Dec 02 2011

QA

Cardinal Quest has been in it for a little while, with us fixing up little bugs like “the monsters don’t do any damage”. But we’re almost set! The next release, 1.2, is shaping up to be much more stable and polished than the last. If nothing major comes up it should go out some time this weekend. o_o

And it’ll be totally free!

After that it’s full steam ahead on the Deluxe, paid-for version. Here’s to a bigger, better roguelike; we’ll be announcing the plans for that soon after 1.2 goes live.

I’ll try and round this site out over the next few weeks. I’ve got a few old projects and minor things that could use a space somewhere, and I’ll be putting up my patch to Sam HaXe seeing as it’s no longer actively maintained. Right now I’m going to fix up a few super-minor bugs in CQ and keep testing 🙂

Nov 21 2011

SKYRIM

Here is my character in Skyrim.

I AM A PRETTY PRINCESS

Really, she’s my third character. My first was a noble archer/swordswoman who’d help out anyone in trouble, leave people alone if they begged for mercy, and at least thought twice about looting burial urns for money.

One high point of her early career was manipulating a dragon into fighting a giant. The giant won and turned on her, just as a Dark Brotherhood assassin leapt from the bushes. She managed to dispatch them both. Another high point was getting drunk in a tavern and waking up on the other side of the country. But anyway – she was too upstanding to join the Thieves’ Guild or Dark Brotherhood, not magey enough to really join the Mage College, and frankly that only leaves the rebellion storyline and the main one. They’re a bit dull! Too many speeches.

So she had to die.

My second character was a thief who refused to have anything to do with violence and simply ran away at the first sign of trouble. Having avoided the nearby city on the grounds of it probably being a set-up it took him three hours of sneaking along roads, running away from wolves and robbing villages blind to reach his first city with a travel cart. He likes fancy clothes, easy money and not being shouted at by men with swords. He tried doing a quest once since it sounded pretty safe. It ended with him running through a bunch of surprised pirates hoping they wouldn’t block the doorways and then dodging their arrows as he ran for the hills. He didn’t get paid. He still hasn’t figured out where he can fence any of the stuff he’s nicked, or in fact what money is good for if you stay out of fights.

The third character, the one above, I made purely to do the Mage College storyline since it seemed interesting. Firstly, the Mage College quests are awesome. Secondly, magic is awesome. I spent something like twenty hours with my first character hitting stuff with swords, and the moment I fired up this new character focusing entirely on Destruction magic, my immediate thoughts were OH MY GOD THIS IS AWESOME I WILL SET EVERYTHING ON FIRE FOREVER.

I actually freeze about 60% of stuff to death now, but the other 40%? All of the fire.

Here are some of the bugs I’ve found in Skyrim:

Nov 10 2011

LEFT CLICK

Man! Skyrim. It’s sitting on my desk, it unlocks shortly… it’s been taunting me all day with its un-installable-ness thanks to Steam, and I ended up reading the manual for want of anything better to do.

Here’s something I found. I love that this can make sense:

Anyway.

You know how sometimes you get super busy and it’s all a bit too much and you actually get less done, ’cause your brain rebels at all the doing-stuff and goes on strike?

No?

Well hey, I get that. Last week was a bit crazy, then I finally got my car back together over the weekend. With that done I drove to the London Indies monthly pub meet on Monday evening, then I drove to Cambridge Indies weekly meetup and monthly pub meet on Tuesday, then I got back here and I slept. Now HERE I AM, mobile and sane, and getting shit done on Cardinal Quest!

Until Skyrim unlocks in 15 minutes. But I digress.

We’re working on CQ Classic still. The buglist is pretty much clean now, especially since jday’s fixed a bunch of nasty inventory bugs with an epic system rewrite, and I’ve been doing some class, monster and weapon balancing (I think Fighter is much more fun now, and Thief is a little more complicated). Watch for an update soon. 🙂

Oct 28 2011

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY

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 😀

Oct 22 2011

CARDINAL QUEST (MOAR)

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.

Oct 18 2011

CARDINAL QUEST

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. 🙂

Oct 14 2011

BREAK TIME

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!

Oct 13 2011

GROUND UP

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?

Oct 11 2011

PERFORMANCE REVIEW

I’ve been doing contract stuff today, so here’s something I worked on over the weekend instead!

Oct 06 2011

TECHNICAL DEBT

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!):