Is it just me, or was 2012 a bit shit?

It seems that the games industry has forgotten what used to make games amazing. And the business side of things seems to have become uglier than ever…

The slow death of the consoles

Another year, and a whole lot more studio closures, not helped by the somewhat predictable flop of the Vita (and Sony axing studios they’d set to work on Vita titles). And now we’ve had a very underwhelming Wii U launch, too. I’m not sure even Nintendo knew what they were going to do with that controller-screen, and without a successful gimmick, they’re basically launching a current-gen console just a year or so before the next generation arrives…

So now we’ve got a new Xbox and Playstation expected within the next year or two. For the first time ever, a new generation of consoles that won’t show a huge step forwards graphically from what we’ve got now. (nothing like the previous jump to to HD+shaders) I’m not really sure how they’ll sell them. And with development costs so high, I can’t see there being many next-gen exclusives other than a few big titles funded by MS/Sony.

I think we’re going to see cross-platform development reach a somewhat extreme level, with developers supporting 5-6 platforms (New Xbox, New Playstation, 360, PS3, Wii U, and maybe PC). Ouch, I wouldn’t like to be anywhere near a 6-platform end-of-project crunch…  now that’s going to be painful!

Although maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if the next-gen versions ran at 60fps, and current-gen at 30fps. But sadly, in the console development world, 60fps seems dead.

Thirty fails per second

Yes, the demise of 60fps console gaming has continued, and it seems that there’s little chance of the console world ever returning to that ‘one true framerate’ that we so enjoyed in the 16bit days, and on all those mid-90s arcade games. We’ve seen Devil May Cry and Forza joining the growing list of franchises that dropped to the ‘dirty thirty’. Carmack predicts that 30fps is sadly here to stay, even on next-gen hardware.

Personally, I blame YouTube, for not supporting high-framerate video on the web. With no way to see the glorious fluidity of 60fps in online promotional videos, it all comes down to screenshots.

Far too many people, even in the industry, still claim ‘but you can’t see more than 24-30fps anyway’. This is clearly bullshit. Try to make a scrolling 2D game, or a fast-paced rhythm game, at 30fps, and it looks, well, shocking. If 60fps wasn’t clearly better, then why did all those arcade game developers back in the 90s choose more framerate instead of more detail when making early 3D classics such as Ridge Racer, Daytona, Sega Rally, Virtua Cop, and many more – on much more limited and challenging hardware than we have today?

But it’s not just the issue of promoting a 60fps game online, or even the technical challenges/risks involved in making one. It’s also that there’s too many wannabe-movie-makers in the games industry these days. People that genuinely believe that 30fps is better, as it’s closer to the ‘magic 24fps’ of movies. People who don’t realise that 24fps simply came from a trade-off between smoothness and cost when using old film cameras to make movies. And people who don’t want to accept that game are not movies – for interactive games, you need to see all the action clearly. For non-interactive movies, you can let the viewer’s imagination fill in the gaps.

It seemed a great thing that in the film world directors were starting to question 24fps, and try to do better. It was great news that The Hobbit was being filmed at 48fps, but sad how quick the critics/reviewer were to slate it – so conditioned into only accepting 24fps as ‘cinematic’, and unwilling to consider anything else. Admittedly, I’ve not seen it yet – haven’t located a 48fps showing locally, but I’m looking forward to seeing that. I’m not a fan of 3D myself though… kind of wish there was a 48fps 2D version too!

But at least it’s been an attempt by the movie world to move forwards, whilst the gaming world still seems to move backwards… But with consoles dying, maybe it won’t be a big deal for long. Many PC gamers, indie devs, and mobile devs still value good framerates!

The closing of Windows

The biggest and ugliest news of the year was Windows 8, which is really a glimpse at Microsoft’s plans for the future of Windows. Clearly, Windows 8 is one heck of a clusterfuck, but it’s sad that most commentators have just talked about it simply as a huge UI design failure. But really, it’s about far more than that.

Microsoft have seen Apple’s iOS success, and are desparate to imitate it. They want that locked-down platform, with an App Store as the only place software can be obtained, where all developers can be charged 30%+ of all revenue to develop for the platform. And they’re willing to sacrifice everything to get it.

