Last year, as some might have seen, we appeared at Gamescom with several of our games. It was an absolutely incredible experience (click here for a roundup post and pictures) and we hoped we’d get an encore at some point. Turns out we didn’t have to wait that long.

Now, what we did last year was awesome, but we thought we could perhaps try doing something radical. Think ninja skateboard robots voiced by Sean Connery fighting Mechagodzilla dancing to Thriller-radical. Except less lasers and chaos and destruction. And more computers.

Being part of the retro games exhibit, we of course need to stick to retro games or games that have graphics bad enough to deceive everyone. But apart from that, for now, there’s no leash. Of course there will be technical, financial and spatial limitations, but for now we have to let our minds roam thinking of the radicalest thing we could do. Like perhaps 8 player Mari0 played superwidescreen on a wall using 3 projectors.

This is where you come in, stranger. If you have some cool idea of what we could pull off that won’t get us arrested, send us an email, facebook or disqus comment, tweet, whatever you whippersnappers use these days. We’ll read every single one.

We figured we might as well post about it. Mari0 SE, that is.

As you might know, it never had a release date (apart from extremely rough guesses which were completely useless), and for a very good reason: it’s a hobby. You pick your own hours and your own projects. Perhaps a bad excuse, but nobody wants to spend their free time working on something as if it’s a job, especially if they end up finding it tedious.

My point is that Mari0 SE is currently on hiatus. No, that doesn’t mean it will never be updated again. No, that doesn’t mean that online multiplayer isn’t coming out. It will come out and it will be released even before Duke Nukem Forever Half-Life 2: Episode 3. I explained why we can’t release it in its current state over here.

That does mean something else: More work on smaller experimental projects, bite sized games like Ortho Robot. Speaking of which, did you ever try it out? We always felt like it got less attention than it deserved and it’s arguably the most polished of our games. If you haven’t, perhaps give it a try.

I can’t imagine everyone will be happy with the news, but a game you forced yourself to make is guaranteed to be less fun than one you also had fun making. It’s a given. Don’t stab yourself over it.

Adding new editor features always adds the challenge of making it easy to understand and access for the user. There has to be a good balance between number of clicks required, amount of information displayed and prioritization of features.

You may know the way map resizing is handled in Mari0 1.6, where there’s two arrows and an “apply” button.

This is terrible on so many levels and I still feel bad.

For Mari0: SE, which features vertical scrolling, I had to change the whole thing around anyway to allow changing of the height, so I went and made it not bad while I was at it.

It’s now accessed via a button at the old position and looks like this:

It shows a preview of what the map will look like after the resize and you can change the size of the map on the right as well as the left side. I might change the width/height display a little bit but I’m happy with the rest.

Exams over and I have nothing to do for a week, so I would usually promise a lot of updates but that never goes well, but I’ll try anyway!

Here’s some notice system I quickly wrote for chat and other messages. In the gif I made it print a random message with a random color and a random duration.

Exactly 1 year ago (give or take a few hours), Mari0 has been released publicly for the first time - we almost completely forgot about it. Time really flies, doesn’t it?

There really isn’t much to say, so here’s some numbers: Mari0 so far clocked in 1,696,644 downloads (not counting third party websites), with Windows having 88.88%, OSX 6.09%, Linux 3.18% and source 1.85% of the downloads. It is played (details here) on average over 10 thousand times every single day.

That should be enough to satisfy your number hunger. We hope you’ve had fun playing and creating with Mari0 and will continue to in the future!

So you played Not Pacman and perhaps you thought “Hm, you know what this game needs? A level editor that allows massive levels, customizable everything and also sparkly powerup for pacman.”
Well, now there’s a mod for that.

Not Pacman ++

A Not Pacman mod by Felix Dumenil adds that and much more. If you’d like to give it a try, see the forum thread for download and run instructions as well as the full changelog.

Someone on the forums recently suggested a gamemode where the portals are made for you. Well since SE has portal placing entities and region triggers, you can already do this.

I wrote a quick overview of links so you can roughly see how it’s made up:

Mari0 SE, the upcoming update that adds online play to the game, does not have a release date, and that’s simply because it isn’t done.

To be more precise, the online mode is proving to be tougher than expected and we can’t tell when it’s going to be done. Since this is the most anticipated feature, I do not wish to release the game without it. If something like the overworked Portal campaign wouldn’t be done yet, I could release the game without and then update again when that is done, but it’s simply not an option for me with online play.

I hope you understand and thank you for your patience! It’s your constant positive feedback that keeps us going.

I did what I was threatening to do yesterday and added a second world on the “right” side of the cubes. The player collides with both worlds now.

Because it’s really confusing, I added a little 2D map showing the combination of the two worlds. It makes it a little more obvious what is going on.

Ever since I updated the Ortho Robot engine to support textured cubes, I always had this idea of playing a 2D platformer on the sides of the cubes where you can move the cubes around. Well last night I decided to make a prototype like that and you can see the results below!

I’m thinking of creating a second 2D world on the right side of the cubes so that changing the cubes will affect both worlds. Not sure what will become of this or if I even want to punish myself by making actual levels for that.

Before Not Pacman’s release, our best time was just above 40 seconds and the best time at Gamescom was 39.4, but RabidJellyfish has put that all to shame with his impressive time of 30.9 seconds.

Are you a bad enough dude to roll even faster? Tell us your best time!

Finally! After over 2 years of sitting around on our hard drive, Not Pacman is ready to be played.

The main problem with the game were lack of a working control scheme, which we managed to solve with the standard controls where the player moves his mouse left and right to rotate the field.

Find the game over here and a video of the game below.

After a lot of work, we’ll finally be releasing Not Pacman later today. You know, that game that has been in the sidebar for one and a half years? Yeah.

That’s pretty much all I have to say. So, prepare to Not play Pacman later.

You know these boring black screens before each level which tell you how many lives you have left?
Well mappacks can customize these on a map basis now. There was a thread on the forums suggesting that and it sounded like a good idea. Also some forum members (hans1998 and idiot9.0) made a few nice mockups of levelscreens which you can find here:

Oh and, happy new year everyone!