Stabyourself.net
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.