I'm the kind of person who picks a game and sticks with it for months, maybe even years.

The ones I've stuck with have been as follows:

-Microprose GP1 (pc)
-Pokemon yellow (gb)
-F1 World Grand Prix (n64)
-Super Smash Brothers (n64)
-Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2
-Perfect Dark (n64)
-Burnout 3 (xbox)
-DotA (pc)
-Heroes of Newerth (pc)
-iRacing (pc)
-Overwatch (pc)

Ragdoll physics looks amazing, but on the other hand won't this slow down the pace?

Yea i'd thought of that so I made watching the ragdoll physics optional, as soon as the player dies they can tap the screen to respawn instantly or watch the ragdoll physics play out as long as they like. I just haven't got up to adding a UI text to explain that yet.

There will probably be some sort of text block that slides in saying 'Subject Deceased, Tap to respawn'.

If it was me, I'd respawn the player and let them play while the ragdolls are still ragdollin'.

Updated today! Today's update is only to the tile editor, which doesn't have version numbers. If you've been there before, you should probably ctrl+f5.

The tile editor is a pretty cool little development suite that was originally used just to make tile maps and convert sprites to a format that the VO-EM's GPU can understand. Today, I expanded on its feature set a little.

New features:
-The tile editor can now be used to actually edit (and even create from scratch, if you're masochistic) tiles and palettes. Of course, you can still import spritesheets in png format, but you can now edit them directly with the pencil tool. There is also a colour picker included, which lets you pick new colours for sprites. I intend to add some numerical RGB inputs as well.

Bugfixes:
-The ASM exporter now exports tilemap data in a way that's a little easier to use - the order has been changed so that map length, width and height comes first and then data. The lenghth etc are now embedded with .word rather than .equ, so that they could be loaded by a map loader dynamically at runtime.
-The editor no longer crashes when you try to load a sprite sheet with dimensions that don't divide perfectly by 16. There is a 3px margin for error before it either adds a whole row/column, or deletes a whole row/column.
-The 'flood' tool has been removed for now, as it was causing some issues.

Wiki entries:
-The wiki has been updated to include detailed instructions on the usage of the editor. You can find the instructions here: http://wiki.vo-em.com/index.php?title=Editor

Strange, to say the least. I can imagine this scam might pay off if you take a Kickstarter that is absolutely on fire (talking multiple millions and lots of press coverage) and start an identical indiegogo campaign with a very short goal in the hope that it'll get funded by people miss-googling before anyone catches on that you're a scammer.

I can't imagine, however, that a scammy spinoff of a kickstarter campaign with a goal as low as yours which, if funded, will probably follow the "surge, stall, final push" pattern is ever going to get funded in short enough a time to evade detection.

It does, as you've said, read as a ploy for attention, as this is the sort of practice that would probably scare a lot of folk who don't realize how non-viable it is, and therefore make for good click bait. Maybe somebody who wants your project funded cooked it up?

This was supposed to be a 15 bit rgb color picker chart... I think I took a wrong turn somewhere and I got a TooL album cover instead.

I told this to my mom and she asked what assembly was. When I told her, she asked if it was the "morse code of programming" and I think that's the best description of assembly that's ever been proposed.

If assembly is the morse code of programming, what would the interpretive dance of programming be?

I would say the majority of content is split between surreal ironic shitposting, and self-deprecating devlogs.

Probably put the hourly wage you're offering in the subject field to catch people's attention

No it's Optimus Prime's birthday.

Like a lot of other people I got Clickteam "The Games Factory" out of a magazine as a kid, and later got Multimedia Fusion.

My personal belief is that they're great for developing an interest in game development, because you can get something that moves and is playable very quickly. If you're happy to use inbuilt movement patterns and the like, you can put together a platformer in no time at all. It lets you get straight into level design and the like, so it's very satisfying, especially if you're very young and have a short attention span. With the latest MMF, you can even export your games to Smartphone right off the bat, which is sure to get the kind of praise from parents that really keeps kids eyes bright for this hobby.

However, making serious games with Clickteam products requires a huge amount of effort and arcane knowledge. You need a lot of experience with the program to force it to do more serious things. Even something as simple as making your own movement system ("static engine") becomes quite kludgy.

