1) and I tried making my text adventure. Well, turns out Gamesalad is not great for text. And all that broken shit I thought I'd left behind is still broken. I'm kind of amazed that it's still busted after 5 months, but hey, they've got their own priorities, I guess.

Okay, so forget Gamesalad. AGAIN. Let's try Corona. AGAIN. This time I knew exactly what I wanted to make Corona do. I just had to find samples of the basic code and make it all work together. And by god, last weekend I figured it out. Seriously, I cracked the code or broke the magic seal or something. I figured out how to display paragraphs of text and change screens based on the user's selections. It might sound simple, but dammit, it was not easy decoding this shit (please remember I have no programming training or experience). So right now I'm fucking proud of myself for assembling a template that works. I say "assemble" because I've been pulling out code from free samples that other Corona users have made and I'm putting it all together to meet my needs, hopefully without breaking anything in the process. Anyway, go me!

Alright, now that I've got a working model all that's left to do is write my damn story and put it all into Corona documents. This will take a while. At this point all I've written is Chapter 1 and it's around 4000 words worth of content. This will definitely take a while. But, hey, at least it works!

END OF THE WORLD!!!

Oh crap! I was just in 1998 again!

What the fans really want is "Deepak Chopra X Dalai Lama." The PS3 version will have Kratos as a playable character.

Oh DAYYMMNNN! Mushroom collecting and swimming!!!

I'm shocked that a Nintendo game has spoken dialogue! Although why am I not surprised that it's awful?

Even though MGS3 is my favorite game in the series, I'm not interested in replaying it, especially on a handheld.

I played the 360 version. Load times sucked. It was hard to tell what was shooting me. The weapons felt underpowered. Graphics were serviceable at best. It wasn't fun.

That being said, I'm still buying the final game. Blame the remaining nostalgia I have from playing Duke Nukem 3D when I was 16. Sigh.

Is calling this store Origin meant to be a slap in Richard Garriott's face? And if so, should I start wishing for a Bioforge sequel???

Probably not for either...