Oooh, it's a blog. Shiny. Not that I've ever seen the need to post updates on what I'm doing outside of my homepage (www.remar.se/daniel), but coming all the way here just to read this blog probably means you're interested in my GM works, rather than DDR simfiles or what-have-you. :p This could get long-winded though.

To be honest, I haven't contributed very much to Eo since I came here. I get (and hopefully give) a lot of good feedback, though. I haven't been around the official Gamemaker forums for a long time, but that doesn't mean I've retired - I've been working more or less constantly on Iji. While I've recently finished two smaller games, one of them (Garden Gnome Carnage) may or may not be released as an Eo mini, and the other (name kept secret) is a game-within-a-game that goes inside Iji.

To post some info you WON'T find on my homepage: I won't release any other full-scale games until Iji is complete, which is sometime in 2007. I'm currently working on Sector 7 of 10. All weapons, most enemies, and all the basics of the engine are done. Cracking, chat sequences, stats, Special traits, the technicalities of boss rooms, saving system, AI, and a lot of other things have been done for a long time. I'm saving sound and cutscene images for last. There was a public demo of Iji released in October 2005 with the first two Sectors, but I took it down, because the game has advanced so much since then. The few of you who saw the very first incarnations of Iji, and fear that I may cancel or put it on ice: I won't. I stopped updating my webcomic in favour of this game. Being a one-man project, I knew from the start that it would take a long time to create, and it's already about two years old.

So why's it taking so long? Well, I'm coding it from the ground up, I'm doing the graphics, creating 3D models with forward kinematics skeletons in Blender and animate them frame-by-frame, writing the script, cutscenes and logbooks, programmed the menus, optimized the game so it runs on a 850Mhz computer with a 16 Mb video memory card... the game has so many rules and even more exceptions, half of the time is spent making sure it's fluid and bugfree. Building a Sector, even with my hand-drawn blueprint, takes about 30-40 hours.

Of course, the biggest reason is that I'm attending the university at the same time. You may have heard it from a friend, but I'm indeed taking an education on video game design, one of the best in Sweden if they are to be believed. I love it here, and our teachers are all good. So I'm dreaming of a time where I actually make a living on my games and ideas. :)

And now for something completely different: I'm positively surprised by the reception Castle of Elite got. As far as I'm aware, it's been included on several PC magazines and independent gaming sites. I'm glad so many people are appearantly enjoying my games, that's why I make them. :) I won't ever charge money for the GM games I make, with the argument that even more people can enjoy them then. (Note: this doesn't mean I think it's wrong to charge for GM games or anything like that, it's just my own choice in the matter.)

But please, stop asking me for the CoE editor. :p You're not bothering me, and I'm flattered you like it, but to make it clear, this editor is 100% hardwired to CoE. It consists of hundreds of lines of code, a great lot of CoE-specific objects and world controllers that make it work in the first place, and to put it bluntly it's extremely slow and poorly planned. The only reason it doesn't take minutes to save and load a level is that a level in CoE is merely a 13*12 grid and has 72 entities. It doesn't use a 2D array as you might think, but rather checks what objects exist physichally in the editor room - saving one level means a loop that, at worst, goes through 72 lines of IF statements 156 times. Now imagine you use this editor for a game with a 200*200 room, with 200 unique objects. That's 8'000'000 IF statements, and your computer won't like that. If you have any skill in arrays and hash checksums, you won't have any problem writing a better editor. The only thing I needed help with (thanks, Eo!) was checking what levels exist in the game directory.

At the same time I'm not surprised Retrobattle and Hero didn't catch on very well, they're very... special games. They only appear to retro enthusiasts, I guess, but that's why I made them. As for No Friction, one of my first GM games, I think you'll notice with Iji that I've improved since I made that one. :p

Now, something I've refrained from doing is building hype for Iji. I'm smart enough not to promise a lot of things for a game you won't see for another year, that's why I haven't posted anything about it on GMC. I also know it won't appeal to a lot of people, with its breed of System Shock 2-style upgrade system, strategical platform shooting and Out Of This World-style graphics, but I know at least some will enjoy it, and it's for those that I make it. So, stick around for 2007, where a game with a female hero, who shockingly enough does not have a supermodel body and a head filled with air, may hit a PC near you. :p