Happy month of February Interwebs,
Time for another whirlwind rundown.
So the christmas break happened. I was going to make a cool game to show off to all those new faces. That game was not the one I set out to make, which fell victim to a combination of Game Maker being ill suited to complex tasks, and me being too lazy and easily distracted to be terribly productive while on vacation. I also played a lot of Catan. I'll give that project another chance later in flash or objective C or something.
A game did indeed get made though. On the off chance that crazy number worshipers, history channel executives, and the Mayans were right against all conceivable odds, I figured I might as well make a game for the occasion and die as I intended to live. That game was a tiny platformer in which you run around a minimally designed, meteor and lava ridden hell scape to reach the rocket ship that will take you to salvation amongst the stars. I made it in about 7 hours and it came out pretty well actually managing to have a difficulty curve and a reasonable margin for player error without becoming easy. I'll have it up on this blog in before the month is over (hopefully).
As for the game a month challenge, that goes better. I'm taking some artistic liberties and measuring my success by wether I have 12 functioning prototypes by the end of the year, freeing myself up to develop projects over multiple months in parallel. But January's prototype, "Heart the Beats" is functional and was my project from the Global Game Jam. It is also part of my contribution to UVic Gamedev's "Verb the Noun" project, a club minigame collection which I am also helping to build the infrastructure for. Verb the Noun is all in Flash using the Flashpunk libraries. If you think you're ready to move past Game Maker, Flashpunk is an ideal second step and since you are free (and even encouraged) to alter the engine for your own purposes, it's a great way to experiment and understand how a game engine works, and what it needs to do. Whenever we get VtN online, I will be sure to post a link. Hopefully Beats will get some polishing before then.
February itself is kind of a toss up. All through this month, I have been working on an educational game for NEPTUNE Canada as a software engineering design project (it's a course at UVic and that's all you really need to know). It is almost playable, but I don't see it making it for the end of the month. If it isn't ready by March, I'll be in serious academic trouble, so it will definitely be ready by then. The more likely candidate is a primitive version of Stratagem.
Yes I have at last blown the dust off the project and started coding again. This time the primary concern is the front end, the HTML5/javascript project that I have studied, bu not seriously pursued up till this point. I just committed the first version of the game loop and while so far it's just the render function, it is using a bare framework of the game data to which objects can be added and removed, so the skeleton is there. I've been spurred into production again by the Tsukino Con Game Jam, and since only the first day has passed, there will be more to come. I'm trying to make the front end rather than start a new project and with a little luck, I can get it to work with the backend by the end of the weekend.
There, you are now up to speed. And with that, I'm going to sleep, because it's 2:30 in the morning and I have lot to do tomorrow.
