Nikki @mno@gamemaking.social

I spent this morning drawing E1M3 of Doom from memory! it was a lot of fun, especially realizing that I missed the huge secret area in the bottom right

I completely remembered that part, but I thought it was in a _different_ map for some reason!!

here's version 2, revision A https://skirtdingo.neocities.org/tests/CCC_Rules_Draft_v2A.txt

I'm going to playtest it today with my partners, and that should give me enough feedback to update to revision B. I doubt I'm going to change many of the rules at this point- what's important is clarity, which is weak in some places (namely the three different Collapsing rules).

here's my test board, using pieces from several different games lol

and I'm really not kidding when I say I designed this game in a dream! I had all of these pieces and their basic concepts- the formal rules I wrote out were extrapolated from the need to specify these concepts, and to try to keep them functional together.

I don't even really like abstract games cause I don't have a head for them so idk why I'm the one to come up with one in a dream lol

cool move

the other night I designed an abstract board game in a dream, and I wrote down the basic design as soon as I woke up. I forgot one of the pieces, but I was able to extrapolate a first draft of rules to _try_ to make all of it functional!

you can read it here, although do note that it's quite long and complicated. https://skirtdingo.neocities.org/tests/CCC_Rules_Dream_Draft_v1.txt

I'm working towards a second version that takes out a lot of the complexity- dunno when that'll be done

my takeaway? I need to double check my assumptions wrt where the error lies much sooner. I was _sure_ that the problem related to how quickly I started loading a level, because changing that (seemingly!) affected how often the crash would happen.

but in truth it was unpredictable, and I should have faced sooner that I could be misunderstanding the source of the issue. if you write code that _seems_ to fix an issue without understanding what the issue actually was... it's not a solution

so, in conclusion, I dealt with a frustrating, seemingly random, fatal error for months on end that consistently baffled me, because I went ahead with entering a value of `1` instead of `0` into a dialog window I am forced to give an answer to every time I write a particular event, and which had no explanation in the program or any documentation I could find for *why* I should choose one option or the other

phew

my findings were:

1) the extension had been last updated in late 2011, but the newest version available was from 2010. the 2011 version might very well be lost except for whomever happened to download it directly from the developer.

2) in 2015, somebody made a post pointing out that having the extension try to save in its own thread is inherently unsafe, because it will sooner or later fail to release the lock on the file, and then crash when it tries to access it for writing

the option was not explained wrt the result it should have, so I just went "sure, use your own thread, why not?". the first crash happened a while after coding this, so I never thought to review it. why would *saving* be a problem?

a few days ago, I was finally able to debug the fact that the extension I was using to store data and save/load it was mentioned in the backtrace of every single crash... maybe other people online have had the same experience and there's a solution to this problem?

I kept trying different workarounds to _load_ level data a bit slowly, in case the problem was clickteam was running too fast and trying to access data that hadn't been loaded yet, and then crashed cause it didn't know what to do. this was a total wild goose chase.

the problem was that, in the event I had for automatically saving the data, I said "yes" to allowing it to save using its own memory thread. the way events work in clickteam, you have to go through several dialog windows *every time*

I spent about a week slowly adding sound effects to my puzzle game, but I'm so glad I did. I've had a mental creative block for a while, and this is exactly what I needed to freshen up.

the game feels so much more reactive and engaging now, I'm really happy with my choices for sfx!

also, in even better news, I finally fixed a months-long glitch that would cause the game to randomly crash whenever a level was completed. the problem was... embarrassing

I've finished a first draft of all the 12 levels my game will come with! I'm really excited about how this is coming along.

the game is going to be kind of short overall but I hope it will be very entertaining. and I hope people will be interested in the level editor, because there's a lot of potential puzzles I haven't dug into!

Playing a Janky Version of Breakout on a CRT TV Sitting Behind a Mirror in the Bathroom of a Gourmet Restaurant at 2:19 PM https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/11575

is my new favourite game

sat down and made a new level today!! I had fun making it. the idea was to have a level that only lets you play as Ravi, while using a lot of obstacles that Ruff is supposed to deal with.

hopefully I can keep this energy going on and finish off the rest of my planned levels... only 4 more to go!

the reason this causes such a conflict for me is because, other issues with speedrunning aside, I *love* hearing technical details of how it works alongside a demonstration of it being done, and GDQ is... the only place I can have this satisfied, without delving into speedrunning communities myself (which I am loathe to do).

so it hurts me to be effectively taunted with other people enjoying it, because for me to look past the huge issues would be so wrong

I'm frustrated about hearing about GDQ second hand (not on here), I'm going to try to mute it cause I don't want to see it. it causes too much internal conflict for me.

because of how awful so many speedrunners are, and how bad GDQ is at dealing with this (not surprising considering they are cut from the same cloth), I cannot watch anything from them anymore. it's not just a moral issue- I feel unsafe watching their streams b/c I never know what awful moment could possibly happen

gonna try to work on games again soon. it's been a couple weeks... I got that creative fire inside of me heating up

#screenshotwednesday

so called "virtual realtiy" gameing will never take off. why not? because it's not real. it's in the name. nice try, buckos, but it's completely fake