A second game announcement? Why not! Well, about a month ago, I got really bored one night and was trying to reacquaint myself with keyboard controls, when I had a revelation: Creating the movement for Vertical-Scrolling Spaceship Shooters is damn easy. With that I created the basic template for a spaceship shooter entirely out of squares and had a blast doing it, working well into the night (You can see the result of that night here: http://neveronti.me/action.html). The next day a good friend of mine (http://multihawk.newgrounds.com/) showed me the result of his first foray into pixel art, and I couldn't help but get inspired and promptly asked him to be the artist of the game I was going to make based on the tech demo I mocked up. This collaboration came at a bad time, as we are both UC students and midterms were about to smack both of us in the face. Thus, development was slow for the past two weeks. Finals are over now though, and work has resumed at a breakneck pace. Probably one of the biggest learning experiences for of making this game for me has been sound. An Action Game just isn't and Action Game without sounds, so from the very beginning figuring out how to do sounds was a top priority. As using default javascript for sounds is the equivalent of trying to play the Moonlight Sonata with a rubber band and a popsicle stick, I opted to use the Sound.js library to add sounds into the game, with pretty good results so far. Another thing that I wanted to make sure to do this time around was add a decent options menu. So far work on that has been going pretty smoothly, so far it has options to mute the music as well as sound effects, a framecounter, as well as an option to double the framerate, a feature rarely seen in browser games. So far we're looking at releasing it around March or April depending on how much our professors want us to work.

As for the second part of the post, I encountered some simply strange bugs when trying to upload early versions of Assault Fury on to Newgrounds project system. One of the first thing I realized is that it generally doesn't work well with having folders. When I decided to use Sound.js, I wanted to make sure that the game would still work offline (for nostalgia visits way down the road) and didn't want to depend on their CDN, so I put all of the necessary files in a folder and was using that for a while, but for some reason the game had trouble finding them on Newgrounds server, so instead of figuring out a way to fix that I just put them into the main folder, solving all problems. Another, more frustrating bug I encountered was that even though I was constantly updating the game, the changes never seemed to get past after a few updates no matter how many times I emptied my cache or even switched computers. At first I thought it was just a problem with how the project system handled the game. After a while I even resorted to linking the version I had running on my server to the newgrounds version through an iframe (something that worked, but would have my bandwidth charges fly though the roof), but then I realized that no changes, however minor, were going through. Realizing this, I decided to start a new project and lo and behold it worked exactly as planned. Apparently after updating the game file a few times, the project system just stops updating the file. It really is a small thing, but that didn't stop it from annoying the hell out of me. 

All that said, if you want to see the current version of Assault Fury, you can find it at http://www.neveronti.me/Assault_Fury/Assault_Fury.html (Arrow keys to move, Z to shoot, SHIFT for slomo and X for bomb). Due note that many art assets are missing (I never can completely forget about my standard rectangle bullets) and all of the sounds and music are subject to change. Also only Survival mode is in as of yet, so don't bother going into the campaign mode yet. Also, you may be asking about what ever happened to that crappy RPG I was talking about earlier, well I haven't really worked on it too much, but if you want to play it you can find it at http://www.neveronti.me/Grinder/web-export/grinder.html (WSAD to move around the menu. SPACE to select)