I’ve abandoned a number of game development projects through the years – not so much recently, though.

Still, I felt like uploading some of the older ones, and they can be found at the Abandoned Games page. Enjoy.

An immense lack of updates, here.

I am currently developing a system for managing multiple online shops. This system is already in production, yet feature requests come in at a higher rate than what I can keep up with. As such, I haven’t had time to keep this blog alive. That, and Starcraft II has been eating up my time as well.

Straight after I found out preordering Starcraft II could get me a Beta Key, I did. Contrary to the original Starcraft, I am not going to let myself fall behind out of lack of experience. Slowly but steadily, I climb the soon-to-be-wiped Beta Ladder – currently in the Bronze League, but I have no intention of stopping there.

If the first Starcraft and its expansion – or Blizzard’s games in general – are anything to go by, Starcraft II should become the de facto competitive Real-time Strategy game. I intend to reach a point where I can enter tournaments and not end up dead last, at least.

Must construct additional Pylons.

This is the first screenshot I have to show of the hacksim game thing; massively work in progress, this shows that while the game is heavily command-line based, there will at the very least be a fancy globe for traceroute etc.

Making procedurally generated yet interesting content will be difficult. Adding a number of tailored storylines, and attaching these to semi-random servers is probably the way to go.

So far, I have been thinking about somehow gathering keywords when a server is requested. This way, google.com would be a search engine, nasa.gov a space agency, cern.ch a scientific research facility and so on. For this to be viable, servers should be put into predefined and -programmed categories.

Colours!

In this way, storylines could be specified not per-server (or per-organisation), but rather in a server-agnostic way. Imagine a generated scenario with you working for the KGB to bring down FBI!

Simple single- or few-hacks jobs should be plentiful, and available for or against most servers. And all but a select few servers (used by the game) should be hackable as well.

This will take a while. For now, enjoy the (rather bland) screenshots.

It should become the least unrealistic hacking simulation around, which isn’t saying much. We were a bit torn on whether to make the game as realistic as possible. In the end, we decided to tone down the realism a bit (still way above the other games out there) in favour of accessibility.

We haven’t really made that much (anything, really) of the game yet, so most of what I write will be mere ideas, but the game would hopefully have such features as:

• Decent amount of realistic tools (and realistic usage of these)
• Pinging real servers to generate gameplay elements
• Hacking all sorts of places, from banks over airports to government facilities, and possibly even other players
• Persistent, shared internet
• Live maps and views

The game will be able to run on the lowest mainstream resolutions, which these days appear to be 7″ netbooks. This means it will look nice at 800×480 and above. I hope to have some work-in-progress images up in the not too distant future.

You can follow the development of hacksim on github here.

Finally getting somewhere. Damage works, throwing works (but needs to be balanced), walls need a little fiddling with (there’s still only one wall, for starters). The UI is nothing like I want it to, but that’ll have to wait.

Snowball-collision works very well. Now, whenever a snowball hits either a player or a wall, it’ll splash into a rain of snow in every (available) direction. I just need to make the background less white, since as it is, it is almost as filled with snow as can be, essentially rendering this effect nearly invisible.

That's gotta hurt.

Additionally, I’ve added tiny drops of blood whenever a player is hit by a snowball. Perhaps I should make it so this only happens with large or fast-thrown snowballs. The effect looks nice though, so I’m keeping it in there for now.

Yet another visual effect (this is the last in this post, I promise), the motion trail of snowballs. This adds to the liveliness of the game, and also makes screenshots more meaningful.

I still have one or two “special” features I want to add. And then there’s the networking, of course.

The next project of mine has already begun. It is a simple snowball fight; you pick snow up with the right mouse button, and throw it with the left mouse button. Hit the opponent, but keep moving so as to avoid being hit yourself. There is even a wall there.

Instead of health, you have to keep your body temperature above 35 degrees. I hope to implement the ability to build small walls yourself, by collecting snow somehow.

A few problems already, though; I can’t quite get the mechanics right – how is it supposed to work? Right now, there’s a lobbing throw and a straight throw, but the lobbing is almost impossible to hit anything with – it’s necessary to shoot over the wall, though.

The game isn’t fun yet, sadly. There’s no point in releasing anything as of now.

I should get around to writing a collision library. That, and a user interface library should be very helpful in future projects.

This adventure/exploration game has (sadly) been added to the dump. I don’t know what my next game project will be yet.

Of course, this just means that the combined loading times are gathered in the beginning. Not a big problem per se, except for the disturbing white background (and the general ‘not responding’-ness of the game). An obvious solution used in most games; a loading screen.

It turns out that there is really no good way to use crossplatform multithreading – fork() is mainly available on *NIX systems, but doesn’t even exist on win32. I don’t know what I’ll do for now, but perhaps the user will settle with a ‘loading resources, please wait …’ splash screen. That’s the plan for now, anyway.

Scripting. Not the plot-writing kind, mind you. It is essential to have some sort of scripting engine if you’re not relying on procedurally generated content – and it would take too much to write a procedurally generated interesting exploration game.

The basic functionality is there (object activation, map-specific events), but a lot still needs to be done – connections to other maps, associated speech, and modification of map collision data.

I also need to make at least a few more frames for the protagonist, since as you can see by comparing screenshots so far – he really only has one pose, and he floats along the ground. I am a terrible animator though, but I’ll have to try anyway.

I have an idea for a game. I have written/drawn a plot for said game. I have even gone so far as to begin coding this game.

A problem I have previously had to face with most all of the games I have wanted to develop was scope. I was simply incapable of defining any scope whatsoever, let alone keeping inside this scope. This time around, I feel – I feel it might possibly be feasible to have at least something that resembles a game. I have most of the plot laid out already, and it hopefully won’t belong before I have some kind of prototype working.

The game will be an exploration game – little to no danger, and just a couple of puzzles to be solved. It is set in a desert of sorts, and should have more than a few surprises.

What Would Science Do?

I can’t say much more (most of what I know is in my head), but I have a great many drawings … drawings of anything from contraptions and layouts to notes – and even a map of the entire game world. I wish I had a scanner, so I could show you.

For now, you will have to make do with these few early gameplay images … Showing a confused guy in the desert, and a weird button that nobody knows what does.