Had a scan through another bunch of old Amiga games and stumbled across Geoff Crammonds excellent Stunt Car Racer. Knowing that Unity had some sort of vehicle physics (albeit not very good ones) I wanted to have a go at this myself.
Here’s what I have come up until now.
Added shields and the energy pads, that will power the shields. At the moment the shields just protect the catapult and will vanish when hit. In the next version the energy pads will replenish the shields as long as they are not blocked by the projectiles that are being dropped.
http://game.lychesis.net/CP003.html
Fixed a couple of things and added a new type of enemy. Still no way to die, but I now have a good idea of where I am going with this.
We’ve been developing in Unity again at work and this got me started at several small games at home (just for practise and maybe a bit more).
Catapult is a variation of the old PC game called Paratrooper.
You control a turret and have to defend yourself from aircraft dropping bombs onto you all the time. It’s not very advanced as of yet but that’s mostly because I am trying and testing different techiques at the moment.
I decided to to do something about my homepage again and switched from LifeType to WordPress. The old site was having issues and has also been spammed regularly.
Most work went into transfering most of the content and comments from the blog. I also added and updated a couple of images and I finally added my gallery again. Luckily WordPress is able to reroute the URLs so I am confident this switch will not break too many of the old links.
I am still filling it and I am planning on adding new stuff to it. Let’s see how long that new years resolution will last 
Redesigned front-end from my Colours game
The new art design is coming along well and I am now working towards showing the player what has to be done as well as what he is able to do.
It’s becoming clear that I have several color matching directions (rows, columns and matching the central ring) and while these make the game interesting they are not merging together fluidly. The game mechanics are still somewhat complicated for anyone to just pick up and start playing.
I’ll have to address this before I can let anyone play this, but as soon as I have I will put up a playable demo of this.
Updated version of the new colours gameThis is another screenshot from my colours game. I changed a couple of gameplay mechanics and noticed that not all additions improve the playability. I’ll have to change the graphical presentation of the game to improve the gameplay.
I therefore posted this screenshot just before changing everything (again).
The game will still look similair to it’s current form but I want to overhaul the 3D side of it so that I can also do something with the surroundings.
I’ll keep you posted… hopefully soon
New variation of my Colours gameA simple Snakes game prototype
After finishing a game project for Capture in the beginning of the year I found that the game engine Unity3D, that we had decided on using, was also quite good realising game projects that I had been wanting to do at home.
I have purchased Unity3D some time ago and here are the first screenshots of two games that I have been fiddeling with.
The first one is an evolution of my Colours game, that I had already done an early prototype of in Microsofts XNA, only to find out that making an installable version for distribution is quite a chore. Being a 3D game engine I did a couple of tests to find out how to use this new dimension for Colours and this is now the first variation where I have the feeling that it actually takes advantage of being in 3D. It does change the game slightly, but I already had several extensions for the original game idea. I therefore don’t think that it will be a less enjoyable game than the 1992 version.
The second game is a Snakes variation which I started mainly to test a couple of game mechanics in Unity3D. Being a simple type of game I can very easily test aspects of Unity3D before using them in bigger games and it will also result in a little online browser game that should provide a little fun time on my sites (sometime in the future).
I already have several other ideas for games but, as always, work commitments and private stuff keep development moving at a slow pace.
While awaiting a final release date for Squares upcoming Final Fantasy XIII I had a look around previous Final Fantasy releases and made a list.
Now I know it’s a bit unfair to leave out Final Fantasy XI and add the delay to Final Fantasy XII but for me MMORPG variant wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and since it came out pretty soon after Final Fantasy X it’s development had probably started long before FFX was finished.
At the same time FFX-2 was only half a new Final Fantasy because it built on an existing FF world. Probably a tribute to having two Final Fantasy’s in the pipeline at the same time. This would also explain the long wait from FFX.
| Game | System | JP Release | EU Release | Gap to last game | Gap EU to JAP release |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Final Fantasy VII | PSX | 31.01.1997 | 17.11.1997 | 10 months | |
| Final Fantasy VIII | PSX | 11.02.1999 | 27.10.1999 | 23 months | 8 months |
| Final Fantasy IX | PSX | 07.07.2000 | 16.02.2001 | 17 months | 7 months |
| Final Fantasy X | PS2 | 19.07.2001 | 29.05.2002 | 12 months | 10 months |
| Final Fantasy X-2 | PS2 | 13.03.2003 | 20.02.2004 | 32 months | 11 months |
| Final Fantasy XII | PS2 | 16.03.2006 | 23.02.2007 | 36 months | 11 months |
| Final Fantasy XIII | PS3 | Q4, 2009 | Q2, 2010 | 42 months | 6 months |
What becomes clear is that, as the visuals get increasingly elaborate so does the development time increase. At the same time it isn’t a linear growth. What remains is that the european release often trails the initial release by nearly a whole year – time will tell if Sqare Enix manages to keep the european FFXIII inside the 2nd quarter of 2010 or if all the projected dates for FFXIII are completely wrong because Squenix may want to delay the world release to get the Xbox360 version ready at the same time as the PS3 version.
Sooo, the front page is new. Something broke my website and since I was to lazy to find the problem I redid the front page with a nice slideshow which will do until I rebuild the rest of the site. The blog survived unscathed and I used the occasion to update it’s software, hoping that nothing broke on the way.
I also relaunched the Amiga Graphics Archive with my own gallery system because ZenPhoto got a bit too cumbersome for my taste.