7 years ago I created a game called Perceptia for a gaming contest based off of a M.C. Escher painting.  Almost immediately after I began working on a sequel.  At first it used the same graphics but just had more rooms but I soon realized that I wanted to make it bigger than that.  Throughout the next year it evolved from a puzzle platformer about  ball to a puzzle platformer about a female fennec fox named Perceptia.  It got larger and larger until it was well over 25 very large rooms.  I decided to tone it down and made it into about a 7 stage open word game.  But over the years the game file has become bloated: filled with useless code, sprites, objects and resources that probably accounted for 25-30% of the total game file. 

I've been trying to work with it but all the extra garbage is causing no ends of problems and multiple conflicts/errors that I simply cannot fix anymore; the game file has become far too unstable to be of any use.  I don't want to scrap Perceptia II; I like it way too much to allow to to fall into the garbage can with the rest of my dead games.  So I'm doing the only thing I can do: I'm starting over from scratch with a new game file.

This will allow me to do several things: with no more old game files I've purchased Game Maker 8 today so I can begin programming Perceptia in it.  I'll be programming it in 60 fps so it will look a lot smoother than the original and I can streamline/improve things that were impossible in the old file.

This step will mean a lot longer until Perceptia II is done, but it means that it will get done.  If I had left it like it was I would almost certainly had given up in frustration.  And this time, without the nuisance of a bloated and unusable game file I might actually succeed.  After all, Perceptia has been waiting 7 years to rescue her family; I think that's long enough ;D

You know you've been playing Braid too much when you go back to play testing the current game you are working on, make a move you didn't want to do and automatically press 'shift' to reverse time.  Took me a day to get that out of my system. :D

By the way, if you haven't bought Braid yet, what are you waiting for?  Easily one the best games I've ever played.  And the ending blew my mind.  I was sitting there watching it play out and I got chills; literally.  It was that good.

My website seems to have been hacked by someone at some point and a phishing page was added in one of the folders.  It's been reported and now my website is gone.  Shoot.  I'm talking to my hosting site and hoping for the best, but now that my site has been reported it's been added to many lists that look after this, including Firefox.  I may not be able to get it back.  Kawanda was hosting it for free and I seriously doubt I can afford to pay for a site somewhere else so it might be the end of Blackrat Studios.

For anyone who does visit Blackrat Studios please keep an eye here to see what's going on.

Still working on Perceptia II.  It's only taken 6 years ;D , but I think I finally got a workable system for the game.

...to have his own building to house his awesomeness?   ;D

Saw this here in Ottawa and couldn't resist taking a shot.  I was stopped at a red light by the way...no using cellphones while driving, people.