Well that stinks! Did you see this article over on Shacknews? No? Well @notch of Minecraft fame is working on a sequel to his Ludum Dare game, Minicraft. Normally, I’d just say cool but it just so happens that I was thinking on turning a prototype I’ve been messing around with for a bit now into “action roguelike with crafting and modifiable terrain”. Well, I think I’m still going to see about getting something into a playable state and go from there. Keep your eyes hopefully I’ll update before St. Patrick’s Day.

After an extended break from thinking about torrentzip, it came to my attention that there was an issue with the Windows version. Due to file permissions it was impossible to access files on a drive mounted in Windows with the IFS Driver for Windows. As luck would have it my current development box has several ext3 drives mounted so I grabbed the source (and activated SVN while I was at it) and patched it up. It appears to be compiling and running just fine in Windows – I haven’t test compiled the source in linux… Hopefully there will be no issues.

Download it here: TorrentZip Win32 0.3 RC 2

*update* Missed a small but, huge bug – RC 2 should take care of that.

At work I am tasked with playing a DS for 8 hours a day so you’d think that the last thing I want to do is muck about with it after hours.  Well, you’d be wrong – Portrait Of Ruin is awesome!  However, I’m lagging a bit behind in it – since on New Years Day I received my R4 slot one cart and shortly after that I installed DevKitPro so I could jump on the homebrew bandwagon.  Having a good grasp of C and C++ it hasn’t been too hard to jump in and have simple things work.  Maybe once I’ve done one or two small programs I’ll put something together and bring it to one of the developers at work – maybe I’ll get to convert it for use with an actual Nintendo devkit.  I’m very interested in seeing the differences between the homebrew and developer set up.  That however will have to wait – Dracula is calling me…

• Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming
• Homebrew Nintendo DS Development
• Dev-Scene
• DrunkenCoders

Microsoft has announced that the XNA Game Studio Express public beta is now available from MSDN. So all new devs (and old school devs) got downloaded it and get started on the game you've always wanted to make. This version will only compile for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Once the final build is released developers will be able to purchase a subscription for $99 a year that will give them the ability to compile for the Xbox360.

I've got an idea for a game that I could make. It will feature a hapless blogger wading through press releases and PR sites trying to find something no one else has yet, all while dodging spam and pop ups. Maybe I'll call it blogwars. Heh.

Via TeamXbox::MSDN

*Update* I'm not sure why WordPress keeps butchering this post but hopefully its fixed now.