Current Projects

I thought I'd give readers an idea of what I've been working on recently. I've been jumping around a bit between projects, but a few are pretty far along.

They Want ME - If you've been to our website, you've probably seen this mentioned. It's a sequel to We Want YOU, with more abilities, more equipment, more weapons, dynamic lighting, bullet penetration, a more developed storyline and...well, you'll see when you finally play it someday. I redid the game from the ground up twice, and the way things are going I will likely start one more time using my newer engine and all the improvements that come with it.

A secret agent game - This game is what I think of as a "strategic platformer". It's not quite a puzzle game, but we want the player to have to think about how they approach situations. You don't have to be stealthy, just smart. I created a level editor, a new animation system, a lighting system and about four "complete" levels. Then I got caught up in my personal life. When I finally got back to coding, I'd started thinking about other things I wanted to work on.

A random, text-based-world generator - I've done this so many times, and so many ways, that I've lost count. The idea is to make a worldmap, with cities, forests, lakes, roads, etc. and then explore it like a cross between an RPG, a work of interactive fiction and a life simulator. The issue? I don't want to make graphics for it, so everything in each setting is described using text instead. Have you ever tried writing a program to describe things? It either requires simplistic templates or a huge database of properties for each object/material and how they interact. Then you have to make sure the words fit together properly. I think I've found a pretty good setup right now, though. Maybe I'll write about it at some point.

A 2D lighting engine - My problem with lighting was always that, with multiple lights, sometimes shadows were overlapping lights. Obviously, a bright light should never be covered in darkness. I realize that there are many lighting engines out there, but I haven't seen many in Game Maker that actually have walls/ground cast shadows properly. I finally got it working recently, but I want to expand on the tech so that I can use it in an endlessly-generated game such as They Want ME.

A 2D platformer engine - This is what I'll probably use for my next game or two. It's the most organized engine of mine so far. Most of the basics are done, and a few of the more "advanced" elements, but it's still missing a lot.

A We Want YOU remake? - I'm redoing my procedural-generation code, and combining it with my platformer engine. This may end up as a remake, or revamp, of We Want YOU...or I may just do something else with it. I have ideas.


There you go. That's all the big projects that are still in progress. Does anyone have anything they'd like to know more about at this stage? If not, I'll just write and see if people have questions.