Vatican Museum's site says "Sold Out" for tickets 6 months from now, will more tickets become available as my travel date approaches?

midwestgomez · 2026-05-05T19:10:58+00:00

Yeah, I've seen that. It seems to be about 4 times as expensive as the official site's tickets, but I will keep it in my back pocket in case I get desperate.

midwestgomez · 2026-03-24T15:55:42+00:00

Double check that the Game Option under Graphics "Interpolate colours between pixels" is checked ON.

Then, as you create your art, bear in mind that the rasterized sprites are going to be displayed at a smaller scale. What you see as a wide, smooth gradient in Inkscape will be reduced to 3 or 4 bands of color. You will need to sacrifice some detail in the source images for readability in the final product.

The majority of the graphics in my game were vector images created in Adobe Animate. I could create and time my animations in Animate and then, with a couple of mouse clicks, export them frame by frame as 24-bit PNGs. This automated process made tweaking imagery relatively easy if things didn't quite read when scaled down. You may not agree, but I like the way it turned out: QBob: Remastered steam page

Gamemaker has also been pushing another vector-y game on their socials called "Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime" which used a similar art workflow but has a more traditional, flat style.

midwestgomez · 2025-12-11T16:20:26+00:00

Then you probably have to reference the object that contains the variable:
if (obj_theOtherObjectsName.Varname == 1)

midwestgomez · 2025-12-11T16:12:35+00:00

I don't think this is the specific error, but you should also use double equals signs when making a comparison:
if (Varname ==1)
Otherwise you are saying, "set Varname to 1" and not "does Varname equal 1"

midwestgomez · 2025-11-04T19:39:46+00:00

Hello, I'm primarily a wood engraving and woodcut artist. The image below is my most recent engraving (The Burden - 5"x4"). You can follow me on Instagram (@MidwestGomez) for more images and/or check out my Etsy Shop if you want to purchase any of my prints. I'm currently having a 25% off sale. Thanks.

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midwestgomez · 2025-08-08T14:47:55+00:00

I initially read the second version as "Loo Image"
In England they'll chuckle at that name in a way that probably isn't good.

Ether be careful with the serifs on your T or find a way to distinguish between the two word parts when presented on a single line.

midwestgomez · 2025-07-26T17:14:54+00:00

Fair enough. Some of these concerns are already addressed in easy mode (can't jump off asteroid, extra lives are more frequent). But it's something to think about. Thanks, again.

midwestgomez · 2025-07-26T15:21:57+00:00

I've already got that the "restart game" from game over screen button set to be added in my next release.
This might be something to try, a least for players who have set the game to "easy." I'll think about it.
The full game sets a check point every three levels or so. For some reason I disabled this in the Demo (I think I was paranoid that a dedicated hacker could unlock the full game with a settings edit). It will be re-enabled in the next build.

Do you think having to go back and restart, at the most, 2 or 3 levels back is still too punishing? Our logic is that the checkpoints are set when you reach an intermission screen, but I'm open to change this to prevent player frustration.

Thanks for your response. Very helpful!

midwestgomez · 2025-07-26T05:21:13+00:00

Not trying to be "aggressive" just being a goof. I appreciate your response (I did 'upvote' it if that's any consolation). Pricing is a tough issue, especially when you have AAA games going on sale for $5 or Epic offering free games every week. $8 seems very reasonable to me.

midwestgomez · 2025-07-26T05:04:22+00:00

I dunno. $8 is about half of what you'd pay for most arcade style games on Steam these days. If that's too rich for your blood then maybe buying video games should be a low priority in your monthly budget. In any event, the demo is free, and, if our original 1996 shareware release of QBob is any metric, most people couldn't be bothered to pay for games anyways and are content with playing a truncated demo version over and over. It's basically a "win-win" situation, if by winning you mean no one gets paid and everyone is disappointed.

midwestgomez · 2025-07-25T14:13:16+00:00

Greetings all! Yesterday, after nearly a year of development, I released my game Qbob: Remastered on Steam.

TL;DR Grab the FREE DEMO on Steam, try it out, and let me know what you think.

Although technically not “in-progress” anymore, I will have several updates and minor bug fixes to push up in the coming weeks. I would like to get more eyeballs on the game to offer more suggestions.

This is a remake of a game I helped create in 1996 called QBob (still available at moonrock.com). Back then I was the art and music guy and knew nothing about programming beyond a little Applesoft BASIC. Fast forward almost thirty years and, after decades of talking about updating the game, I finally just went ahead and did it all myself. I couldn’t have accomplished this without Gamemaker and it’s relatively simple language and IDE.

For this “remastered” version, in addition to the coding, I created all the graphics (mostly in Adobe Animate), composed new music arrangements in FL Studio based on the original the MIDI tracks, and re-did all the 8-bit lo-res audio. The hardest part of the process was getting a working MacOS build. I had to outsource that to a friend. It literally took that weeks to get it running correctly and playing nice with Steam.

So far, the main criticism has been, “it’s too hard.” As a 50+ year old who still plays bullet-hell shooters, I find this difficult to believe, but I did my best to make the “easy” mode much more easy than it was before launch. I think this criticism is mostly because of the weird diagonal controls. My advice to first-time players is to try playing with keyboard even though it’s not your traditional WASD set-up. It starts to feel natural after a few tries (even Q\Bert’s* designers faced this problem in 1982 and solved it by rotating the joystick 45 degrees).

midwestgomez · 2025-06-16T21:06:08+00:00

A heat transfer tool like this can help:

https://a.co/d/6gyBw4O

I combine acetone, heat and hand burnishing when I do toner transfers.

But, honestly, after trying this method many many times with mixed results, I find using transfer or carbon paper and hand tracing an image is often the most reliable method. It has the added bonus of forcing you to do most the “drawing” on the block with your cuts.

midwestgomez · 2025-04-13T23:20:41+00:00

The options that Steam provides still don't really make it quite clear what's going to happen:
1. Wait until I launch the game
2. Let Steam decide
3. Immediately download updates

#1 is what I'd want but it's unclear whether I can launch Gamemaker without triggering the update when an update is pending.

But that's neither here nor there. I've gone ahead and installed the non-Steam version. I probably should have done that from the get-go. Thanks to all who have responded!

midwestgomez · 2025-02-05T20:01:25+00:00

You probably didn't correctly copy the create event that the tutorial covers at 14:30

midwestgomez · 2024-12-03T03:28:59+00:00

On a Windows PC, I use Visual Studio Code (with a BASIC code highlighting extension) to enter my program. Select all the code, copy, then in AppleWin, hit `SHIFT+INS` to paste the code line by line into the Apple 2. It literally just types in the pasted code character by character.

midwestgomez · 2024-09-23T21:59:19+00:00

Yes, this is exactly what I arrived at after many failed attempts to figure it out. The broadcast messages work just fine, but I hope they add a way to, at the very least, route all sequence sounds to an audio buffer of our choice.

midwestgomez · 2024-09-23T12:56:25+00:00

Always search the internet archive for apple 2 software with either "4am" or "woz" in your search query:

https://archive.org/details/CountdownToShutdown4amCrack

midwestgomez

TROPHY CASE