I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and festive holiday season. I’ll be away for the next two weeks as I travel home to the US to see some family and friends, and feast on home-cooked food and American delicacies (hamburgers, Mexican food and pizza).
2009 has been wonderful year, and the game has come in great strides. I found a wonderful partner in Orioto. We got an IGF demo done, and a bit of positive buzz. The game itself is gelling, and we’re both very much looking forward to 2010 where we will complete this game and release it.
As a small gift to our readers, I want to share a video showing of the game as it looked seven months ago. I made this clip when I was searching for an artist, and it’s clear to see how much things have improved since then. It’s actually a bit embarrassing looking back on it, but whatever, there’s no point in keeping it for myself any longer:
Not much to say today, but I’ve got another post coming very soon.
Work Done Last Week
More work was done on the tools. I can’t really update much on this, I’m in the middle of a major transition, and I hope to wrap it up as soon as possible.
More admin work as usual these days. I expect this to be on-going for the next few weeks.
Work Planned This Week
My focus to be on the grouping, templating and tools side. I really would like to wrap that up this week so I can get back to some gameplay issues, and level design. We’ll see how smoothly things progress.
Meanwhile, Mikaël has been working on some of the art work for the different worlds, and the game is starting to shape up in a very interesting way. We don’t have anything new to show yet, but don’t worry, things are progressing. In the meantime, his latest video game art has been covered once again by Lifehacker, recapping his last eight images. The Worms one below is my current favorite.
The most inspiring thing I’ve seen all week hails from the wonderfully talented, Canadian indie Alec Holowka. Incidentally, the editor for one of his games (Aquaria) was the inspiration for many ideas in our editor. Feast your eyes on this beautiful developer profile and tell me it doesn’t inspire you:
Work Done Last Week
Most of last week was taken up by administrative work. Still managed to do some design, planning and a bit of work on the audio system, but overall development progress was slow.
Work Planned This Week
My focus this week will continue to be on the tools side (when I’m not dealing with more administrative issues, who knew running a company could be so tedious). Alongside the grouping of the objects, I need a way to templatize and reference already created objects. This is something I should have included from the beginning when implementing the component system, but I couldn’t see the immediate use back then. My hope is that what I’ve set up so far will be easy to extend to support template objects.
Actually, the issue is not so much how to create template objects, but how do I manage them and mix them up with the rest of the scene. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense, I’m as confused as you are.
