Okay, between one thing (Cardinal Quest) and another (Batman: Arkham City) and another (fixing car) I’ve literally had no time for miscellaneous things over the past week. Fortunately Batman’s finished, the car should go back together this weekend, and Cardinal Quest keeps getting better 😀
Okay, this past week has just flown by. I’ve been working nearly every waking hour on Cardinal Quest, putting in bugfixes, coding new features, optimising the shit out of everything… and when I haven’t been doing that I’ve been hitting things with hammers to try and get my car back together and on the road. BUSY.
In Cardinal Quest news, Ido’s announced Cardinal Quest Deluxe, a total revamp of CQ that’s going to be bigger and better – with new classes, new monsters, new items and a whole ton of cool stuff. If you’ve paid for Cardinal Quest (or pay for it now) you’ll get an upgrade to Deluxe automatically once that’s done, and the full version of Cardinal Quest as it stands now has gone free!
If you haven’t played it yet, there’s now no excuse. It’s all there.
Yup! I’m working on this now. It’s a snappy, graphical Roguelike – explore dungeon, get treasure, down potions, cast spells, kill monsters – but without all of the fiddling and inventory management of classics like NetHack, so it’s almost exclusively focused on kicking ass.
Cardinal Quest developer Ido Yehieli‘s hired myself and a couple other awesome guys to work on making this game leaner, faster, stronger and bigger than ever! You can look forward to some nice improvements to it shortly – more spells, lots more items, balancing and so on just for starters – plus iOS and Android versions if that’s your thing.
It’s normally $4.45, but right now it’s on offer and you can get the PC version for anything from $1 up. There’s an online demo here if you’re curious. 🙂
I’ve pretty much taken the day off to play Forza 4:
It’s ace! It’s basically Forza 3, but more so.
Anyway, I’m pausing work on Fight Back for a month or so. I have a tiny bit of Vigilance related work to do – putting it out to other portals – which I’ll likely do over the weekend. Come Monday, I’ll be spending my time on a nifty contract project. It’s games related this time, indie games related even, and I’ll blog about it if I can. 😀
Until then!
I’ve got most of the essentials figured out with Fight Back now, so I’m finally getting to move whole new systems across. Stuff like ship physics, weapons and AI. This is my current sandbox:
The white ship’s a player ship, the black ship’s an AI. The pink squares, well, they’ll become bullets in good time. About when I sort the background out, in fact. 😀 As for why they’re pink – as a general principle when you’re doing something placeholder, the more obviously wrong it looks, the better! Hot pink usually serves that purpose perfectly, though maybe pink bullets in a shmup aren’t that strange?
I’ve been doing  contract stuff today, so here’s something I worked on over the weekend instead!
I’m making good progress on Fight Back’s new core engine. After the jump, here’s a little tech demo of interpolated rendering (I say little, it’s several MB because it still has most of the game assets in!):
Having analytics is awesome! Here’s Vigilance’s play graph since it went out on Newgrounds:
It’s really nice to be able to keep track of something after it’s out in the wild. Play count is only half the story though! Here are a few other stats and things:
I have no idea if this is good or not but I feel SUPER PROUD. It’s pretty great seeing literally tens of thousands of people enjoying something I’ve made. Vigilance is now the most widely played game I’ve ever made by a factor of ten or so and it’s just going to keep getting new players now ’cause it’s up on the internet forever. That’s the power of Flash!
Oh, there’s a little side project I’ve been gradually adding to over the past few months – a simple Starcraft 2 mod for friendly 1v1s, practice and coaching. I did a little work on it over the weekend and now it’s collecting stats on things like how much time you’ve spent supply blocked in the game and how good you are at spending resources. The stat tracking’s really simple but already I’ve noticed holes in my game from it, so it’s a useful tool. 😀 I think it’ll have to get its own page soon!
Yup. Here’s my game right now:
All this under-the-hood stuff is hard work. Especially given I don’t really understand a few advanced HaXe features I want to use fully enough yet, like type parameters. Progress is slow but steady! So right now, all I have is Blue Square.
Of course all the old game logic and rendering is still in there, it’s just switched off. Right now I’m effectively building a new game engine inside my game. Everything should hook up OK once it’s done, but plugging it all in now would just get in the way.
I’ve got my memory management (such as it is) and component-based entity system set up now. The next major job is figuring out an event system for keyboard input and such. Hopefully I’ll be able to get on with that next week, though I have a few odd jobs that’ll intrude on the time.
Am I spending too much effort on tech that I might never end up needing? Probably! But it’s interesting and it’s good practice. More updates next week as things start to get pretty again 🙂
