Monday, April 10, 2006

Fission Mailed: Ressurection

Hey, I'm still alive! Fancy that.

The last two months were a break from programming. The quarter is over, I'm taking a lighter load of classes, so I'm back into the development spiral. I'm not ready to pick Extinguish back up yet, but I have two new projects.

The first project is my feeble first attempts to write a Roguelike. I've never tried this before, so this particular project is more of an self-teaching excersize than a full-fledged game. After I finish this, I may start over and make a proper game in the genre. My engine is not particularly elaborate yet, allowing for little more than moving around the map and opening/closing doors. I'll talk about this one in more detail once it gets going.

The other project was inspired largely by the vast amount of time I've spent playing N. This game has brought be nothing but fury and woe with its brutal difficulty and unforgiving nature. After a while, I began to ask myself: Why am I still playing this? Why is this stage so compelling after the 80th time I've died on it? Rather than find a reasonable answer to these questions, I decided to make a sadistic platformer of my own. It will use a simple (and incomplete) platforming engine I made a while back called Vertical, and will heavily emphasize use of a grappling hook for getting around. Beyond this, I have little planned, except that it will include enemies with fairly basic AI (although they will not be the main emphasis of the game, as our hero will have no weapons), and movable objects that will interact with the world using some decently complex physics.

The moral of the story: I'm alive, kicking, and coding. Expect more updates in the future.

Until then, enjoy a simple demo of the Vertical engine.

1 comment:

loneninja said...

when are you going to do this? if you've lost motivation then please keep going! i love you're games especially vertical thats why i joined here, and mabey you can kill enemys by 'grapling'them? oO