And finally, a new level set to download! I am quite pleased to bring you the first custom level set created by a Zep's Dreamland player.

Head over to the Zep's Dreamland page in order to get the level set. Please, anyone who has been working on sets, feel free to submit them via emai! I do not, unfortunately, have a submission form for level sets. Simply attach your level set in a zipped format and email it to me. I'll be sure to check it out and host it!

It's been too long between posts, and I know it! The truth is I have not done too much in any department, whether it be GBA, Allegro, or anything else. I've been adjusting to my new life-schedule which includes a new full-time job which I will retain for the next six months! I really wish I didn't let this much time pass by without posting anything, but unfortunately it did happen. I haven't added any code to the GBA project I was wroking on. I ran into a little roadblock with my flash kit, but after reading some documentation that's all cleared up now.

I have, however, started up a development document for a project which I will not name or reveal at this time. It is short at this point in time, and only really contains information that I have already through very hard about. I simply wanted to get everything down in a format other than just the memory in my brain. Hopefully this document will actually make it to a final stage; at least I hope so. It has already started to prove itself as very beneficial, and think I just might start a up a bunch just to jot down all of the ideas I have for future games and/or projects.

I've been receiving a few emails with some custom levels for Zep's Dreamland which are in the works by various people. The levels are turning out very good and I can't wait to make a download section for custom level sets. If you would like to get your own levels hosted, hop to it and start designing some levels. Shoot an email over to me with your compiled level set to play and I'll be glad to host some brand new levels for Zep's Dreamland!

Finally, back up and online! It's been a few days; and I'm sure you've seen that my site has been down. So, here's the scoop.

Basically, there was a little mishap which took place in regards to renewing my hosting, which led to it being taken down. It was partly my own fault was well as my host's. I never received a reminder about my hosting going up for renewal, but I should have been on top of things and simply renewed it when I renewed my domain name. Either way, I guess both halves were up for fault. Anyways, I'm back up and hopefully everything will run smoothly from this point out. I changed my dns entries about two times. Once to point to my hosting at University; while my hosting was down. And now to point back to my host. Some viewers will be able to see this post while others actually may not. It can (supposedly) take up to two full days for a domain name with updated DNS entries to propogate throughout the web.

Happy to be back! Also, if anyone has tried emailing me while the site was down, please resend your emails; as now I will be able to read them as well as reply to all of them.

Thanks!

Here rolls in another year! Yay 2004. Anyways, that's not the half of what's been going on lately. Although I took a huge break from working on game related stuff after the release of Zep's Dreamland in order to simply promote the game and play some other games I received for Christmas, I got hit with the motivation stick pretty severely in the past few days. Working with Allegro? Unfortunately, no. Actually, that's not really unfortunate, is it? :)

I've been delving deeper and deeper into GBA Development. I've started writing a lot of my own functions that handle rather tedious things such as figuring out all of these numbers required when putting your sprites into the actual sprite memory of the hardware. It's a pain and includes a lot of math that can be easily screwed up, so I added some functions here and there to help with that. They only work in one direction. I need to make some kind of set that will keep track of not only what sprites are in the memory, but which ones have been taken out and how much space there is available once a sprite has been removed. It's complicated and very restricting, but I'm having a really fun time working with it. Having these constraints really helps me think before I start doing things; whereas when I would program for the PC, I could simply just do whatever I want since my resources were so vast. Now I'm running into things like: "Well, 32x32 sprites would look so much nicer, but I would be using lots of them. Maybe I should use 16x16 sprites in order to save some space so I can have more visual effects than bigger sized player and enemy sprites?" Lots of stuff like this comes into play. I'm sure with my first demo or even game I won't even end up using all of the memory that is available to me, but that's ok.

So, what have I been working on? Anything cool to look at? Actually, yes! For a starting project, I decided to use SpaceyShooter as a backbone for my learning on the GBA. What is that? Am I porting SpaceyShooter to GBA? Well, not exactly. I'm simply using the whole game architecture and the design of the game. Eventually I might make a fully working port of SpaceyShooter for the GBA, which, in fact, wouldn't be too hard to do. I'm using a porting process in order to learn more about the GBA than I would if I was simply following online tutorials where you just copy'n'paste everything. I wanted to play around with some of my own code, and this is giving me a very good opportunity to do so. So far I already have a basic player ship which will thrust with fire if you move upwards, and can also shoot. The ship is animated when you move left and right, unlike it's PC predecessor. I've recorded a simple little video which demonstrates all of the work I've done up until now.

The video features the use of two video modes, simple hardware sprites and backgrounds, and a lot of programming on my part to actually make it all work. It's about 15 seconds long and about 200k in size. Enjoy.