As the summer approached I was full of hope, game code was expected to flow abundantly from my fingertips, whole worlds were going to be created!
Immediately after WWDC, things fell apart. I had to focus on my industrial consulting business when a number of projects decided to align like the planets for installation in July. Working seven days a week, and long hours to boot, meant there was no time for game design. I won’t even touch upon issues in my personal life, but they have had an impact as well.
Its a shame that the time-out happened, but it is a necessary evil. The completion of these projects over the past 6+ weeks has brought in more income than the last 2+ years that Rogue Touch has been on the market! Without the money obtained by my consulting business, I cannot work on games. Someday I hope to transition to my older games sustaining me and funding new games, but for now I have to lead a double-life.
Now that my schedule has finally opened up a bit, I have recently returned to the world of Xcode, Objective-C, and OpenGL for the first time in a few months. It feels good. It turns out that taking a substantial time away from Mineko and Rogue Touch code is a mixed blessing… I have had time to forget how some of it works, even though I wrote the code! The flip side is that I’ve been able to rethink past assumptions, find hidden bugs as I re-read code, and improve the foundations.
To reiterate some goals:
1) Rogue Touch 2.0 is still “coming soon”, and is shaping up to be a much more dramatic update than I’d first conceived. It will be interesting to see how it is received by old and new players alike.
2) Spirit Hunter Mineko is deep in production, with thousands of frames of animation, and many thousands of lines of code completed so far. It is my sincere hope to release her before the holiday season rush this year.
3) “Unnamed Tactical TBS”, which I’ve barely mentioned around the internets, will begin to advance at a faster rate as soon as Mineko hits beta-testing. Don’t expect to see this arrive until spring 2012 at the earliest 😉