I think that if you get to the point where you're developing serious games (eg, with a team and/or for publishing), it might be counteruintuitive to try and bend Clickteam products to your will to do so. In most development environments, most of the skills you learn can be transferred over to other languages and platforms, but KNP/TGF/MMF are sort of their own little school of black magic. You may find yourself so exclusively comfortable with the software that you end up reluctant to use more appropriate platforms when applicable, and hence end up limiting your output.

I know some people who were using Clickteam products when I first got one at 11, and are still using them now. I'm 25. They definitely have not progressed as far in terms of quality and ingenuity of output as other friends who branched out earlier.

All that said - if your goal is making a game, use whatever platform, library and/or tools you believe will realise that goal as efficiently and accurately as possible.

13/7

"Prime Curios!: 137. The only known primeval number whose sum of digits equals the number of primes "contained." 137 is the largest prime factor of 123456787654321. The reciprocal of the fine-structure constant of electromagnetism is close to 137."

I don't know if giving my mad science software engineering a purpose somehow devalues it in some way, but I thought it'd be nice to make some assembly tutorials for the absolute beginner.
Foreword
Being able to write assembly is not a necessary skill to become a game developer, or even a game programmer. In this day and age, compilers work well enough that bytecode-level black magic is more likely to confuse your workmates than it is to improve any aspect of your algorithm.

However, in my opinion, there is no better way to understand how a computer really works than getting as close to the hardware as you can. Assembly is just one step away from writing your program's .exe out in raw 1s and 0s - and if you can write assembly well enough there's no reason you couldn't do just that. With an understanding of assembly, you'll likely find yourself stumped by cryptic error messages, strange crashes, and code structures that "should work but don't" a lot less often.

With that in mind, I've started writing a series of tutorials on assembly programming. All of these tutorials use my virtual console, VO-EM. No paid software or licenses are required.

I'm very interested in getting feedback on these - despite being employed as a teacher I'm often told I'm terrible at explaining things.
Index
A Series (Beginners)

• A0 - Getting Started from Scratch ^{An overview of what a computer really is.}
• A1 - My First Program ^{Babby's first assembly program. Covers toolchain setup.}
• A2 - Branching ^{A slightly more serious program, using conditional branching.}
• A3 - Exploring the Assembler^{A deeper look at what the assembler does with our code.}
• A4 - Saving & Loading^{A course in saving and loading data to and from memory locations.}
• A5 - Calling subroutines^{How to write functions at the assembly level.}
• A6 - Input & Interrupts^{Learn about hardware interrupts.}
• A7 - Input & Interrupts Pt II^{Make an interractive program using gamepad input.}
• A8 - Introduction to Computer Graphics ^{An introduction to how computers display graphics.}

• A9 - Drawing to the Screen ^{The final A-series tutorial - interactive graphical output! Make a Tron-like effect!}

Z series (lol)

• AX - Hello World ^{Tying it all together with a Hello World tutorial! (May be a bit advanced for most at this stage; still filling in the gaps)}

Updated today! If you can't see the right version number (12.7.22.5 Alpha), you need to ctrl+f5 your browser.

New features:
-Breakpoints
^{There are now a few commands pertaining to breakpoints in the console debugger. Typing "breakpoints enable" will switch them on. "add_breakpint 80085" will add a breakpoint at memory address 0x80085 (base 16). Whenever the CPU arrives at a breakpoint, execution will be paused as if you'd pressed the pause button. You can remove breakpoints in the same way, eg "remove_breakpoint 80085". "breakpoints list" will show all currently active breakpoints. "breakpoints disable" will once again disable the breakpoints. Loading a different cartridge or DLX file will clear all breakpoints. If I remember correctly.}

-Timer
<sub>There is now a timer available at 0xFFFFFF08, spanning one word in memory. It ticks up at one tick per cycle, so assuming the emulator isn't lagging, at 72khz. Writing a byte to 0xFFFFFF08 sets an interrupt request channel for timer events (it currently defaults to IRQ channel 0). Writing a word or halfword to the same area sets an interrupt mask, which defaults to 0xFFFF, which is roughly the length of one Mississippi. Basically, whenever the current value of the timer AND'd with the mask is equal to zero, it will fire an interrupt. It will not fire on the first cycle of execution.

