I originally created Victor Victorious on an old but immensely powerful laptop. Try to imagine the monolith from 2001: Some Space Wank but covered in confrontational stickers and with selotape holding bits of the casing together. Anyway, I recently downloaded it onto a smaller, newer laptop that I use for working in cafes and suchlike, and tried to load it. And boy howdy did it ever take it’s sweet time to load. Even when the loading progress bar had finished, the first screen of the game sat on my monitor for several minutes while software crammed itself into gear.
The point is that Victor Victorious is kind of a big, complicated game considering that it was made in Game Maker 8.0, and that means it needs a little while to load if your computer doesn’t happen to have the raw power of a tactical thermonuclear device. Sadly, there’s not a lot I can do about it. Game Maker 8.0 loads basically the entire game in one go at the start, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it load just a few levels at a time, which might conceivably fix the issue.
So, if there’s nothing I can do about it, why am I making a blog post about it? Because the game did eventually load and run smoothly, that’s why. If you’ve downloaded Victor Victorious, I want to let you know that no, your game hasn’t crashed straight after loading. It will run properly after a few minutes, and once it starts running properly, it will continue to do so. So don’t hit the ‘esc’ button just because it doesn’t seem to be doing anything at first.
My sincerest apologies that it’s taken me this long to realise there was an issue- I’ll take into account the loading time issues for future development projects. For Victor, the solution is just to wait for your newly-downloaded F—-ING MASSIVE (in terms of file size) game to load. Sorry ‘bout that.