Holy crap, it’s been almost a year since I last blogged! Maybe I’m just swept up in pre-E3 excitement, maybe I’m just punch drunk from watching the entire Ubisoft press conference, maybe I’m procrastinating about working on my game… regardless, I decided it’s time to dust off the old blog and start writing again. Like 5 minutes ago. So let’s do this!
First off, uh the last year, right. I’ve been busy. Busy making games, but for a living now. Seriously, it takes up all my time, so much that I haven’t any of my indie stuff in over a year now. Yes, I’m going to pretend like that is the reason for my mountain of unfinished prototypes and keep on writing. The important thing to know is that over the last year I’ve kept up the good fight and actually become even better and making said prototypes. Prototypes that ultimately go nowhere after a week or three, but playable nonetheless. I’ve leaked a few out to friends and have always received positive feedback, but for one reason or another, nothing has really stuck. Same old story I suppose, but at this point in my life and career, I just kind of roll with it. If nothing else, it’s more practice for when I actually get my stuff together.
And that leads us back to here, my once defunct blog. I’ll try, once again, to keep this thing updated. Post a bit about my development struggles and maybe a tad about games in general, both big and small. So for now, enjoy this little tease and my awesome default Wordpress template.
So, it’s been awhile now. I recently started a new job which has been keeping me very, very busy, but in a good way. Well, in a great way actually. Nevertheless, things will remain pretty slow here at least for another month or so. However, with a new TIGSource compo looming on the horizon, I may be able to set aside a few late hours here and there and try to put together a new game. Unfortunately, the last one really never progressed much beyond the few screens I posted. It’s still a really solid concept, however, the controls kinda bug me and probably are what’s keeping me from returning to it. Well, that and the whole zero time thing :) The compos are a good way to stay focused and motivated during busy times, so it’s something I’m looking forward to for the rest of the busy summer. Towards the end of the year, work will ease up to some extent and I’ll probably have more mental energy to jump on to the some of the larger projects I’ve either started or been prototyping over the last 12 months or so.
Anyway, keep your eyes peeled to the RSS feed in the meantime and hopefully I’ll have something to show soon enough. Also, I closed comments on my ERH post, the signal to noise ratio from our spamming friends was just getting out of hand.
Nothing much to report, as I mentioned before I’m still trying to make up for lost time on other pressing matters right now. I’m hoping in about a week I’ll have something significant to report, as I’ve been tossing around a few ideas and working on some prototypes in my very limited spare time.
Over the weekend my daughter was kinda acting up and it was really hot outside, so I was looking for things to do to calm her down. I remembered in the past that she really dug watching me play the NES so I hooked it back up (not sure how it got unhooked…) and fired up a few games. She sat transfixed with Zelda but then she started rummaging through the carts (she plays with them like blocks) and picking stuff for me to play in increments of 1-5 minutes. I had to rush through some of my better titles until she finally settled on something she really liked: Karate Champ. If you’ve never had the distinct displeasure of playing this little gem, I wholeheartedly encourage you to continue down whatever path you’ve chosen in life that has kept you away from its existence. I don’t like to rail too much on games, knowing first hand how difficult they are to make. Especially with older titles, the hardware and technology restrictions were incredible and it’s a miracle that people were able to create some of the greatest games under such adverse conditions. However, very little of that applies to Karate Champ. There’s plenty of crappy games out there, but it’s torture being forced to settle on such a lackluster port when so many classic games are just within arm’s reach. However, The Taskmaster would have nothing of it, as my daughter made it clear that Karate Champ was the game to be played that afternoon.
Point.
So not too much to report as of late, I’m currently wrapped up in 3 projects (aside from my game) leaving no time for development (nor sleep for that matter). 2 of the 3 should be complete by Sunday and the last is a long term project, so hopefully a window will reopen for me to dig back into this networking code.
After many failed and half-failed attempts to get the code working over the internet, I’m back at square one I’m afraid. I managed to get one-way network traffic to work, but haven’t been able to nail down the problem that is keeping outgoing packets from being sent. I have a different codebase I started to develop that I think will rectify the problem, but it will take me a moment to get back up to speed from where I was a week ago. In principal, this stuff should be working, so I can only assume I’m overlooking or not fully understanding the implementation. In other words, I am my own worst enemy :)
That seems to happen a lot.
No matter how hard I try, I always seem to hit a wall. I’ve stopped development on Zero at this time for a multitude of reasons, but the main factor, the same problem that always arises once I get knee deep in a game’s development, is that at the current pace I will never complete the game. Sure, I could tack together a few more levels and call it a release, but I’m enough of an art snob that doing so would make me hate myself and my creation.
There’s a sweet spot, one I’m yet to find of course, but with every false start I come closer to realizing its location. The combination of time, attention span, originality, and ultimately health severely narrows my options in what kind of game I’m capable of producing right now. I hope that I one day will be able to crank out that epic I’ve concocted in my head and sketched out on paper, but the harsh reality of it all is right now is not that time and one’s first game is not the right place.
So here we are back at square one. I joked with a friend of mine the other day, saying despite all my many killed projects, the positive I take away from it all is I’m really good at prototyping now. So when a new idea strikes, I can usually jump into it with both feet. That being said, I have to continually audit myself and try to keep perspective on what I want to create. The somewhat sad thing is, being an artist is probably the biggest hindrance I have at this point. I’m cool with cobbling together code with duct tape and spit but when I get to the art tasks, anything but perfection is unacceptable. Because I wouldn’t be a stupid artist if I didn’t take my work personally and a direct reflection of myself, right? And as such, I can never seem to get into making game art. How ironic…
This is all a learning process, albeit a bit more grueling than it should be. Nevertheless, I start again undaunted. I’m not going to make any premature precognitions of this being the one or anything of that nature. I really like the idea I came up with, it’s a bit of old and new fused together. The scope is narrow so hopefully that will keep things streamlined.
We’ll see.
And stop calling me Shirley.
Things are still moving at an agonizingly slow pace. Last night was actually the first game dev I’ve done in the last 4 or 5 days and it only lasted an hour. Rest assured, my 3 fans, games are still being made. It may not be until July before I can resume my normal speed, but I’m going to try and wrestle away at least one hour a night and devote it solely to the game. This pace is frustrating because I’m actually at a really good spot with the code. Whereas before there were about 50 things wrong with the codebase, now that number is more like 15 or 10. So it’s getting there, just slowly.