2138GMT As I dial on to the internet I feel well prepared. I've had a shower to make myself feel alert and a pot of coffee is made - this doesn't finish till 1am in the UK and I want to give it my best. I have a pad and paper and the wife (and cat) are installed in front of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" downstairs, out of trouble. Ah, GD has come up. Just a few minutes until the theme should be announced. Lets waste 5 min on the forums... 2147 Hmm. No announcement yet. Better start pressing F5 every 2 seconds! 2150 THE STARS? Hmm. Stars in the sky or pop stars spring to mind. A cheesy 'comedy' game to assasinate Big Brother housemates? Or a less original but easier game of flying through space... 2200 OK then. I announce my game: "The stars are falling to Earth!" Basically you have to protect a city (I'm thinking a bit like in the QBASIC Gorillas) from falling stars. It's not to stop them getting ruined but to buy the people enough time to evacuate safely. So let's think. Randomly generate buildings on the ground, each building has a certain number of people. If a star hits a building, it and all people it it are destroyed - you lose points. A building empties floor by floor - current population shown by colour or something so you can see which are most important to save. Level ends when all people escaped/dead or if you get destroyed. 2310 So I have a title screen and then a game screen. Buildings are generated and rendered and a sky too. But no game yet! Better get a move on... 0000 I have falling stars which damage buildings, and people escaping. Almost a game! 0040 Wasted a few minutes on what's actually quite a nice particle explosion. A real rush to tie up the end of level tests now... 0105 Done! 0115 Stupid, slow dialup. And stupid USB! Twice I copy the zip onto my USB to check it works on another PC. Twice it disappears off the key. Then webmail takes >5min to upload a 160Kb file. AAAARGGGGGH!

You should donate some cash to get GDNET+. It comes with a nice journal where you can post all kinds of crap without getting this annoying "you should give us money" message :)

Ide get a gd+ membership for the journal but gamedev wont take my money, they only want it through a credit card, not from my paypal account directly.

Eh? I just paid with another subscription with my paypal account yesterday. Worked fine for me :S