Crossroads
Hey all, so it’s been awhile since my last post and a lot has happened.
Macworld 2008 happened mid January, and it was good times. Got to see the Freeverse guys again, which is always fun. Between the unveiling of the MacBookJones, rocketing Freeverse up from butt-naked last to a healthy second place in the annual MacBowl, and narrowly dodging some bad cilantro, I definitely came back with some stories to tell.
I also came back with a bit of a dilemma. Up until that point, I was working pretty much with blinders on, and only on my own code for Mac/PC. But I made a few realizations while I was out there, as to the tools I have at my disposal, the platforms I develop for, and the types of games I’m working on.
The result of all of that is I’m at a bit of a crossroads as far as development goes. The first road leads towards Mac/PC development. Furthermore, along that road I can use my own code, or, get back into Unity. It’s always been in the back of my mind as the option if I need a full 3D engine, but logic wise it does a lot of similar things to my own code, and I’m trying to give the trial period a good long look. It’s got the advantage of immediate deployment, and relative ease of development. No SDKs or TCRs or anything- nothing’s stopping you from shipping any build you want. The problem is, the main audience on PC/Mac seems to be WoW players and soccer moms playing casual games.
Another road leads towards the Xbox 360. I have experience coding a full XBLA game with it (Marathon) and somewhere floating around Freeverse there’s a build of Kill Monty for 360. And no doubt, this is where my target audience is now. The hardcore aren’t using their Macs as their primary game consoles. God knows I’m not. I still have access to the XDK, but without one of the (very, very expensive) dev kits I can get as far as compiling successfully.
Yet another road leads to the DS. The past week or so I’ve hit the homebrew hard, and yes, there is a build of Kill Monty that runs on the DS. It doesn’t do everything yet, but it’s very cool. At first glance, the DS doesn’t seem like the place of my target audience, but I quickly realize that about 90% of my gaming time is spent on the DS. At least. The downsides are that it’s probably the hardest platform to port my code over to. Kill Monty is going smoother than I thought it would, but not nearly as smooth as moving it to Windows or 360.
Finally, as far as what game to make, the beat-em-up is going to go through a few changes. I’m currently going to whip up a quick editor for levels, and the way it’s planned, I can use it for several different genres of games, and it’s pretty simple to create and read. This will allow me to turn the beat-em-up into more of a platformer, and go from 2.5d to pure 2d with 3d elements. However, the editor will also allow me to easily create another game, one that I’ve been particularly dying to make, and one that a lot of people have been asking for…
Hey Fic,
I hope you still plan on doing some Mac developing as if you move to 360 or DS I won’t be able to play your future games as I have a Mac and, console-wise, I will soon be getting a PS3.