Speaking of derivative hacks...

If you've been online and talked to me in the past few weeks, and have asked me what I was doing at the time, you probably know that I am making a video game.

I can't say much about it (it's name isn't settled yet, so it will probably be referred to as "my game" in the indeterminable future), but the main dude looks like a CLAMP protagonist as drawn by Rich Burlew.

I also got a Twitter account (uname: Cromage), and was at a loss for what to do with it besides stalk other people before I realized that I could make updates about my game. It should be playable (albeit shitty) in the next couple months, although all the interesting functionality won't be there. So I'll just put updates there, starting with a bit of rough artwork.

Oh, and do these twitter things support text formatting?

Okay, I lied.

Might as well talk about the game.

I've had the general idea for years, and for a while tried to cobble together a simple 2D version in Java using a few tutorials. But it was very buggy, and then I lost the whole thing, so I scrapped it and started looking for engines.

3D was no good; models are annoying to make and it's even harder to make everything (lighting and suchlike) look good.

The game is a console-type RPG, but RPG Maker provides too much of a framework to a very unimaginative game. I don't just want to be a content whore.

So I use Game Maker instead. It is cheap ($20 for full version), easy to learn (the scripting language is syntactically similar to C), flexible, and most importantly, does not provide anything that you don't want it to. Also its desperately understaffed, terrible website is endearing.