Since last I posted about beta.vrpg, 58 revisions have occurred. In that time:

• I got file submissions up.
• I got (simple, title-based) file searches up.
• I got most of the file details page up (thread spawning, screenshot uploading pending).
• I did a lot of database reworking and massaging, mainly to get to a point where…
• …single file entries can have multiple physical files attached, so one game can have file links to every OS it’s released on

Oh, and I made a Silly 500 Internal Service Error page.

Definitely the most important part of this work.

Going forward will be finishing the file management side of things (letting you deprecate old versions of files in favor of new ones, showing a browsable history, letting you edit and delete files you own), and cranking out the community-based side of things (ie, image uploading and talkback threads on file pages.) After that, advanced search options and a browsable file index, and the section should be complete.

I’m mainly excited to see a upload system that hasn’t seen a failure yet. This was one of the major failures of the current vrpg that prompted the rewrite. I used swfupload for the actual UI/handling of the upload, and integrating it went very smoothly.

The Town for Dial 'M' for MacGuffin's contest entry demo.

Dial 'M' for MacGuffin's forest, with a Slime and Legged Clam present.

A Bomb Blast destroying some bomb-shatterable jars in Dial'M' for MacGuffin's Contest release.

Getting a Max-Health-Up bonus in Dial 'M' for MacGuffin's Contest release. Note the Majestic 'M' use.

Apologies for the delays in posting.  It’s been a crazy year so far.

MacGuffin

In the last 10 days of 2008, there was a HoV contest at verge-rpg.com.  Some of the mightiest hearts and minds in all of vergedom conglomerated to form a game the likes of which have totally been seen before but that they wanted to make nonetheless.

We came up with: Dial ‘M’ for MacGuffin, a Zelda-style top-down action adventure game which pits the mettle of a Dashing Chap (you) against the evil Lord Malefact, who has locked the doors of the whole village just before teatime.

We lost.

Some would blame a world not ready for such a bold new form of art.  Some would blame the lack of even a single boss fight.  Some would blame the shoddy hit model for attacking.

In the end, I blame the fact that CrazyAsianGamer made a helluva good game on his own.

Well, that, and the fact that my arch-nemesis Kildorf was the head Judge.

Masters

Hyptosis made a mighty amount of art, only a fraction of which we got to add gameplay to in the 10 days. He had 4 more gorgeous overworld areas laid out. If this was a 20 day compo, we could’ve filled it up as we were to the content-fleshing-out portion and each dungeon seemed to take about 2 days of implementation and testing. Alas.

Ustor helped in a pinch with the occasional observation and some last minute scripting. His assistance was appreciated.

Gayo came to bat designing puzzles and dungeon layouts, filling up our team’s google site with a lot of information. He’s also to blame for the warp tile puzzle in the dungeon, so you should send your hate mail to him.

most of my time was spent working on the systems coding: entity handling, collision detection, goodie pooping, tools, destructable terrain, etc. There’s still some work to do, I think. The l;ast two days were spent making the dungeon work nice. Sadly we didn’t have enough time to get multiple dungeons in, but this game was/is fun enough and far enough along to deserve some more attention.

I’m on a team with Gayo, Zathras, Hyptosis, and Ustor, and we’re Making an M-game. Hopefully this will get the Zeldalike urges out of my system.

We’ve got a walk’n'slash demo at this point, several chrs, a massive amount of raw mapwork, and music engaged. Still left to do are the tool scripts, the actual map-scripting, and playtesting. We’re on schedule for now, but I’d like to be ahead of schedule just because tragedy can strike at any moment.

Tragedy is a ninja, see…