JamesGecko

My Ludum Dare 18 entry is complete. Grab it here and the (public domain) Game Maker source here. The result is better than I expected, but not amazing. But hey, for about fifteen hours of work in my first 48 hour competition, it’s not bad. I suppose I should write up a post mordum. What went well For my first competition, I’m happy that I even came out with a finished game.

The news is all over the place by now; the brilliance that was Google Wave is coming to an end. I have mixed feeling about this. Wave was absolutely fantastic for collaborating on projects. It was a huge hit with my campus ACM group; we used it to outline presentations, plan the setup for a new computer lab, as a makeshift IRC channel, and on a software engineering project or two.

On my Intel X3100 GMA, it’s still unplayable. I hit peaks of 20 FPS. The fog and particle systems really seem to bog things down, dropping the FPS to 3 areas like on the first level. Unfortunately, you can’t disable them; Valve has them marked as “cheats.” Never mind completely disabling the lighting system would be much more of a cheat in this game, and you can already do that.