To Microsoft, Win8 isn’t broken. The ‘fix’ for all the ugly Metro<->Desktop switching is simple: Remove the desktop. That is clearly their new vision for consumer versions of Windows. Like iOS, it will be a platform which is solely for consuming content, and utterly useless for *creating* anything. And yes, it’s already here, on sale, as Windows 8 RT.

The whole thing has certainly got Valve scared. They’re making huge amounts of money from Steam, and a closed Windows threatens it all. So they’re trying to make a move to Linux. But Linux is under threat too, from ongoing UEFI Secure Boot shenanigans, which could make it impossible to boot Linux on future ‘designed for Win8′ x86 hardware. But that’s OK, there’s a ‘Steam Console’ on the way…  So as gamers, you’ve got a choice between Microsoft’s closed, locked-down platform, and Valve’s closed, locked-down platform…

The real question is how Microsoft will treat developers and enterprise users in this ‘Closed Windows’ world. They can’t kill the desktop entirely, can they? I suspect that we’ll be seeing a ‘Windows 9, Enterprise Edition’, which features a desktop and is able to run unsigned code, but at a much higher price. OSX could well do the same, as it’s consumer version continues to morph into ‘iOS X’…

Fee To Pay

So with consoles dying, and the PC under threat, we look to mobile devices… A few years back, they were an exciting new world for game developers. Then there was the ‘race to the bottom’, and an increasing struggle to make money from £0.69 games. Then ‘free’ was the new £0.69, and everything got really ugly.

This year has been about the battle between ‘nice F2P’, and ‘evil, exploitative F2P’. And sadly, in this epic battle of good vs. evil, the good guys didn’t stand a chance. The top grossing iOS chart has been dominated by exploitative F2P games, those that suck you in then force you to pay and pay and pay for consumable items – pay to skip excessive grinds/delays,  pay to win battles, pay to gain power…  Games that have ‘buy more shite!’ buttons plastered across their UI at all times. Games that aim to out-Zynga Zynga. Games where the ‘money mechanics’ take precendence over gameplay mechanics.

‘Nice F2P’ has been attempted – just selling cosmetic items, permanant upgrades, or real content. But sadly, it rarely seems to succeed. There’s been a few notable failures during the year, particularly by indies trying to go F2P but be nice to their customers, with no nasty consumables or manipulative psychological trickery. Jetpack Joyride was one big success which did it nicely, and a memorable feature that differentiated it from ‘bad F2P’ games was that it didn’t get greedy and offer £69.99 packs of coins, but it stopped at something like £12.99.  And most of the upgrades and accessories are permanant, it doesn’t pressure you into buying consumable items.

But there’s not many examples of ‘Nice F2P’ succeeding. F2P supporters will continue to point out League of Legends and TF2 as huge examples of if working, even outside of mobile. But it’s always those two same examples, whoever you talk to! – To me, that’s like saying ‘Subscription MMOs are the next big thing, look at, erm, WoW!’

Bundlegeddon

Whilst mobile has been tough for a few years now, it’s seemed like a particularly tough year for PC indie devs. We’ve had Valve giving ‘lesser indies’ the middle finger in the form of Greenlight, and we’ve had a relentless barrage of Indie Bundles, reducing the value of PC indie titles to maybe £0.50 or so each…  We’ve also seen the continued rise of the ‘super-indie’/'celebrity developer’ – successful developers who wield immeasurable power, and whom can make or break a ‘lesser indie’ in a single tweet…

Bundles. I just can’t see them as a good thing. Humble Bundle was a great idea to begin with, especially with the charity aspect. But ever since they recieved 4.7mil in venture capital, I’ve been a skeptic. Bundlers are middlemen and gatekeepers. The last thing that indies need are more middlemen and gatekeepers. Humble Bundle in particular seems to set rather high barriers to entry, too – usually requiring games to be on Mac and Linux as well as Windows. And since Humble succeeded, there’s been endless attempts by others to create competing bundles – usually with very limited success for all involved. But it’s created an attitude of ‘I’ll wait for it to be bundled’ amongst gamers, as well as reducing the percieved value of indie games, which is rather unhealthy.

