Spooky Progress and More News

So I had originally hoped to have Spooky finished by Halloween. That didn't happen. I've actually become quiet invested in making a suite of 2d platforming tools within JME which has resulted in Spooky taking a LOT longer than originally anticipated, and also means the scope of Spooky is probably getting bigger than originally planned as well. Making games is fun!

I have the foundation for a much more robust Sprite system than I've done before, and I've implemented Tile Maps with a custom collision system that is looking very promising. The platforming aspects of Spooky are something I've wanted to do in games for a long time, but I always used pre-made physics systems. Using physics is great for some games, but in games where you want more deterministic responses to collisions and the environment they tend to make simple things more difficult. Hopefully this makes Spooky's controls much tighter and more responsive than Dungeon Hordes were.

The month of November will likely not see any major updates to Gothic as I had expressed last time. I still really want to sit down and work through all my poorly realized net code and incomplete understanding of ES systems to make Gothic the game it deserves to be. For now it has been moved from "Probably in November" to "Maybe in January". Not the best news but that's where it's at.

Reindeer Rearing will still very likely see updates come December. A large amount of work I am doing for Spooky should be directly applicable to Reindeer Rearing. I'm honestly excited about the chance to clean things up and really fix some of the more game breaking bugs I had left due to time constraints. (Reindeer Rearing was originally made for a Jam).

My current schedule looks something like this: Continue working on Spooky with the hopes of getting a vertical slice level by the end of the month. Once December starts wherever I am at with Spooky will go on hold until I can at least clean up Reindeer Rearing and tackle some of the bigger bugs as well as re-do the sprite system to be in line with Spooky's sprite system. Once RR has seen enough polish to warrant another update, go back to Spooky.

Next update will have some screenshots no matter how ugly they are!

A Scheduling Update

Hello again! it's been a couple of months so I figured I should make a post saying what I've been up to and my current road map.

First off, I disappeared again after getting another job. Finding good ones is hard, but this one will likely stick for awhile. My hours are a lot better and I have had a LOT more time to work on things, of course I also have my kid, so that's where a lot of that time went!

I also built a new computer from scratch. This was a much needed upgrade though it did result in a couple of weeks where I didn't have access to my usual desktop environment. It also lead to me switching from Windows to Linux. I still have a copy of Windows 10 that I mostly use for playing games, I am about 90% on Linux Mint now. This means I have less distractions since most games are a reboot away so I can focus on tasks better.

I've been working on my programming projects so here's the quick rundown:

Project Dawn (from WAY back when I first tried making a game in unity) has been re-booted entirely and I've actually made a lot of progress. It's a 3rd person spaceship game somewhere in between the X games and EVE Online. I probably won't mention more than that for a long time since that's a very large project and even though I've been burning through my checklist it's still a very long ways from being playable.

Sheep Tutorial is kind of on hiatus for now. I lost some of my source files when I transferred (an issue with getting Linux to play nice with ntfs file systems caused by my relative lack of Linux experience) but it's not abandoned, just waiting for a long weekend where I can sit down and get back up to speed.

For the month of October I am working on a project called Spooky! It's planned to be a 2d platformer I am planning to launch on October 31st. More info will come as I make progress worth showing.

If all goes well with Spooky and I get relatively close to my release without any major issues, November will be dedicated to going back and really re-working Gothic. I've noticed it's probably my highest trafficked project and I really sort of dumped it without giving it a proper round of polish. I won't make any major promises outside of cleaning up the UI and re-working alot of systems that were largely hacked together.

Lastly, December will be Reindeer Rearing's month of love. I plan on thoroughly re-working it's systems and giving it a solid round of polish it definitely deserves.

Well that's pretty much all I have for right now. I hope to have some screenshots and better news to share shortly!