Whew, glad that’s over. My wife went out of town to visit a friend and get a much-needed break from the chilluns…of course in order for her to do so, I had to watch them all myself. Thus, my hiatus.
But she’s back safe and sound and had a great time, and I’ve managed to get a full night’s sleep now, so everything is back to normal.
I actually managed to get a surprising amount of work done on Planitia while she was gone. I improved the “painted” terrains, got the lightning bolt finalized, got the earthquake working and did various other tweaks. There will be a demo release this weekend, although I don’t know if all the god powers will be done by then.
Actually…I think I’m just going to start doing releases on a weekly basis. That way you guys can just grab the latest and see what’s new instead of waiting on me. I have been loathe to release something that feels “incomplete” and yet I should be getting as much feedback as possible on how the game plays so I can improve it. I need to just get over it and start releasing on a regular basis…so I will, with the first release being this Saturday.
I also discovered pSX over the weekend, which is an emulator for the original PlayStation. I’d played around with ePSXe (a different emulator) for a while but was ultimately unhappy with how poorly it ran most games. It seemed like ePSXe’s developers were more interested in “improving” the original PlayStation than truly emulating it.
Not so with pSX. The devteam for pSX pride themselves on the accuracy of their emulation, and I was astounded by how well all my old PlayStation games ran. Even Chrono Cross, which uses tons of graphical tricks and pushes the PlayStation to its limit, ran just fine. I also happen to have a PS2-to-USB converter so I could actually play the games with a real PlayStation controller. It was fantastic! If you’ve got old PlayStation games you want to play and you’re not in a position to be able to play them on the family TV any more (possibly because you have three kids), pSX is an excellent solution.
I may be back soon, too. Assuming all goes well, I will network access at home by tomorrow night. Come Saturday, I may even show up on IRC!
Oh, you guys hang on irc? Where? =)
Usually on #gamedevelopers on irc.starchat.net. But that seems to be in the process of dying. I’m also usually on #tigirc on irc.esper.net – that’s the channel for The Independent Gaming Source (tigsource.com).
It’s only dying because I haven’t been there since my network connection woes started. B-)