State of Blazing Games Porting March 2018

Last week we finished off chapter two. My plan for this blog is to have site update information and making of/postmortems for released games between chapters. The only games that have been released since chapter two is NIM and Video Poker. The creation of both of these games are part of the book so they will be covered in the book.

For porting work, I am in the process of porting Coffee Quest to Unity. I am doing this the hard way by porting my Coffee Quest FS engine that has been started and stopped many times to Unity. Having an engine contained within another engine may not make the most sense, but using the data format I developed for the FS engine will make porting the first four games easier then redoing them in pure Unity and will allow for me to move away from Unity in the future if necessary. Using Unity will give me a lot of features that I need to finish the FS engine so effectively lets me get the games done quickly while giving me the option to create my own pure engine in the future.

Another feature that it gives me is the ability to create a high-def version of One of those Weeks. This is something that is heavily under consideration with the decision to be made once I am further along with the FS port. Sadly the number of hours I have devoted to this are very few but as I don’t need to finish CQ until later this year (if I am to stick to the rough schedule I set up in January).

For those wondering, FS does stand for Five-Six and was the engine that I was developing for Coffee Quest Five and Coffee Quest Six. If the port of the first four games in the series goes well, then it is extremely likely that my CQ5 curse will be ended and I will finally be able to finish that game! More on this when I know, but don’t hold your breath.

Speaking of my schedule, I realize that my plans for posting Nightmare Maze in October may not be the best plans as it is the second game I create in the book, not the last like the original book. For that reason, I am going to use it as my Friday the 13^th game in April, so July will be the original 13 spikes and October will either be thirteen spikes unlimited or another horror game which I will decide later.

The next 8 weeks will be chapter 3 followed by my next state of the site update and a couple of making of posts. Chapter 3 is a very quick course on JavaScript!