Today’s post starts off by me saying “sorry”. Again. I wish I could break the habit, but hey, this place just wouldn’t be what it was if there weren’t the frequently incorrect release dates and hopelessly inaccurate promises!

We’re talking about the Poing! PC community level pack, of course. I won’t harp on about the why of it, but you’ve probably noticed that it wasn’t released last weekend as I said it would be. This is, of course, entirely unacceptable. As some minor compensation, here’s a third and final peek at a couple of the new levels that you’ll be able to play through (thanks to Mauft for both of them):

When will it finally become available? Erm… “imminently”. To say more than that would be foolish, I think…

E3 has come and gone, and I can’t say there was anything in it that really grabbed me by the throat. Well, apart from perhaps one thing…

First of all, if you didn’t get sucked up in the miniature hype tornado that appeared around Mythos before it sadly disappeared off the face of the internet, let me explain a bit. It was a point-and-click action RPG in the vein of Diablo and Dungeon Siege, and it had a ton of potential. Unfortunately, Flagship Studios – its ill-fated developer – went bust early last summer, taking Mythos with it. But in a twist to the story, it turns out that virtually all of Flagship‘s development team has been signed up into a new software house called Runic Games. What are they working on? Well, it’s this little ol’ thing called Torchlight…

Read more…

It seems to be a tradition here in the UK to use bank holidays in order to get rid of all those DIY jobs you’ve been meaning to do for ages… so, in recognition of this, I’m not going to do anything constructive whatsoever! Alright, well, maybe a bit. My recent obsession with Minecraft has stolen time away from stuff I really should be sorting out. There’s a whole slew of other recent indie games that I want to talk about, not to mention some coding that I’ve been neglecting for way too long.

As you possibly noticed by the lack of the announcement, submissions for the Poing! PC community level pack are now closed. I’m moving the estimated release date back a week to somewhere around the first weekend in June. When it does arrive, though, you can look forward to at least two new levelsets with new graphics and a new “pastel” brickset to use in your own levels if you wish. I’m resisting the temptation to do a full visual makeover of the game because, honestly, with no access to the code in order to fix its long-standing bugs, that would be wasteful. It’s an old game and I think from this point it needs to grow old gracefully

Yeah. Any more work I do on a Poing-style game would be better spent on making a sequel… and sorry Poing fans, but no – that’s not a hint at a future project. Not for this year, at any rate!

Well, that went well!

I’d like to thank whoever was responsible for removing all of my uploaded WordPress images; it was a nice test of my backup system. Fortunately, it did its job quite well Anyhow, as you can see, everything is back to normal. Happy days!

On to more important matters: I am aiming to release the Poing! PC community level pack by the end of the month, but regular readers will be painfully aware of my awful track record in accurately predicting release dates I honestly can’t remember what date I extended the submission deadline to, but I’ll be closing it for good next weekend (the 23rd or 24th, depending on how eager I feel). Are you ready for some serious slippage? I know I am…

Awww man. That’s just my luck. I couldn’t show my face around here until I finally put together a few more screenshots of the upcoming new Poing! PC levels – and now, when they’re actually ready to post, weird stuff happens. Bloody typical. I won’t stand for it, I tell you! Someone will pay!!

So, anyhows, I have no idea why the in-post images (EDIT: make that any post or page image except the three above) aren’t loading up at the moment. I’m going to hope that the problem goes away by itself, and will cross my fingers that these wonderful teasers are visible to you all… if not, I will investigate using my trusty sledgehammer at some point tomorrow. Bah.

Yes, the long silence is broken with something that definitely isn’t a Poing community level preview (coming soon… honest!). Instead… well, what on earth is THIS?

Presenting the first (and possibly the last) screenshot of: EightyForty, an oldschool DOS-ish screen prototyper! Boring, nerdy and geeky, yes? Hell no! This is the cutting edge, I tell ya…

This came as a direct result of finding out how to do single-buffered graphics in BlitzMax, which isn’t as clearly documented as it should be. As it happens, such a graphics system isn’t really utilised fully in this particular app – but for a future Blitz Roguelike engine it certainly would be I must shout a big “thank you!” to Mauft for suggesting the breakthrough that got it up and running.

In other news, work is edging forward on a super-secret collaborative project that I can’t say anything about. Yet. If and when there’s anything juicy to tell you (that my good coding partner is happy for me to let slip!), you’ll almost surely be among the first to know

I said I’d post some more teasers of the new Poing! PC community levels over the weekend. I failed. Miserably.

Sorry folks. You deserve better! I have slapped myself on the wrist and will remedy this by posting some teasers later in the week.

I was going to wait until tomorrow before announcing this, but since all the preliminary guff has been done, there’s not much point in waiting around…

Pleasantly, as I’ve been able to get a huge amount done over the past few days, I’m happy to announce that Dalyn’s Quill is now available for you to download! This means absolutely nothing to most of you, of course, but then I do seem to specialise in… erm… “niche” software

Since the last Quill update I’ve obviously added and tidied a fair bit of stuff, but perhaps the most interesting addition is that of teleporter target visualisation. In other words, selecting a field with a teleporter in it will show you on the map where the target field is. If it’s not on the current level, you can click the “Show Target” button and it’ll automatically switch levels and flash a highlight around the target field. Handy, eh? No more counting grid squares to double-check coordinates!

Anyway, head on over to the shiny new Dalyn’s Quill project page for the full blurb, or if you’re impatient, get the Windows download right now. As always, any feedback or bug reports that you send in are very welcome. For now though I’ll tie this up by wishing you happy dungeoneering!

Hmm… and I guess that makes it time to decide on my next “big” project…