Blazing Games Life after Death

It has been no secret that the Blazing Games site is going away in April. This may lead to the question about what I am going to do with this blog after the site shuts down? I have been thinking about dropping this blog keeping only my Homebrew Gamejam blog but I am slowly porting the Flash and Java games from BlazingGames into HTML5 and hosting the new versions on Spelchan.com. There are a lot of games that I had created on BlazingGames so this process will take a very long time so it makes sense to continue to keep this blog running. Besides, I have to finish posting the chapters from my Making HTML5 Games using Animate eBook.

I will continue posting the sections of the book each fortnight with updates on game ports made between the chapters. In addition to Spelchan.com, I also have my 2600Dragons.com and will soon have TarotRevealed.com which is where I plan on hosting my tarot games. There are a lot of pages that make up the site as well as a lot of features that I would like to add to the site so this is going to be a process that will take a fair amount of time. I am going to spread this work out adding new layouts or features every month with the site being updated on the 15^th of each month.

Right now I am running into some issues setting up the site (adding it to my hosting is still pending) but hopefully the site will show up shortly and I will be able to have the first version of the site ready by the 15^th of this month.

I would like to be porting games much quicker than I currently am but at the moment am working on my Masters degree so my spare time is very little. The few hours a week that I allocate to working on both blogs, porting games, and developing my emulator should probably be used for study but I consider this my time so try to allocate some time for these projects. Naively I was hoping to get ahead of the release schedule so that I wouldn’t need to worry about hitting release dates but that has not been the case. My summer schedule is lighter but as we are expected to work on our thesis at that time I suspect that my tune situation will be just as bad in the summer. The Coffee Quest engine isn’t too bad so I should have no problem releasing content for that series but I was really hoping to do my revamped One of those Weeks and Ultimate Retro Project games.  

Needless to say, my focus for the larger project will be Coffee Quest  and once that project is done I will have to make a decision between Ultimate Retro Project and One of those Weeks. What I want to do with OotW is very time consuming but I should be finished my Masters degree so unless I decide to go for a PHD I should have more spare time. More on this once I have finished posting the next chapter of the eBook, which will be starting next fortnight.

Site Plans Winter 2018

Working on my Masters of Science in Computer Science is proving to be very time consuming. While I am trying to allocate blocks of time towards my porting and site work, the amount of time that I am actually able to devote to these side tasks is not as much as I would like. This means that there may be changes to the blog post next year. As the book is mostly written, there will not be any changes to this blog. The emulator work has slowed down so I will have to decide how to handle things once I catch up with my current work. Worst case scenario is that I cut back to monthly updates though will likely write some side-trip articles covering other aspects of the development such as the creation of test games and assembly libraries.

Spelchan.com will continue to be updated each month with a port of an existing game. As you have already seen, the October game was changed to Pent Up Anger. While I was going to release Coffee Quest 2 next month, instead I am going to release Cribbage Square and will use my new Coffee Quest engine to do an enhanced version of Santa’s Search for the December game.

I do plan on releasing a Coffee Quest episode every quarter of next year, with more information on the Coffee Quest porting plans to be made next fortnight as next fortnight’s port will be on the making of HTML5 Coffee Quest.

Even though the Dozen Days of Dice series is not overly popular, I really don’t have time to do a worthy port of One of those Weeks, so until I have enough time to do a proper OotW port, the Dozen Days series will be a placeholder with an episode every quarter.

This leaves four games open.  These will probably be used for holiday games but I have not yet made up my mind what I will be releasing so consider the other four releases for next year to be mystery games. They may even be new games if I end up creating some for University assignments.

Next fortnight, as mentioned above, will be a look at my Coffee Quest port and what the plans are for that series.

Game Making Glut

I am a coder. I like writing code. Probably too much. My biggest problem when it comes to coding is suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome.  This is when a programmer prefers to write his own code instead of using third-party libraries. There are a lot of really good low-cost (some even free) game engines and game-related libraries out there.  When it comes to cross-platform development, the big problem with developing your own cross-platform engine or library is testing. When each of the platform that you wish to support also has a wide variety of devices with different specs, it is clear that this is not a good idea for a one-to-three person team to attempt. Instead I am going to be looking at existing tools and engines to use for my cross-platform projects.  The list of platforms I am looking at is a lot larger than anticipated as I have acquired a lot of game making tools the last few weeks.

I found AGK  2.0 (App Game Kit) on Kickstarter a few months ago and should be getting a beta of this library fairly soon. This is an interesting tool as it comes with a BASIC language compiler as well as a C++ library so you can use either language. Their BASIC does not seem to have any Object Oriented extensions in it so I would probably only use it for rapid prototyping, with C++ being my development language. It supports a variety of platforms with Windows, OSX, Android and IOS on the list so clearly meets my needs. Once the beta is in my hands, I will be able to better decide but on paper this looks like a good choice.

While looking into AGK, I discovered  FPS Creator Reloaded as well as the original FPS Creator. As these came with a large number of free model packs, I figured I would grab them if only for the extra models. While Reloaded looks like a neat tool, especially if they use Lua as their scripting language, it is sadly Windows-only. For game-jams it might be a handy tool so I may end up playing around with it.

Unity is a very popular 3D engine. My focus is mostly on 2D so it seemed like this was overkill for my needs. Now that they have added 2D, it may be worthwhile looking at it. This is an expensive option, though they do have a free indie version which seems fairly capable. Scripting is in C# or JavaScript which is tolerable. While  technically this is probably a better choice than AGK, it is my second choice but I definitely want to play around with this.

The above is more than enough but the Steam autumn sale had RPG Maker XV Ace on sale for 75% off so I had to grab it. This is Windows-only but might be great for prototyping. Right after acquiring this, Humble-Bundle had a bundle that included Multimedia Fusion 2, a game maker I had never heard of but that has optional cross-platform support modules. Then there is Game-maker pro, but unless there is an extremely good deal on the masters bundle this is just not worthwhile for me but my experimentation with the free version showed me that this tool has a lot of power. These are just the tools that I have access to at the moment. There are many additional tools that are available to those willing to look for them.