Greenlight. Well, there’s been plenty of rants about this, particularly with the $100 fee added simply for posting a title on Greenlight. In theory, it was supposed to be a good thing, a more transparent way for indies to attempt to get on to Steam. But in practice, it’s the graveyard of Steam rejects. If the game is good enough (or more importantly, by a suitably well-known developer), it simply gets to bypass Greenlight.  It’s very clearly a 2-tier system, just look at recent indie releases in the Steam client. Greenlight is mostly just a holding area for games that Valve can’t be arsed reviewing.  Ok, there’s been a couple of successes. Out of maybe 1000 games on Greenlight, a whole 6 have made it on to Steam. Congratulations to Sos, whose McPixel was the first greenlit game to arrive on Steam!

But it’s not all bad!

Whilst it’s seemed like a shit year for the business side of game development, when it comes to actually making games, things just keep getting better. Hardware keeps getting faster, and tools and middleware are constantly improving, and it’s getting easier every day to create games!

The ‘death of Flash’ was massively exaggerated, and we now have Stage3D as an option to bring higher-performance Flash games to the web, as well as FlasCC for C++ to Flash porting possibilities. HTML5 is slowly maturing, too. And Unity has become massively popular. Myself, I’ve continued to use Marmalade, which lets me develop for iOS in C++/Visual Studio, without a Mac, and also build for Android with minimal hassle.

However, the risks of relying on middleware have made news again, with the demise of Openfeint, and Gamespy shutting down their indie-friendly offering

Indies have continued to create some awesome games, a couple of my favourites of the year being Thomas Was Alone and Super Hexagon, with Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia also being a very memorable interactive experience.  I’ve really not spent a whole lot of time playing games this year. When I’ve not been making games, I’ve spent more time messing with RC helis/quadcopters, and drinking beer! I need to make more time for actually playing games next year – I’ve got a growing collection of unplayed and barely-played games in Steam, and there’s a few really great XBLA games that I’ve not got around to playing yet, too…

Game Jams have been increasingly popular, too, with thousands of games made during Ludum Dare contests alone, and around 2000 developers signed up for next year’s ‘One Game A Month’ event!  I was a bit lazy this year, and didn’t complete any Ludum Dare games, something which I hope to correct in 2013!

And personally, I’ve released two games this year – Little Acorns (iOS+WP7) came out back in February, and then Skyriders in October (iOS+Android). Whilst I haven’t really earned enough from these to keep doing full-time indie development long-term, I’m glad that I’ve given it a try, and actually got two games out!

I noticed that I had quite a collection of Skyriders screenshots in my Dropbox public folder, that I’ve tweeted or posted to Screenshot Saturday during it’s development. And thought I’d write a little ‘Making Of’ post based around them…

So by February this year, I was finished with Little Acorns. I probably should have done the sensible thing, and made another platformer, based on the codebase and experience from Little Acorns. But I wanted to do something quite different. I experimented with voxels and deferred shading on the PC briefly, a 2D rollercoastery game featuring a caterpillar, and a word game, of all things – before starting Skyriders…

March

The beginning… Let’s get some polygons rendering.  I had a decent amount of reusable code from Little Acorns for 2D rendering, but the 3D side of things needed doing from scratch. I was working in C++, with Marmalade, but also had a native Win32/D3D build to maintain.  Anyway, the first screenshot…  basically a tilemap wrapped around a cylinder.  With the old HUD from Flutterpillar (the caterpillar-rollercoaster prototype) on top. Just seeing this rendering really smoothly on my iPhone4 made me want to carry on.

Later in March – the tunnel could now curve left/right/up/down, and I’d written a basic model converter/importer (Export from Blender as COLLADA, and convert to my own custom format. A very simple format that supports hierarchies and basic material properties, but no animation). This was the first successfully imported model – the Blender monkey!

I’d also started to hook up a physics engine. I went with Tokamak, as it seemed fairly lightweight compared to newer engines, and therefore easier to integrate into a Marmalade project, and more likely to perform OK on mobile devices. I had fairly minimal physics requirements – I just wanted a sphere colliding against a static environment. Although the environment did end up having quite a lot of polygons in it.

