MARDEK 2 Save Problem Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Wed 5th Nov 2008, 6:02pm

Yes, I am aware that there is a save problem that has suddenly come up in MARDEK 2. It's something to do with Flash Player 10, but I have no idea what. I simply do not know HOW to fix it, and can you imagine what it's like to make a game which works swimmingly for months then all of a sudden some crucial feature becomes crippled by no action of your own, you have no possible way of fixing it, and you get loads of bordering-on-angry demands to fix it or else they'll never play anything you made ever again?!/1/ o_O I have been looking up things that it could possibly be, and I've found nothing. The old files for chapter 2 are also not even on this new computer that I got recently; all the MARDEK files on this computer contain chapter 3 data. I have the old files on another computer, but that's in a box somewhere in this house (as it has been since I moved country), and I am unsure where. So, should I spend ages and ages being frustrated trying to find my old computer, trying to work with the poorly-made old code that I've just spent months trying to get away from by rewriting the game's code from scratch, and so on, just so then people will stop complaining, or should I just continue to work on MARDEK 3, which will likely work fine when it comes to saving? Bah. I hate problems like that that suddenly come up. What did you DO, Adobe?! Anyway... progress on MARDEK 3 has been going poorly lately. All my motivation was basically removed from me for personal emotional reasons that I'm not going to go into, but the situation that caused those emotions is resolved now so I should be getting back on track... Though I am a few days behind my schedule now. Hmm. Also, making tilesets is really dull and off-putting for some unknown reason! o_O I think working all day every day on the same thing is also taking its toll on me... But hopefully this is just a temporary feeling and I can still get things done by Christmas. That's almost two months away, after all! 53 Comments

Revised Release Date Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Thu 30th Oct 2008, 5:47pm

As expected, the previously announced release date was unrealistic. I THOUGHT I'd be able to do things in one day which would likely take about three, as I've found just from trying to do the first thing on my To Do List in a day and taking three times as long... I've revised the To Do List/Schedule thing, assigning somewhat more reasonable times to each task, and the finishing date is now around the 27th of November. It's very possible that I could finish things earlier than I expect, but I'd say that it's most likely that the game won't be out until December. Christmas DOES seem very possible to release by, though! I've had a lot of new ideas for features that I was to add, which is one of the main reasons I've extended the release date like this. These new features will hopefully remove monotony from the gameplay... and cause me to receive all sorts of stupid comments, probably, because some people just cannot work out the simplest of puzzles (the Catacombs signpost comes to mind)... I intend to write a progress report every few days, partly to inform people of what I'm doing and what I've done so then you're not just completely in the dark, but also to motivate myself, in a way... Anyway, uh... This is why I usually don't announce release dates, I suppose; they're subject to massive changes! 49 Comments

MARDEK 3 Release Date! Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Tue 28th Oct 2008, 1:25am

Now don't get your hopes up too much about this, people, since it's entirely speculative and I do tend to overestimate my own abilities, but I've been writing out To Do list things for all of the things that I need to finish in chapter 3 of MARDEK, and assigning the tasks to a vague timetable thing. Based on my sketchy estimations, if I work at full speed from now on, I should get most of the content done by, uh... the 10th of November. I'll need to give myself some extra days though to add details and just generally clean things up, and I'm sure some things like musical composition and dialogue writing will go over the allotted time because they require creative inspiration that doesn't always come when I want it to... That is not a release date though. After I've actually finished making the game, it'll need to go into a testing phase, where I get a bunch of beta testers to play through it while I fix bugs that they find. This may take a week, maybe two. Perhaps even more. After that - or during that - I'll need to contact a sponsor site to actually pay me, and that takes some time, especially since they need to play through the games that get sent to them, and MARDEK is long. With MARDEK 2, it took almost a month for a sponsor to finally give an offer, I think... (Or was it more like two weeks? I can't remember, it was so long ago... o_O) Anyway, like I said, this is just a vague, VAGUE estimation of how much time I'll need to get everything done, but it looks hopeful that I could finish things before the end of the year at the latest. Christmas time is my goal, anyway. So yes. I wish I could give an absolute, definite date when you'll be able to play MARDEK 3, but unfortunately, I cannot see the future, and things tend to be unpredictable, other things are disruptive to planned schedules, etc, etc... But since I get asked CONSTANTLY for a release date, I thought I should say something to this effect anyway. 43 Comments

Update Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Sun 26th Oct 2008, 12:29am

