It’s PAX week. I’m heading down to Seattle on Thursday morning and am very excited for this year’s gathering of uber dorks. Since I have a bunch of sabbatical time banked, I decided to round up my two days off to give me a full week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week is dedicated towards personal projects.
With my Basic Tile Engine complete and out there, I feel I can finally get back to focusing on my own games. The Unnamed RPG (now called Project J) is on hold for the time being. It has a bit of an art budget and I’m running into snags with contractors.
Project R has a prototype built that I hope to revisit again soon. It’s definitely my most technically ambitious project as Flash just isn’t very kind to precise timing.
Project G & C are both very very early concepts. The ideas are in my head and I will look to fleshing them out in the future.
Which brings me to Project Z. Inspired by the game I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 I’m working on building a very straightforward top-down shooter.
Yesterday’s progress was very good. I booted the game up from the Sample Top-Down Game in my Basic Tile Engine. Within the day I had completed a very functional game (with very temporary art). My biggest accomplishment was my implementation of Game States. I have three main states that the game can loop within.
- Game Loop – Typical Gameplay
- Pause Loop – Nothing Moves
- Death Loop – Enemies & Bullets continue to move, but user input is disabled. The enemies track decoys instead of the Hero.
Today I’ll work on getting some less temporary art in the game as well as add pick-up objects.