The implementation for the timer is currently untested and haphazard, so these usage instructions won't be valid after tomorrow, but the basic operation is set.</sub>

Buxfixes:
-Fixed a rare issue where reading bytes from ROM would return zero despite data being there. I seriously doubt this bug would've ever appeared in practice, but just in case!
-Disabled the RESET button for now, not happy with its implementation. Will fix it later.

Wiki:
-I've started a series of tutorials on using the VO-EM and programming assembly in general. You can see an index of them here.

At this point I don't care if I love the game or hate it, I just want it to come out in Japan so I can get in on this already

The Japanese website's gone from "July 2016 release" to just "2016 release", so I guess it's time to abandon all hope.

There's probably a German one out there, but I've never tried to look for one. Most of the interesting, game-related communities tend to be in English.

I frequent a Japanese one, but forum-wise it's abysmal and it's basically more of a dump for "baby's first game" (I once downloaded about five games and only one of them wouldn't crash within the first 30 seconds). There's no real exchange going on either, which is a pretty big bummer.

I've stumbled across a Chinese game-dev related forum once, but I'm not yet proficient in that language so it kinda got lost in my bookmarks.

I was just thinking that I hadn't explored any Japanese game dev forums... if that's par for the course, though, it sounds very disappointing.

I haven't done any console dev for quite some time (not existing consoles at least), but you used to be able to develop for DSLite using an r4 flash cart and the DevKitARM (or DevKitNDS was it?) toolchain for C.

I don't know if that's too old for you, or if it's something you can still do on modern Nintendo handhelds.

Also, obviously this won't create something you can legally sell - just grey-area homebrew. Great fun if you're just looking to play around, though.

Does anyone remember a  PC bullet hell game, I think it had "Raptor" and lots of purple bullets. It had SNES graphics and what was fun was the absolute bullet-hell, there were just tons of bullets to dodge.

Are you talking about the DOS era Apogee game, Raptor: Call of the Shadows? Because that game was an absolute BLAST.

Whether something is a waste of time or not depends on what your intended outcome is.

If your intended outcome is learning more about how computers actually work, I don't think any reasonable attempt at rolling your own console will be a waste of time.

The purpose of making my virtual console is to waste time, so I am paradoxically wasting time while achieving my goal.

I think people have moved away from 'freeware' because it's often a lie, nowadays.

Especially when it comes to audio/video/document conversion software and other specific-task applications, there are a huge amount of smalltime devs who advertise their software as "freeware" but it's only "free" as long as you only want the first 15 seconds of your video converted, with a watermark and noise mixed in.

The word 'freeware' is synonymous with deceptive trial software, packaged adware, and glitchy products for me, and I don't think I'm too alone in that.

Updated today! If you can't see the right version number (8.7.0 Alpha), you need to ctrl+f5 your browser.

New features:
-Start/pause/step buttons.
^{You now need to hit play (|>) after loading an executable. You can pause with ||. When paused, you can step through one cpu cycle at a time with ||>. If you notice the "cycle" count skipping a lot of frames, that's because the "wait" opcode was used. The emulator skips the "wait" cycles to save you clicking a thousand times. PS: You can also step with enter, and can hold enter to step fast.}

-N shortcut key in memory viewer (page)
^{Pressing "n" on the memory viewer will now take you to the current value of PC (ie, the currently-executing memory). The word that's executing is wrapped in <>s, but it's hard to see so I'll make it colourful later.}

-poke shortcut clicks
^{There's always been a "poke" command in the console, with the syntax "poke [address] [byte value]", that lets you write a byte to memory. I've updated this so you can now write many bytes sequentially, which will be written starting from [address]. I've also made it so that if you click a byte in the memory viewer, it will automatically fill out a "poke" command with the address of the byte you clicked.}

Bugfixes:
-performing a save halfword (sh) op no longer performs an unwanted shift left arithmetic immediate (slai) op.
-fixed a bug where writing to tile palette data was not causing tiles to be drawn with the new palette until the tile itself was modified in tile data.