A Lack Of The Clones [Work In Progress: Dystopia City]

Dystopia City is taking shape: I'll release a beta version soon. I had originally planned the game around the task of growing your population of cloned Citizens to 500 - but while playtesting, as I approached a population of 200 other parts of the game started to break down. As well as the Citizens themselves, who are clones in both the Scratch sense and the literal sense, I also use cloned sprites for my scrolling map, for fires and for some of the effects and menu options. A response from a helpful Scratcher on the forum confirmed my suspicion that the number of cloned sprites Scratch can handle is limited to 301.

Factions of Dystopia City

I've re-weighted the game based around a lower total population. Now working on the various possible endings, and thinking about sound effects and possibly music...

Comments

Snarl And The World Snarls With You [Review: The Snarling]

A film crew set up in a quiet village and start making their zombie movie, to the amusement of the locals - but a series of gory murders, committed during the full moon, draws the interest of the local police. The Snarling was first screened at Horror-On-Sea in 2016 and has been brought back for a new screening in 2018 by popular demand. It's a well written, well produced comedy horror in the vein of Shaun of the Dead - light on gore, although there are some bloody moments, and heavy on jokes. The script features many colourful and funny characters amongst the film crew, the locals and the police - the fool archetype recurs in all three groups and there's a constant stream of jokes based on misunderstandings that is just to my taste. There are also plenty of visual gags including some extremely witty editing choices. Laurence Saunders stands out for playing two very different comedy characters - Greg, the male diva actor, and Les, the village fool who happens to be his doppelga...

Meet The Parents [Review: Get Out]

Photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is travelling with his girlfriend Rose (Alison Williams) to meet her parents for the first time, and is anxious about how they will react to an interracial relationship. On arrival he is greeted warmly and his fears appear groundless - but the parents have their own eccentricities, and the more he gets to know the Armitage family, the more he becomes convinced that there is something strange and sinister afoot at their household. Get Out is a well-received horror movie from 2017, directed by Jordan Peele. It has won several awards including the Oscar for best screenplay - and well deserved. This is a clever film. The theme of racial intolerance and stereotyping is explored intelligently to play all sorts of psychological games with the audience, while subtle clues are incepted to pave the way for a horror twist in the final act. The movie opens with a subversion of a stereotype - a black person becoming increasingly nervous as he walks through a whi...

BASICally speaking

A long time ago, before blogging was a thing, the Sci-Fi Gene has fond memories of learning to program on an early home computer, the BBC Model B. My efforts were written mainly in BASIC IV, with only a few very minor excursions into machine code. They were stored on C90 cassettes and later on 5" floppy disks - buying the double-sided disk drive was a major life event. Most of my games and other programming experiments would be of interest only to myself. However one or two made it to the pages of user magazines and their monthly giveaway disks, and a few appeared on public domain lists. I was recently surprised to find that some of these games have been preserved at the Complete BBC Games Archive here - where they are playable online! I present the games here not because they're particularly good - they're not, they're basic, derivative and barely playable - but because they're part of my journey and experience of the digital world, and because as a geeky teenage...

Thenessgroup

Search This Blog