Big News, Amigos!
Friends, as I write this update, I have good news for you all! This project has been sitting on a slow burner for me, due to the aforementioned life events that have transpired, which have caused me to step away from my development endeavors several times, and for longer periods of time than I would have liked, and to say this has been frustrating, would be an understatement! Plus, I was promoted at my job and had to learn the ropes of my new position, and then my finances took a turn for the worst, due to poor decisions I had made in the past, which I am currently still working to reverse! Anyway, I finally broke through the glass ceiling again, and it was all thanks to AI! The fatal bug that plagued my development since 2014 was finally fixed in the newest version of the IDE that I was using! Ever since it was introduced, it proved to be an insurmountable problem that none could solve, save for a select few, who had their own motives in wanting my project to fail, which I couldn’t entrust with my work, due to their ulterior motives.
So for a year, I battled this one issue, until the IDE I used was updated, and my project got caught up in a wave of new technical issues! Unfortunately, I had to turn my attention to other aspects of the game, such as story, world building, and creating DZ Chronicles content, to fill the development gap, which I had to restart more than a few times! So in 2025, I was finally able to re-open up Dark Zeta and create the Overlay Controller system, which in turn reignited my passion to develop DZ even more! The Overlay Controller allowed my game to be playable from phones via browser, hence why it was such a huge breakthrough for me! From that point on, I began to go back to the notebooks I had been using for this project, to finish what I had started, to bring this game to a new era, for a new generation of gamers.
That was quite a daunting task, as the code that I had represented four years of hard work! Would I really have the time to do it all again, only to make a different version of the game? It would have been nice to have those four years to myself again, trust me! Unfortunately, those days are gone, and all I have to spare to do my hobby is about two hours every day. Prior to this, I worked seven days a week at my job, leaving me with little time to relax, much less do my hobbies! So tell me, with my busy work schedule and my need to make money to pay all the bills, how is it even possible for me to make a game?
Well, the answer is simple, really: With the help of AI coding assistants, I can finally express my creativity and ideas for the project, while delegating the tedious and hard work of programming to my favorite coding assistant, Claude! However, I must admit, relearning GameMaker Language and juggling with AI to assist with it has been a huge learning curve for me, as I dive deeper into it! But solving that fatal bug and updating the code to be compatible with the new GameMaker Studio 2 IDE was worth the time invested in pushing forward into it, as it revolutionized my development process. I feel like I have no limits to what I can do now, with my GameMaker skills improving by the day! With that being said, I have made major progress with Claude, and even put some of my own hand made work in for the art and animation of this project!
So without further ado, amigos! DARK ZETA is coming through! Yahoo! Hopefully very soon, so get your popcorn ready, because I’m going to be blowing all of your minds with this new action-adventure RPG engine of mine! So that demo I did back in 2013 (play now) is nothing compared to what I have in store for you all!
Let’s go!
Until next time, amigos!