A new Den post is almost ready. Quite a lot of games to talk about.

Till then, I started another project. This one isn’t a game per se, but a series of game templates or starter projects. Basically, a bunch of barebones projects based around various genres and ideas.

It’s intended to help prototyping ideas or getting game jam ideas up and running quicker. This comes from my own experiences in game jams where even though the idea for our games were simple, we still had to split time between development and art. And it ended up hurting the core gameplay feel more often than not.

This was especially problematic when working on The Feathered Stalker back in GGJ2021, where as the person in charge of the programming, I spent an alarming amount of time programming the player character and having it work properly, but ending up not finishing the game as a whole due to the core features taking too much time, plus the monster never got properly finished.

So having a few generic gameplay systems would probably help my life a lot during game jam stuff, at least where Unity is concerned. And if it helps me, maybe it’ll help others too.

Probably not gonna spend too long on this project though, probably June and some of July on it. Providing I can be as productive as possible and not have to deal with real-life bollocks, I should be able to bang out a template every day or couple of days.

One of the more interesting things I want to work on is networked multiplayer, and have it work with the different game templates. Not sure how that’s going to go, but I will provide updates as I go along.

In terms of other projects; the fighting game prototype, FIST-EM, is semi-on-hold. I’m still working on fixing the camera and the movement system. I’m not even going to attempt to animate any combat until those two things are fixed. Plus I need some new or adjusted animations for what I currently have anyway.

As for the reason why it’s on-hold; Space Cart. Currently re-doing the station menus and everything related to it. As well as going to make new mission types. Unfortunately, I need to rewrite quite a bit of code because what’s there is basically the contents of a pasta bowl. And it’s taking longer than I would like to work on it due to not being particularly motivated. Feature creep Hell is real and will haunt you.

Not much else has really been going on, not surprisingly. Our dog has had a few problems since the last post, but nothing too serious. Now that sun is out a bit more, playing with her is going to be much easier, she’s been fairly grumpy during the very wet and cold spring we’ve had.

That’s everything I guess. Like I said, Den post soon.

-Adam