And I'm happy to report that playtesting is nearly finished.

Thanks to me playing through the game, I'm found a lot of bugs that were left in accidently, and have corrected them. Debugging is so much easier for this game. The glorious thing about working with minigames is that the rules only apply to a small section of levels. So as long as the exit is properly coded, I don't have to worry about game-destroying bugs and can focus on a small area.

It's been almost a month since I started working on Donkey Kong, and very soon it will be finished. All I need to do now is work on the tougher difficulties, and I'll be done.

And I hit my third scenario block! Woohoo!

Congrats. How are the difficulty levels gonna challenge you?

The harder difficulties will have more enemies, and you also get less lives to play with. On Normal you get three, Hard gets two, and Difficult only one. I'm going to have to thoroughly playtest these modes to make sure they're beatable.

And harder difficulties is what I've been working on lately. Converting Normal games to Hard was a bit easier than I originally thought, since most of the code is recycled. Finished with Hard and moving on to Difficult.

Although, I still need to playtest this all to make sure it all works, and that hard mode isn't too hard.

Arcadia Mania.

Cause you can't stop a good thing.

Almost all of the coding is complete. I just need to playtest what I've made and I'll be done with Donkey Kong.

So, with Donkey Kong very nearly complete, I've had some time to reflect on what I've done and said so far.

I'm happy with how the scope of the game will play out. It's both ambitigous and not too much. What I mean is, it's got enough content and ideas to be finished, but it doesn't have so many ideas that it'll get bogged down in them and never get released.

I'm still very interested in the idea of expansion packs and user-created content. I really want this idea to flourish and work, and really want to release at least one expansion pack after the main game is done.

I'm not sure if I stated this idea here, but one idea I had when I started this project was to port it to the other RPG Maker games. And seeing how long it takes me to complete just one mini-game, I'd say this idea is going to be dropped. I'm not familiar enough with the other makers to make this idea work, nor am I willing to try working on them when my motivation is high for making this on rpgm1. So if you were eager to see Arcadia Mania on a different system, I'm sad to say it's unlikely. Maybe after I finish the game, it may happen.


And since Donkey Kong is so close to completion, I'm curious. How many people would like to playtest my completed Donkey Kong mini-game? Post here or pm.

Damn if only I can find my Memory Cards.

Oh well.

Oh, I'd love to. My week will be pretty light, so I think I can do it. (And if you don't have someone else already)

As I continue working on this game, it surprises me just how much of the game changes as I progress.

Ideas that once sounded great don't seem so anymore. And other, more obscure titles gain more interest because I'm getting better with rpgmaker1. The amount of coding to make everything work and work well was amazing, and there were many changes throughtout. This is the opposite of my last peoject, Usuru, which didn't change hardly at all through the whole game.

So, which title to work on now has kept me from working on anything.

The one idea I'd like to work on is Love Love Go Go Simulator, but it's tough from adding any challange to the title if it's just 2-way choices. So, what I might do is have the player make good choices and have some action bits to keep things interesting. But still, you can only have so many "don't touch that or you'll die" events. So I may need to do some research and figure out what I'm going to do. I tend to do my very best work when I know exactly what I want to make.

I've been thinking about what to do in the last couple of days.

And while Love Love Go Go Simulation is a good idea, it doesn't fit here. It's an interesting mini-game, but it's got nothing to do with arcades at all.

So, for now anyway, I'm dropping that idea. Perhaps it'll be available in an expansion pack.

So I've gone and purchased Midway Arcade Treasures 1-3. This is research on my part. I hope to either get an idea of something I'd like to make or recreate a game for rpgmaker. Hopefully I'll be able to find something I like.

I don't know, the "date simulation" idea seemed to work well in Remote Control's arcade. Then again, it wasn't much of an arcade game, this is true.

I was thinking about perhaps turning the date simulation into it's own game someday. An idea for the backburner.

