calamity annie rides back into town! what’s new? the game is smaller and runs more quickly! if you’ve been having trouble running annie on your machine, try this new version!

why is it faster? well, game maker has terrible scaling, and when i first tried displaying annie’s sprites at four times larger than their normal size – the size they appear in the game – they came out blurry and ugly. being the brash young firebrand i was (and still am on a good day), i simply resized all the graphics and multiplied all the numbers by four. packing so many images in the game at four times their original size, though, made for a bloated, memory-hungry game.

recently i stumbled across a script created by the marvelous chevyray that produces crisp screen-scaling in game maker. thanks to this script i’ve been able to reinsert all the game’s sprites at their original size, making the game less of a memory hog. to compensate, i’ve added this little piggy – from my forthcoming two-player game of the same name – as the tenth extra character. i’ve also reduced the rate at which extra characters are encountered, now that they comprise a full quarter of the game’s cast.

if you’ve donated, you’ve already got her: just download the new version here or at the original post (the link is the same, but the file’s different). if you havn’t donated, click the button below and send me a dollar or more to receive (via email) a password that will unlock ten special guest hombres for you to show down in the old west.

how about some press? well, gregory weir, in the inaugural episode of his column, “the interactive palette,” writes about the way in which the story develops over repeated playthroughs of the game. at the opposite corner of the critical spectrum, allen tan is so oblivious to the existence of dyke courtship that he invents a male character to be the recipient of the mysterious city woman’s flirtations.

one more time: download version 3 of calamity annie here or at the original post.