Hey everyone.

How is everybody? I'm doing okay, I got a job as a lifeguard at the pool on the airforce base I live on, so thats pretty much what I've been doing during the day, but its really not that bad at all, and I get paid $10 an hour (for sitting on my ass all day, thats not bad[grin]).

Well, today I really didn't do anything regarding Angels 20 or my 4E4 project, but I did do something I think is pretty cool. I was sitting at work today, thinking about A20, and I thought that it would be cool if A20 had a mode where 1 player flies the plane, and another player can switch from flak cannon to SAM site to enemy plane and try and stop the player from beating the mission, kind of like the counter-operative mode in Perfect Dark (ahhh memories....). Well, I didn't exactly do what I just described, but I did do the next best thing, and so I present to you:

Angels 20: Flak Defender

I'm not claiming that it's a breakthrough in game design as we know it, but its pretty fun, and I enjoy playing it. It's pretty much my variation of Missile Command, try and stop the bombs from blowing up all the buildings.

The controls are pretty straight forward:

Mouse: moves cursor
Left Click: fires gun
'Q': quits to menu

Anyways, it took me about 2 hours to make, thanks to the A20 basecode, which is alot more useful than I though it would be. The biggest change for this game was that I switched the rendering to SDL so that I could use color keying to make stuff transparent(it's amazing how much laziness affects code design). Well, thats all I did today, let me know what you think of the game, I'm going to put it into the showcase tomorrow.

In other news, Mark the artist finally got an account here at Gamedev, his username is Prinz Eugn(dont ask). And here is the daily(ish) Artist's Update and cool airplane texture:

[artist crap]
Yay! It's Mark! That is correct, I'm back for yet another 1-3 paragraph paragon of
perfection that is the Artist Update. Well it's been a reasonably productive week. I've
finished off the Vietnam Era of airplanes for the multiplayer of A20, which was harder
than I expected. The problems were as follows: North Vietnam only really flew 3 types of
airplanes (Mig-17s, Mig-19s, and Mig-21s), which, for anyone with air warfare
knowledge, would basically suck as an opposing force to the US's airplanes. The
other problem was drawing the F-14, which for some reason is so oddly and subtlety
proportioned as to make drawing at this small scale a real bitch. I overcame these
obstacles by: ignoring the 'Vietnam' aspect, drawing an Su-15 Flagon instead, and giving
up and coming back about 50 times trying to make the goddamn think look right,
respectively. Incidentally, while being pissed off at the F-14, I made several new
camouflage schemes for the partisan, which are displayed in the previous journal entry.
I've also devoted every moment of my Driver's Ed class that's not spent talking to hot
girls (you would be surprised how not-sarcastic that statement was) to working out the
HUD for the multiplayer. The work is conceptual, sketched on notebook paper, but I
think I've made a good blueprint for Thomas to go by. Of course, the final Hud is likely
to change based on actual in-game testing and how much of a weenie Thomas is
programming-wise, but what I came up with seems pretty do-able. In other news, I've
been commissioned to draw the textures for a 3d model of the partisan that will be
featured in movie that a couple of friends that are going to our local college (which
features an excellent Maya program, I understand) are making. The movie has something
to do with airplanes (Thomas actually knows more about it than I do), and will be
submitted is some film festival thing. The only downside is that the textures will be really
hard and time consuming to draw (photo-realistic is what they requested) and will
consequently take time away from Angels 20. Nothing else extreme to report, except that
I have the Star Wars Gangsta Rap stuck in my head. ("I'm yo father, I'm yo father")
Watch it and you will understand.

-Mark the Artist
[/artist crap]

And here is the F14 image Mark was bitching about in his post:



Well, its late here, so I will talk to you guys later.