I still haven't had any great ideas to get behind, so I tried to work on at least SOMETHING in the meantime. I recently put down some people in the town, and gave them some interesting things to say.

What I want to achieve is making the townsfolk say something different whenever you achieve something different. Beat DK on Normal, get a response. Beat it on Hard, get a new response.

I had a little fun with this idea with a particular person. There's a lady in the Pizza Palace who will tell you ____ is the best pizza. And her response changes every time you get certain new items. It's a fun little diversion, if nothing else.

Unfortunately, development hasn't gone anywhere in a while.

Donkey Kong got completed, but since then it's been a drag. I mentioned earlier in a post that my motivation was drawn upon the arcades themselves, which I frequently visited. Well, now I find myself bored with them, and so I haven't had any motivation to draw upon in some time.

So here's what I'm thinking: I could either scrap the project and submit what I've already done, or keep going with it. If I decide to scrap it, I would be submitting Donkey Kong as a standalone title, and either begin working on a different title or take a haitus. Or, just stick with it and wait for that motivation to come back. Problem is, who knows what will happen there. I could get motivated, or it could be on hold forever.

Oh well. It's late, I'm wide awake, and somewhat depressed. I need some sleep.

Well, you could release Donkey Kong as a stand alone title, and if you get your motivation back, you can add it to the compilation of arcade games.

In addition to the "Midway Arcade Treasures" series, you should get...

+ Namco Museum
+ Namco Museum 50th Anniversary
+ Atari Anthology (has Atari arcade games)
+ Taito Legends

Maybe you'll find an arcade game that you love as much as Donkey Kong.

I've been playing a lot of those arcade collections lately on my PSP.

+ Namco Museum Battle Collection
+ Taito Legends Power Up
+ Midway Arcade Treasures
+ Atari Classics Evolved

Also got a Namco Plug-N-Play.

It'd be great if you could do Centipede or Pac-Man.

So, there's been no progress or updates here for a good while. Here's what I'm thinking. Arcadia Mania, for it's ambitions and goals I set for it, requires a large amount of creative force behind it, something I realize I can't supply it with. I figure the best idea would be to scrap the project and release what has been done, and release them as stand-alone titles.

The first game will be the garbage game, Find the Needle in the Haystack. Ten needles in roughly 30 of so haystacks. It's a garbage game. Whoop-de-cluckin do. Since I only need to port the game over, this will likely be released first.

The second game is the non-garbage game Donkey Kong, a RPGM1 port of the original arcade classic, Donkey Kong. This title will take some time to rebuild and modify from it's original code. I also plan on uploading custom sprites if possible.

So, at the very least, the community will get something.

And lo and behold! Find the Needle in the Haystack is complete!

It took about an hour and a half (maybe two hours) to fix everything. First, I made a copy of Arcadia Mania up to this point and am saving it to my computer, if I ever need to refer to the original code source.

I started out by deleting a lot of old code. Since the title is no longer attached to Arcadia Mania, things like tokens and warps to the arcade were deleted. From there I fiddled with whatever code was left (the code that made the game work), and modified a couple things to make it complete. For example, a haystack changes a different color when you find the needle in it. That way you know there's nothing left to be found in there. I also included various noises after you find needles, just for fun.

What threw me for a loop was that some of the code didn't work. This is because when I completed the game 5-6 months ago, I never playtested the entire game. So playtesting ensued and bugs were fixed to make the game beatable.

And when it was all done, I deleted everything other than Needle off the memory card. This is so the game loads at it's fastest, without having extra code to decipher. So when I gave the game it's final playtest, it loaded very quickly without any hassles and worked like a charm.

So the game is 100% completed, and work now progresses on refitting Donkey Kong into it's own game. So when can you play Find the Needle in the Haystack? I haven't decided yet. I plan on making an ad or two for the game to try and advertise the game, and since I'm such a sucker for release dates, I'll likely give FtNitH one.

More news will be reported as it develops.