News

At this point, I'm planning to work on an RPG about angels, rather than about rabbits. RBI will most likely not be completed. My previous plan was to program RBI and then use a modified version of the same engine for a video game about angels. I've decided to program 2 games about angels instead, with the first one being a much simpler freeware game.

I may post some kind of rule system for angelic RPGs. I've already determined that I'm going to use a dice system vaguely similar to that used in the World of Darkness for determining the success or failure of skills. For any skill attempt, you roll a number of 6-sided dice dependant upon your ability with that skill. Harder tasks will require more successes. A system that simple should be appropriate for pen-and-paper play as well as video game play.

I've even computed the probability of getting a particular number of successes with a particular number of dice:

I added three games today: Cute Knight Kingdom, Date Warp, and Tasty Planet. I would have added Tasty Planet sooner if I realized I could sell it as an affiliate.

I also deleted all references to Mac OS X in the system requirements for games. We aren't selling Mac games any more, so there's no point in mentioning the Mac versions of games. I fixed the top of Cute Knight Deluxe's page and reassigned it to the Adventure genre, which seems to be a more common designation for it than RPG.

Finally, I added a review for the game "My Life Story". It even includes YouTube videos that I made myself (since there weren't any already made). The videos aren't as high quality as I would like, but it's better than nothing.

RBI's still languishing. I haven't gotten alot of coding done, but, at least, I have a much better idea of what the game will be like when it's finished.

I've added an Overlord 2 Review to the articles page. I should probably add some screenshots, but I don't know when I'll get around to it. I may review some other games in the future.

I also added a section on the end that links to the only Wikipedia article I've written that hasn't been deleted. At this point, it's not a particularly fleshed out article, but it's more than was there before. Perhaps I'll write some more Wikipedia articles in the future. Don't take any Wikipedia pages I write too seriously though; since anyone can edit Wikipedia, someone might change anything I post there.

Orbital Bricks and Space Junk have both been updated to a new version.

The thumbnails for the screenshots and the logos for Nanotron and Lucky's Puzzle Carnival are all bigger now. Also, a couple of minor improvements were made elsewhere to the website. It's not a big update, but I wanted to make sure it was recorded somewhere.

I'm not going to be bringing my Mac with me when I move, so I won't be making Mac versions of any more of our games. As a result, we're no longer going to offer any Mac games for sale on this site. Frankly, including Mac games did nothing except clutter up the website.

Also, the following games have been completely removed from the site: Battle Brain, Coin Planets, Coin World, all 3 Demon Star games, and Troll. At some point in the future these games will be replaced by others that more strongly complement the Orbital Cows Software game portfolio.

Rael: The Redemption and Kiki's Candyland have both been removed from the site. If they are ever worked it, it will be at some point in the distant future. The front page looks a little better on widescreen monitors.

Additionally, I added a cool game to the website: Eschalon Book I.

Lucky's Puzzle Carnival's price has been reduced to $9.99 permanently.

The company is being renamed from "Orbital Cows Entertainment" to "Orbital Cows Software". This change will likely have no effect upon anyone. A change is being made to the business structure, primarily to reduce paperwork during tax time.

RBI still doesn't have a playable demo yet. It will probably be quite some time before it does.

I updated the article Time for A Modern World. There's a new table, a minor correction, and some improvements to the text. Some unnecessary text is deleted. Mostly, the article is just organized a little bit better.

I've also updated the RBI design document and storyline quite often. Both documents are still in a very rough form, but they at least resemble what RBI will be like more than the did before.

Speaking about RBI, progress is still relatively slow. I seem to spend what little time I have to work on it rearranging code I've already written for the map editor. I don't think Eduardo's doing an artwork for it all right now, but there's not much point giving the state the game is in right now. It does, however, seem like I'm starting to pick up a little bit of momentum at taking care of the backlog of refactoring.

Oddly, I seem to spend time refactoring code that isn't of immediate interest than I do actually coding the game. This may be a bad thing, but I am accumulating quite a large library of reusable code.

Quite some time ago, I wrote an article that I forgot to post. Today, I updated it and realized I had never posted it. Without further ado, Algorithm Directory is now available.

I added the game Kudos Rock Legend and removed a number of free games that simply weren't that good. I also combined some of the game genres so that there are fewer buttons in the menu, and the links page only contains games now. The special bundle deal is mentioned in the descriptions for the games, rather than on the front page.

There's no demo for Rabbit Bureau of Investigation as of yet.

I've replaced our old forum with a new updated forum [Edit: Link Deleted.] because the old one was buried in spam to the point where I couldn't do anything about it. It's my hope that this new forum won't have this problem. Unfortunately, the user data and posts from the old forum could not be saved.

Anyone who signs up for the new forum before the end of the year will be private messaged a discount count for 50% off our newest game: Lucky's Puzzle Carnival.

Ok, this is a minor one. I've updated the article World of Spells significantly, adding more spell effects, summaries for the spell effect types, and reorganizing a few things.

I also modified World of Magic slightly.

The impetus to these changes was adding these articles to the Simugraph Library, a wiki about developing video game RPGs. Comments about these articles caused me to update them.

Bugs and more bugs. I've been buried in bugs the entire time I've been working on the game. I've spent more time fixing the bugs than I have writing new code.

The demo for RBI (Rabbit Bureau of Investigation) is not being made publicly available as of yet. Progress is being made, but more for the map editor than for the actual game. In fact, progress is only being made on the map editor at this time, though that's about to change.

I just posted this to remind everyone that we're still alive. RBI is going to take a long time to develop, and no release date has been set yet. While nothing is finalized yet, we have a fairly good idea of what the game will look like upon completion.

Two new games have been added: Science Girls and Space Junk (a freeware Orbital Cows original). Also, Orbital Bricks (another freeware Orbital Cows original) has been updated to version 2.0.

New logos have been uploaded for Lucky's Puzzle Carnival and Nanotron.

I restored the Rael banner and the mention of Rael: The Redemption on the Upcoming page. Also, I made a note of a bug in the freeware Rabbits game on the obscure page of this site upon which it appears. The article Time Cost of Walking Vs. Driving (2009) has been clarified slightly.

Lucky's Puzzle Carnival has been updated to version 1.03. The Orbital Cows 2009 Bundle has been updated with the same version of LPC. This update only changes 2 things: it updates some of the interface artwork and clarifies the General Instructions slightly.

Also, the recipes have been removed from the website due to low interest. Later, more relevant articles will be added to the articles page.