Merry Christmas

This is the time of year when  things are the most hectic so I apologize for the lack of progress in Dozen Days of Tiles. I will continue the series next week and plan on releasing the first episode on Blazing Games in March. I am only going to create half the episodes as 2012 will be devoted to a 12 part game. Yes, the end of the world is overused but I want to do a series around that theme anyways. Besides, Alein the Alien has been idle too long.

Merry Christmas (or whatever else you celebrate) and have a happy new year everyone.

Santa vs the Evil Gnomes 1.0 release

At last my Christmas game is finished. Sure, I would have liked to do a few more passes but as always time is the enemy. I think the game is pretty good but I am biased. I have been thinking a lot about what I am going to do in 2010 and the best words to describe my plans are icing. I will be posting my plans for all 9 projects that make up the Blazing Games site on New Years Day. There are some big changes that are going to be happening which will hopefully turn out to be positive and result in BlazingGames.com being a much better site.

Plans altered

I was originally planning on releasing the final version of Santa vs the Evil Gnomes this week and releasing the Christmas Edition of Dungeon Romp 3D for Christmas but with the passing-away of my Grandmother and lack of time due to family being down my plans are being altered. While I am very tempted to delay Santa vs the Evil Gnomes until next year and add a lot more features, I have delayed the game enough as it is so it will be Dungeon Romp 3D Christmas Edition that gets delayed and Santa being released on Christmas Eve.

Santa vs the Evil Gnomes beta release

I was going to have the first two maps of the Santa vs the Evil Gnomes game, but as there is no save feature so players would have to replay the whole thing so I just left the first level in there. The full game, which I hope to finish this weekend, will have 3 maps. The story is not as good as I hoped due to time limitations and what could be done with the rpg/3D engine that I am using. That is why I was glad that most people who answered my poll voted for a longer release between games as that will allow me to make better games. I am also planning on enhancing some of my older games so if there is a particular game you like that you think deserves some enhancements email me (webmaster at blazinggames dot com works). There was only one vote for never updating the site. In the unlikely event that the person who made that vote is reading this, I would love to hear your reasoning.

Santa vs the Evil Gnomes alpha release

While I really don't like releasing Alpha versions of my software, I think the game is far enough along to give the players a sneak preview of my Christmas game. The new RPG core that the game is going to use is not yet finished so the game is currently using my CQ4 core. The rendering engine is my Dungeon Romp 3D raycaster with some modifications. The Beta version will be released next month, and before Christmas the final version will be released. I am also going to be releasing the 3D version of the Christmas edition of Dungeon Romp so next month will be fun for people who like short RPGs.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year! I am quickly writing this after quickly posting the final episode of One of those Weeks. I am doing this Christmas Morning due to the fact that I have plans this afternoon and evening. I suppose I could wait until tomorrow morning to post this game but figured it would be safer to get it posted early. Enjoy. If you enjoyed One of those Weeks and want to see me create another adventure game (or even a sequel to OotW) then be sure to email me and let me know.

Santa progress report

I had to come to a hard decision today. As readers of this blog already know, I have started development on a Christmas special that will be sharing a lot of code with my Android project. With less than a week left to finish developing the game I am at the critical juncture where I have to decide if I focus on finishing the game for this year or put the game on hold until December 5, 2008. After taking a look at everything I want to be in the game, I am quickly realizing that everything that I want to do with this game is not possible within such a short time frame. It is certainly possible at this point in it's development to rush something out the door, and there are numerous companies that would do just that. In fact, I suspect there are more companies that would rush something out than delay a project for a year. Still, I have an alternative christmas special and some One of those Weeks releases so I don't think my regular visitors will be overly disappointed with this December's releases.

The gamespot website has finally posted something on the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, though the news article doesn't give any details or provide any useful information. They do say "However, contrary to widespread and unproven reports, his exit was not a result of pressure from an advertiser." That may be true, but then why edit the review? It will be a long time before I start trusting reviews on cnet owned sites again. Had they left the video review alone and made a statement right away, I would be a lot less leery of them than I currently am.

Considerations for Christmas

My biggest problem is that I have far too many ideas and not enough resources (time or money) to bring those ideas to fruition. I have been trying to only focus on a few projects and not starting any more until those projects are finished. My biorhythms game was an exception to this, but it only took a few hours to put together so I am not really concerned about it. The two logical offshoots to that game, a horoscope and a tarot card reader, are a bit too big of projects to take on. While I am certain that I would be able to create these fairly easily, they would probably take more than a week of development time without giving me multiple weeks worth of releases.

Another ambitious mini-project I am thinking about doing is a Christmas special. This one is dividable into multiple parts and would be using large chunks of the CQfs code that I am developing for a variety of games. I know that people are waiting for me to get back to work on Coffee Quest Revenge so I haven't entirely decided if I will be doing this special. The best part is that all the CQfs code is code that I need anyway so I can simply work on that code and decide closer to Christmas if I can quickly assemble the pieces I do have into a game.