Super-Secret Game: Revealed

As tweeted earlier today by @thezombiecow, the super-secret AGS -> XAGE conversion project is Time Gentlemen, Please. Obviously this is massively exciting for a number of reasons:

• TGP won Best Game, Best Gameplay, Best Dialogue and others in the 2009 AGS Awards.
• TGP is the first (and only?) AGS game to be released on Steam.
• TGP has received a decent amount of mainstream attention, and has a metacritic rating of 84.
• TGP features Nazi Dinosaurs.

More accurately, I'm actually working on the demo as a feasibility study and it's going pretty well. The ultimate aim is to get the full game onto Xbox Live. It's a huge amount off work but I'm confident it can be done.

Zombie Cow Studios are currently venturing into the third dimension, with some hand-holding from Channel4, in Privates (read the eye-opening press release here).

Oceanspirit Dennis:

I've actively been working on a few others things that have helped development across the board (finicky things like handling GUI transparency). One is Ben304's mock RPG, Oceanspirit Dennis: Scourge of the Underworld. It's essentially a satire on JRPGs (at least, that was my interpretation). It has since spawned a number of increasingly peculiar sequels, all of which are brain-achingly canon.

An interesting diversion and XAGE's second full conversion - play it online here: http://www.clarvalon.com/XAGE/games/ODennis/

To quote the author: 'Don't play if you're looking for a rewarding experience!'

Ben has also recently open-sourced '!', his well-received comic-panelled, robotic rap-athon. You should all follow @ben_304 and ask him when he finds time to sleep.

Other Stuff:

• Expressions are supported, in that XAGE now copes with things like cChar.Walk(cChar.X + 10, cChar.Y - 20).
• RenderTargets are no longer used when no scaling is required, improving performance in certain instances.
• Silverlight now uses png textures instead of xnb, improving load times and further reducing the xap filesize.
• Internal Dictionaries are generated in-game during initialisation. This means that, if a room has 300 objects, the engine no longer needs to loop through 299 to retrieve the last object when it is referenced via scripting. Certain methods that were previously using 4-5% of all processor time now use a tiny fraction.