2013 Plans

I am sure that anybody who regularly reads this blog already has a good idea what my plans for 2013 are, but I figure I should go over them anyway for the record. While I was originally planning on developing Color Collapse Plus over the year, that was before I actually started participating in game jams. I may still work on that project as it was my mothers favorite game, but my priority for 2013 will be on a number of larger commercial projects. As I want to have regular content for the site, I am planning on participating in game jams such as Ludum Dare. The games developed during these challenges will make up the bulk of the site game releases, with the remaining releases being updates of already existing games until I actually finish one of my larger projects.

My larger projects will be targeted towards tablets and possibly smart-phones. The target platforms will be iOS and Android, though I may also port to Windows 8 tablets/phones if the effort will not be too great. Once the tablet releases are done, I intend on porting the game to the browser (probably Flash but HTML 5 isn't inconceivable). The browser versions will be broken into a number of episodes and released in installments.

My game jam work will initially be done in Flash but as my GameJam library reaches maturity (hopefully by this summer) I will port it to HTML 5 and transition to using that if the performance is adequate. While ActionScript and JavaScript are very similar, I am just way more comfortable with ActionScript as it has language constructs that make it much nicer for working with larger-scale projects. Still, JavaScript is quickly becoming the language of the web, though a lot slower than the experts predicted. I personally think Flash will be viable for at least another 3-5 years. If Adobe gets their head out of their butt and create an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler it may be significantly longer though the resulting Flash programs would be "native" HTML 5. Sadly I suspect that Adobe will let Flash whither away and instead try to turn their new Edge Animate software into the replacement for Flash.

I have not decided which games I will be updating, so if anybody reading this feel free to email me with your favorite game and I will put that game on the top of my update list. Updating will include cosmetic updating as well as (for Java and Flash games) porting the game to HTML 5.