Five months on, I look back at the last post and sigh. I miss you, five months ago! I wish you were here. Or that I was there. Whichever.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, my dayjob work got hijacked, sort of, into working at another company to help them with a project, which means that my usual five minutes of transit changed to about one and a half hours, and me and the Monsvik Marauder are generally too tired after work to actually do anything… thusly, virtually no work has been done on the project since then.

Well, on the code and actually getting designs down on paper side, at least. We’ve still been thinking and discussing, and at least for me, this work at the other company has been very helpful in getting a hold on exactly what is possible and feasible in a project, taking time and effort into account. Never fear, intrepid reader – I am not turning into a mindless project manager-shaped husk! You simply need to know the rules before you can prove them puny, short-sighted and artifical.

The work at this other company has also given me quite a bit of confidence, both in my programming ability and design skills; being able to comfortably do a satisfactory job in one of the biggest game developers in Australia is something that I wasn’t sure I was capable of. That said, I’m definitely no genius code-wise; I was good at gameplay-level coding, but their tech guys are leagues beyond me in l33tness. And likewise, doing design work (scripting levels and balancing combat difficulty) made me realise how much I have to learn about actually taking a good idea and making a fun game out of it.

But overall it was a good experience. Now all that’s needed is to get back into the swing of things and continue work on this project- well, and…

Kris and I have gotten a little caught up in the phenomenon that is called Desktop Tower Defense, and considering it was just made by one guy over the course of (probably) a few months, we felt that it might be a good exercise to see if we could make a teeny tiny little flash game in a short time span. Interestingly, we chose to make one each; while each individual game probably won’t be as good, I think it’s probably better this way so that we don’t end up chatting about an idea and expanding it until it’s a huge game in its own right.

The only rule was thematic – the game had to be based somehow in the universe of our Mech Game – the link could be tenuous, but it had to be there. I surmised that this is one of the best kind of restrictions; one that doesn’t necessarily block any ideas, but simply gives you a foundation upon which to build, and could very well possibly provide a twist in a gameplay idea that would elevate it from great to original.

We’ve both got ideas and have both kind of started. I think we’re going to aim to have them done by the end of January, but it’s all a bit sketchy at the moment. It’s just fun to work on a new project I guess, where we don’t have to stress about the addition of huge new features or discuss how much the story should be integral to the game, and instead just go back to the drawing board – think some crazy stuff up, implement it and see what happens.