July 07, 2008
games

Not Dead, Just Been Playing Mass Effect

Not a lot of activity in the last month, but I think July’s going to be a little crazy. My latest game, Boulder Blast, launched June 10th. I did a whole post-mortem on the game, but I’ve had a few hurdles to jump through before it was cleared by Shockwave’s legal department (nothing nasty–just had to dot my i’s and cross my t’s). I’ll refresh that a little and get that out ASAP. Later this month will mark the 6-month anniversary of Filler’s release, so I thought it would be cool to do another “progress report” post. There are a couple of cool things going on at work that are probably worthy of a post.

People are already starting to ask me what I’m working on next, but so far the answer has been “nothing.” That’s not strictly true, of course, but nothing major. After Boulder Blast, I decided to reward myself with a little time off to finally sit down and play Mass Effect. I just finished it last night, so I may write up some of my thoughts on it a little later and post those. Besides Mass Effect, I’ve been slowly tinkering away at a couple of more abstract prototypes. I think there’s an activity in some of them, but if Nibblets taught me anything it’s that a novel idea doesn’t necessarily make for a fun game. I make keep them locked in the idea vault or I may just post the prototypes and do a little post on why I don’t think they’d succeed. While prototyping out various ideas for Flash games (to go along with the half-dozen or so that I’ve more or less spec’d out in my head), I’ve also just installed Visual C# and all the various add-ons needed to build games for the Xbox 360. As a first project, I’m going to port Filler over to XNA and toss in some multi-player goodness. If I get around to getting an iPhone, I’d probably do the same.

I’ve also taken up micro-blogging, as evinced by both a new Twitter account and a new Tumblr blog to document my ongoing love affair with food. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve registered a few more domain names in the last couple of months and I’m currently building a prototype of a to-do-list/mind-mapping application which might come in handy for managing all of that stuff that’s going on. Well, actually, managing that stuff isn’t so rough. It’s mainly so I can force myself to schedule rewards such as “play Mass Effect” instead of working on hobby projects with all of my spare time.

Stay tuned…