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So what moment will you remember most? Here's mine, it's a hairy moment that turned out well in the end...

With just a few hours left, I discovered that you could cheat in my game!!! If you accelerated to top speed and faced the Alien, you could kill him before he had chance to defend himself. This was possible on all levels, because the added difficulty didn't kick in fast enough.

To fix it, I added a "feature" to the weapon, it now slows down if you fire it too fast for too long. As it turns out, it makes the game much better, I even added a glowing light to the HUD to display the overheating status of the gun. Sorted! Not only does it fix the problem, you will also die if you try and cheat because your weapon will overheat coupled with the fact that you are too far away from your targets.

With 1 day left I discovered 2 erros.

Loop music doesn't work well in the main loop of your game.
- I got rid of music (now I know how to fix, but it's too late)

The ball was near impossible to get by the alien
- I had to keep him at a constant move speed, and make sure he didn't break the limit.

Considering I started on Dec. 28th(The core,at least) I'm fairly happy with my entry.

Best of luck to all in the compo.

I have a couple for sure.

TOTAL COMPUTER SHUT DOWN

About two weeks ago, I thought my game was a goner. I was working on a new scene, and when it would start, my Windows XP Pro would completely shut down, and give this weird blue screen message. You could hear the hard drive spinning down and everything, and there was nothing more than some message saying that Windows XP had encountered some major hardware error.

When I restarted the PC, everything seemed fine, so I went back into DarkBasic, ran my program, and the same thing happened again. I thought that my DarkBasic had just stopped working. Then, I changed one line of code, which told the program to switch to a different scene, and it worked - no more shutdowns. It has never happened since, so I just try to move on and not look back. But it really had me worried that I couldn't complete my game.

-------- RUSH TO FINISH

This last week has been pretty much non-stop coding for me. This is not easy with a job, a wife and 3 kids... I have taken vacation days from work, come in late on occasion, and on several nights stayed up until 2, 3, 4 or 5, just to get this done on time.

Last night was really, the Last Night of the competition. I started my last night of programming at 10:00 PM with a list of 10 program changes that needed to be corrected in the game. I had so many Mountain Dews that my arms were getting shaky. It got to the point when I just couldn't think or type that clearly anymore.

Finally, at 3 AM, it was time to play the whole game from start to finish, to make sure I didn't forget anything. Good thing I checked!

I found that I told the music to "PLAY" instead of "LOOP", so after the 3 minute long song was done, it was quiet. I fixed that in a jiffy.

And I also found that on Level 3, I have rain effects, but there are none on Level 4. I had forgotten to hide the rain object (which was nothing more than a ghosted plane object with a picture of rain drops). So, level 4, which has a somewhat clear sky, then had rain stuck on the screen. I fixed that one in a hurry too.

Test after test after test . . . revision after revision after revision... My final compile was at 4:10 AM. I began the FTP upload to officially enter the game and went to sleep. I woke up at 6 AM, and it was done uploading, so then I began uploading it to my website. I woke up at 8, called the boss, told her I would be in kind of late today, and went back to sleep.

What a day - and what a competition. It was so intense for me, especially at the end. I will never forget it.

And now, I have new game out of the deal: Invaders From Earth.

My second hairy moment was being invaded by relatives over Christmas...I knew I had a shed load of tweaks and niceties to add, and every time I sat down at the PC, someone turned up! I hadn't seen the deadline extension and had a minor (OK, major) session that went into the early hours.

Third hairy moment...working on January 1st ( ) until the early hours, then checking the upload instructions. Whenever I see a date, I automatically hover over the Windows clock...it said January 2nd!!! I thought I had lost a day and missed the deadline! Then, it finally dawned that I had gone past midnight, and I still had another 16 hours left. Doh!

Probably the saddest thing to happen was that patch 5.2 mangled 98% of my models. While the problem was fixable, it was a real slap in the face as far as progress is concerned.

One of the goofier things was that the AI/main program coder went to Las Vegas for a week without telling anyone else on the team. I though he got hit by a truck or something.

To balance that out, Nuclear Glory's Collision DLL made life much easier.
--
TAZ (Alien Conquest missed the deadline. But, I believe development will continue.)

scariest? submitting my game 45 mins. before the deadline

Hehe, where to start...

Probably my source corrupting 3 different times, that's a nightmare - looks like your source has gone, but you simply load it into notepad and get rid of the weird nonesense the corrupts it.

Maybe the few all-nighters were a bit much as well.


Van-B

I just remembered another scary moment in the Alienware compo game development.

I had been working on the game for about 2 and a half months, and the deadline was a week away. The game had finally come together, and it was actually playable for the first time. However, as I discovered after five minutes of play, it wasn't fun - at all! It was boring! How could I have worked all this time on something that was ... totally boring? What was I thinking?

With only a week left, what was a guy to do? Should I take the easy way out and add bad words or nudity to make it a hit? No, too overdone. What about adding a big gun so that you could blast the enemy away? No, too far away from the original plan, and way too predictable.

It was at that point where I came up with the idea to simply make a power up meter. The more of the enemy you destroyed, the more your power up meter filled up. Once you fill it up, you get a bonus which gives you more attack power (in my case, more starting beams).

Well it worked. This change definitely made the game less boring.

My funnyiest story was when I reliezed I had absolutly no chance to compete. What a funny moment that was indeed.