I should start writing these news article things regularly... So, uh, here is one! Over the last few days, I've been getting a LOT done on MARDEK! As I may have said elsewhere, I've been remaking the engine for chapter 3, because the code for the old one was just annoying to work with, and I got various complaints from Flash about lack of memory when trying to export the game as an swf since it was so poorly put together... I'd been using a version of the same engine which I'd written when I was first learning ActionScript YEARS ago, then used for Fig Hunter, then changed a bit for use in a 'Yalortian Game' which never got finished and which most of you have never seen, then changed a bit more for Deliverance (though the graphics were entirely different to Fig Hunter, the underlying code was much the same), and changed some more for MARDEK... So I was using this patched-up, old code which was originally written when I was completely inexperienced anyway. So yes, that was difficult to work with, so I decided that the best thing for me to do was remake everything almost from scratch. This only includes the code and menus though, mainly. The aspects of the game which you SEE and play are the same; just built more neatly 'behind the scenes'. But it's taken a long time to make all these changes which won't be readily apparent to most players, anyway... But I just finished 'remaking' chapters 1 and 2 yesterday! This is great, because the thought of "ugh, I have to go over stuff I've already done and remake it" was off-putting for months, preventing me from working on MARDEK 3 at all (whenever I opened it to work on it, I saw what I had to do before even getting to working on the Chapter 3 stuff, and just procrastinated...) Now I'm back to working on Chapter 3 content, so it might not be long before I'm done! I'm aiming for a release date of sometime before the end of the year, but there's still a LOT to do, so I don't know how much I'll miss that date by. But just know that it's not taken more than a year so far while I've been WORKING on it; definitely not! It's taken that long because I've NOT been working on it... Other chapters after this one will have the new, neat engine for me to work with, so I won't take anywhere near this long to make them. (I've made half of the content of chapter 3 already, but I made all of that within a month after finishing chapter 2 and haven't made much, if any, progress since...) Anyway, there are some 'minor' changes that I've been working into this new version of the engine, such as: - New look for menus; they should hopefully be smoother, more user-friendly, and less buggy. - SAVE POINTS. Apparently I don't care so much about what people voted for on the poll; gamers do not make good designers from what I have heard. I would assume that most people also assume that the placement of save points would be irritating or something; it would not be. They'd be wisely placed, like at the start of a dungeon, in the middle - usually at a crossroads - and before a boss. They also serve as Healing Crystals, so this is probably a change for the better; you'd no longer die after playing for ages only to discover that you hadn't saved in ages because you'd forgotten to; Save Points placed conspicuously in your path would remind you. You'd also be warned of things like the Saviours Battle by the presence of a Save Point. - Damage and HP formulae are significantly changed. Characters have almost twice as much HP now, and the damage that they deal is now modified by level; it wasn't before (which is why as Level 50 Heroes, Mardek and Deugan still did such small amounts of damage). - I've added three new music tracks to chapter 2... - And I've also changed some bosses somewhat, which might make them more or less challenging... Some bosses can summon allies now, for example. (Such as Moric, the Necromancer, summoning undead minions in battle, which is something I wanted to add in the initial version but didn't have the motivation or time or something.) There are also more changes that I plan on adding, like switching party members in battle, but I've yet to get around to that. There may be issues with saving, however... The new code stored data differently, so it couldn't load old files. I'll try to make a thing which, when you first play the game, converts your saves from the old version into new version saves, but it still might be recommended that you play through chapters 1 and 2 again anyway. It will NOT be necessary though! Just recommended... Especially since there are some changes to them. In all future releases, the game will include all chapters up until that point. It's a lot easier to make things this way. So eventually, the game will be one single 70+ hour long RPG thing, which you could play from start to finish in the same file, probably... o_O (I wonder how many years away that'll be though? TWO at most, I hope!) I'm going to try to focus my attentions on MARDEK for the time being, ignoring any other projects, until chapter 3 is finished. It's been far too long since I've released anything that I've been able to get MONEY for... o_O So, uh, this is bad news for people who are waiting for Beast Signer or FHO updates, I suppose... But knowing me, I'll likely change my mind about this in a week anyway and get back to those. I really cannot predict the future! I'll try to stick with this though. I REALLY want to get MARDEK 3 finished so then it doesn't look like I'm abandoning the series. Oh, and there are still a lot of things I need to change or add on this site... Browser compatibility, for one thing. Oh how I hate that people use obsolete hardware or awkward software! I've got to change the Games page a bit too, and, uh... something else, I think... But anyway, if there is anything that you really want to see added or changed in MARDEK for the later chapters, it would be interesting to hear it! Even though I likely will not consider it because most GAMERS do not seem to realise that their ideas are not in the game already for technical or balancing reasons, or because they don't fit or make sense or they're stolen or they're genre changes or, uh... et cetera. "Change the battle system to something else entirely" is not a viable suggestion, by the way, because it would be too drastic a change. 61 Comments

Browsers Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Wed 15th Oct 2008, 3:45am

Peoples' impressions of the new layout will be dependent on their browsers. The layout was made in Google Chrome, and I've tested it in Firefox and it seems acceptable in that. In Internet Explorer, however, it doesn't look right at all and is horribly inefficient. I haven't tested any other browsers so I've no idea how it looks in them. I realise that at some point I'll need to spend hours making things work properly in IE - what a chore! - but I'm curious about how many of the commenting visitors are using that thing. So I want to ask you all: What browser do you use? And while I'm asking: What do you think of the look of the layout? Criticism will be... taken into consideration. Perhaps. 139 Comments

Gasp! Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Mon 13th Oct 2008, 8:57pm

The site was down for a while because my account with my webhost got suspended. It seems that some part of the new site was causing more server load than I'm allowed, and my site had to be disabled temporarily so then other customers' sites wouldn't lag, which is fair enough. It explains those 'Internal Server Error' things too. I think it's the Chat area which was causing the problems, so I'm perhaps going to have to revise that. I'll see what happens now that the site is back up. So, uh, none of you are banned, if that's what you were thinking! 20 Comments

New Site Layout Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Sun 12th Oct 2008, 6:37pm

Apparently I've almost done renovating the site. For the most part, things are much the same as before, but there are technical differences. The main thing is that the old 'Fig Hunter accounts' of before have become entirely obsolete and can no longer be used or created. Instead, the accounts which served as merely forum accounts before are now used throughout the entire site. If you never had a forum account before, you'll have to make an account using the Join button (that is, if you want one). This is in preparation for FHO, where these accounts will be used extensively. All the old COMMENTS are no longer visible also... They haven't been deleted, but they're no longer visible because they used the old accounts and stuff and are no longer supported by the new site. So now it seems that all my stuff has like no comments... Hrm. You can comment with the new accounts though, of course. Anyway, uh... There are still some things that need doing, which I'm going to get to straight away... 47 Comments

	A post Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Sat 11th Oct 2008, 7:27pm
	This is just a test to see if the new news post thing is working correctly... 49 Comments

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