April

Textures, and a skybox! And the first experiments with models for the player. I didn’t really know what it was going to be at this point, but you can see the basic shape of the player ship that survived to the final version!

By this point, the tracks were getting more interesting, and weren’t limited to cylindrical tunnels. I could blend between a range of cross-sections, allowing the tunnels, flat sections, and curves like those in this next screenshot. I’d also improved the textures a fair bit, and added boost/slow pads (although they were just textures at this point, gameplay was still fairly non-existant)

Tracks were built using my ‘TwoDee’ editor. This was originally designed for non-tile-based 2D game. Then adapted to support tilemaps for Little Acorns, and then abused to build Skyriders tracks!  You can see that the track is 20 tiles across, with a special column of ‘control tiles’ at the right hand side. These control the cross-sectional shape of the track, and also control the curving and banking of the track. It’s nice and simple, and keeps the level data very small, but it’s not WYSIWYG, so can be tricky to work with.  Luckily, I could get the edited track back into the game and test it within a couple of seconds/couple of clicks.

Yay, I had a name for the game!  And it was time to replace the old HUD. Not sure why I made this a priority so early on, but this was the first mockup of it. And it stayed more-or-less like this until the end:

The player ship had also been updated, looking very much like the final version. But with a fairly rubbish attempt at a character within it!  It was also environment mapped, but still didn’t look great.

May

So where did May go? I suspect that was spent on UI work, and implementing that new HUD layout – sothe screenshots of that were less exciting!

It was either that or the threading woes. I’d decided that I’d generate the track mesh on a thread, as it comes into view – to avoid generating it all up-front as the level loads. I wanted to be able to join up a number of levels into a long ‘Challenge Stage’, and expected problems if I allocated and generated the whole thing at once.  Well, I got that all working nicely, or so I thought. It was fine on PC, the Marmalade Simulator, and on an iPhone4.  But on an iPad 3 it just crashed randomly. As I’m using Marmalade, I couldn’t do any on-device debugging, and the crash was too random to track down by printf debugging alone. It turns out that Marmalade had known issues with threading on iOS. I couldn’t be sure this was what caused my problems, but I’m guessing that it was…

Eventually, I just scrapped the threading. For normal levels, the loading pause is fairly insignificant. For the (much longer) challenge stages, there’s a noticable loading pause on slower devices, but nothing major. It did require a fair chunk of extra RAM, though. But it improves performance in-game, as it’s not generating geometry in the background.

June

Here’s a shot showing debug output, just after adding support for mesh entities with collision meshes. The green polygons are the currently active sections being collision tested.

By this point, I’d got a nicer looking player ship, an improved skybox, and the red/yellow colour-switching mechanic was in-game. I’d also added some glow effects (ships engines, and the collectables). The new HUD was also in.

July

Tutorials…  I hate implementing tutorials…  I’d prefer to assume that gamers can figure out simple control and scoring systems, but for mobile games, you can’t really even assume that…  I also had to explain the less-obvious colour-switching mechanic.

Time for some tech work. I’d been getting the Android build up and running. This needs a separate data build, as iOS uses PVR texture compression, and for Android, I needed to use ETC1 instead. My first attempt at supporting ETC1 didn’t quite work…

But soon that was sorted, and it was running quite nicely on Android – here it is on an Xperia Play, and a Nexus 7:

Oh, look – there’s a ‘Games We Like’ button there, too!

By this time I had a composer helping out on the project, and adding music to the game made a huge difference, as it usually does!  We experimented with dynamic music, by playing two music tracks at once – keeping one playing all the time (percussion/bass), and fading the ‘overlay track’, containing the melody, in and out based on how well you were doing. This worked out fairly well, but it’s something that we could have taken further.

(Ogg playback was done via stb_vorbis – This worked well, except for discovering a small memory leak in it, which I only found when my release candidate crashed!)

