March Update – Vacío

Hey, everyone! It’s been a while. About 9 months. So, some news.

The point and click adventure game is… not happening at the moment. As happens with almost every prototype I’ve worked on there reaches a point where I lost interest, or lost sight of what made the game interesting, and it just doesn’t seem worth my time. The same thing happened with another project in the meantime, but I’m not going to go into detail here because I never blogged about it.

However, since December I’ve been working on yet another game project. My roommate (Kobold’s Keep) helped me out with the code for the initial prototype for a short platformer game. A lot is still in progress and I’m not going to talk too much about what I hope the game will be by the time I finish, but there are still plenty of things to talk about.

So, Tom helped me out with the initial prototype character controller, and we got several of the core mechanics working in the prototype stage with temporary open game art.

The game has three powerups planned, and we got the three of them working in the prototype. Recently Tom has moved on to continue to work on other projects, and I highly recommend you follow his twitter to keep up with that.

With his help and the prototype stage finished the game was coming along nicely, and I felt like I had reached the limit of what I could accomplish with the temporary art. While mechanically the core things were in there, it just didn’t feel right. A lot of the feel of the game comes down to how the game looks in addition to how it plays, so I decided to hire an artist and make this project into a full game.

The process of hiring an artist was something that I was definitely nervous about, not really sure why, but it was something that I experienced some anxiety over. I managed to get over my fear and sent an email to an excellent artist I found on twitter, Fernando Angelo, who you should also definitely follow on twitter.

So, going forward. The next few weeks I’m going to be working on refactoring some of the prototype code, making it a bit more in line with my coding style and make sure I understand what it’s doing, as well as fixing some outstanding bugs that I need to get taken care of. The plan is to get the code to a good place so that I’m ready to figure out animation in Unity so I can start getting the stuff Fernando is working on plugged into the game as well. For now the working title of the game is “Vacío”, but that may be subject to change before the game is finally finished.

I’m very excited to get this game off the ground, and I’m excited to share more about this game as I go forward. I will try to post longer updates here when there is progress worth talking about, but for smaller updates (as well as incessant pictures of my dog) you can follow me on twitter, if you feel so inclined.

-Ike