TMoD Twelve Months of Doomsday

What better day then Friday the Thirteenth to resurrect my Game Development blog. After all, Jason managed to rise from the dead quite frequently. True, a month between posts isn't exactly dying but I had to have a Friday the 13th reference. For 2012 I am planning on updating this blog every other week. To be a bit more precise, weeks that do not have new content on BlazingGames.com will be the weeks that I post articles here. When appropriate, these articles will provide details about whatever was posted on BlazingGames the previous week. If for some reason you want to read more of what I have to say, feel free to follow me on Google+.

The big game series that I am running throughout 2012 is Twelve Months of Doomsday (TMoD) which is my way of having fun with the 2012 end of the world theme. Statistically speaking, there is a small chance that the world will end in 2012. To my understanding, the end of the Mayan calendar didn't actually represent the end of the world but the beginning of a new cycle. Perhaps the 21st of December will be the beginning of the singularity that many science-fiction writers are predicting.

TMoD is a collection of classic-style arcade games tied to a twelve part over-arching story about how the cast from One of those Weeks try to prevent the end of the world. I actually enjoyed bringing back the characters from my 46 episode adventure game. The design of this series not only had to tell a story, but had to fit in arcade games similar to those I played as a child. All the games I write are my original code and I try to make the games as original as possible while still bringing back the feel of the old days (well, at least if you are 30+).

The first game in this series was actually chosen not because it was an arcade game but because it was one of the first games I ever typed into my Commodore 64. Lunar Lander was a text based game found in a book containing 101 BASIC Computer Games. While BASIC was not the greatest of languages, it came with the computer so it was the language of choice for learning to program back then. I probably still harbour some bad programming habits as a result. The game gave you a distance from the surface and you had to type in the amount of fuel you wanted to burn. This determined your speed as you approached the surface. There were a number of arcade versions of this concept which I modeled my game after.

You will notice that a large portion of the games deal with threats from space. This is partly because the main villain is an alien, but more because the childhood arcade games that I played tended to have science-fiction themes. There are a lot of really good games that I am planning on releasing as part of this series so please give the series a chance if you find you don't like the first few games.