The PC version of the game is taking me longer than I expected. I could cite a number of reasons for this, ranging from the not-so-mysterious appearance of Grand Theft Auto V in my 360’s disc drive, to the completely fabricated story of how I was promised umpteen pleasures by a small man playing a golden ukulele if I delayed its release.
But really, the major reasons are twofold. The first is that life has done its usual thing and got in the way a bit, so with a combination of work, study and trying not to be too much of a shut-in it’s not easy to always find the time that I had during the summer. The other, perhaps more pertinent reason is that my ever-curious mind has decided it’d be a lot more fun to muck about with something else.
Still, where time is found, time is spent, and the game’s shaping up nicely. A few kind friends spent a bit of time with some builds and gave me useful information so I’ve been able to iron out a few issues I’d not considered myself, and I’m still experimenting with how the mouse controls should work given most characters only fire in 8 directions, but I think I’ll get something useful together. Two new characters have the ability to aim in any direction and that works quite well, so I’ve also got to make the player somehow aware that these guys are probably the ones to use if you’re using a mouse.
I’ve also been demolishing walls. I’ve never been happy with the brickwork in Pixel Plateau (yeah, the research lab has a name, even though I only mention it once), it was a clear placeholder that never really got the love and attention that was required. As the game doesn’t use tiling for the terrain, a simple solution eluded me during the Xbox development but I’ve got one now that I think looks rather neat, and all I have to do is painstakingly go through a bunch of levels and start moving things around in the terribly clunky editor I wrote all those years ago.
It’ll be done soon, and it’ll still be balls hard. I can guarantee that. I haven’t even finished it on Extreme yet…