August

So I’d spent the best part of 5 months on the game now. Longer than planned – it was supposed to be a quick project. But writing my own tools and rendering code, as well as doing my own art had slowed things down. And I only had half a dozen or so levels built. I was aiming for 40 levels, split over 5 zones. So it was time to start on the skyboxes/textures for the other zones, and get building levels!

Here’s an early shot of Zone 2: Emerald Nebula:

I’d also found time to add the trail effect to the player. I’d been wanting to add that for ages!

One of the biggest late-ish changes was to lower the camera and widen the field of view. This hugely improved the sensation of speed. After doing that, and improving the Zone 1 textures, I was, for the first time, quite happy with how the game was looking:

 

September

Levels, Levels, Levels. I really underestimated the time required to build levels. Even after Little Acorns, where we did exactly the same…

But much of September was spent on level design and zone retexturing, as well as adding the upgrade system. Zone 3 became a very vivid orange, but I was quite happy with how the skybox turned out. Skyboxes were created with the excellent SpaceScape, and Genetica was used to help with texture creation.

I also had some playtesters trying out the game, and got some decent feedback, which led to a bit of UI tweaking. The UI was looking a bit nicer now, too:

So by the end of October, I had a finished game! yay, finally!

I’d gathered together all the required screenshots, text, and icons for a submission, and it should have been on its way to the App Store, but plans were somewhat spoiled by Apple’s release of the iPhone 5…

October

Well, the game runs on an iPhone 5 – look, 1136×640!:

Unfortunately, that’s not good enough for Apple. You’re not allowed to support that resolution with using the new 6.0 SDK.  Which isn’t a problem for native developers using XCode, but as I’m using Marmalade, I can’t update the SDK myself, I’ve got to wait for Marmalade to release an update. (And it sounds like they’re still struggling to get hold of an iPhone5! – I must have just got lucky to walk into an O2 store and get myself an upgrade!). It’s a shame that Apple won’t give major middleware providers earlier access to hardware and SDKs, to help avoid such delays.

That update should arrive at some point this month, and I’m praying that it won’t cause any new problems, as I’ve got a hopefully-bug-free submission-ready build here now…

So whilst waiting for that, I’ve been tidying up the Android build. That one will be a free download, with an in-app upgrade to the full game. This makes sure that nobody pays for the full version on devices that won’t run it well. That’s in a fairly good state now,  although I’ve still got a couple of issues to track down that occur only on one specific model of phone so far…

And I made a trailer

If all goes well, the game should be arriving on the App Store and Google Play around the end of October, maybe early November!

And there’s some screenshots from the finished game here

So, 6 months later…

Yes, it’s been that long since I posted anything on here… although I’ve been tweeting a fair bit.

Little Acorns was released, did OK-ish. News on other platforms coming soon-ish (unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re releasing on Android, though). Anyway, after that I spent time prototyping a couple of other ideas – a word game, then Flutterpillar, a rollercoastery thing with a caterpillar.

The new project

But neither of those went very far, and I ended up working on a 3D into-the-screen game, influenced by old classics such as Trailblazer, Sky Roads, and STUN Runner. The working title is ‘Skyriders’, and it looks something like this (video is a few weeks old, though). Technically it’s going quite well – it runs at a nice smooth 60fps on an iPhone 4, and the rendering is working fairly cleanly – simple-but-effective lighting, environment maps, and alpha-fading out in the distance. You really can’t do anything clever with shaders on iOS is you want to run at 60fps on the iPhone 4, unfortunately…

Other distractions…

It’s been a slow few months for progress, between being ill, unmotivated, or just plain distracted by things like this:

A small quadcopter, powered by an Arduino, a Wii Motionplus board, and the open-source MultiWii software… It’s done a lot more crashing than flying so far, but it more-or-less works…

Anyway, time to start updating this site a bit more, and try to do some proper dev blogging!

A New Beginning

At the start of 2011, I was working at FreeStyleGames, and had worked on a couple of great projects there (DJ Hero 1 and 2). But early that year, a project was cancelled, and it was looking like Activision were going to close the studio.

We went through a very grim 3 month consultation period, expecting the worst. In the end, the studio survived, after making significant redundancies. Which turned out to be my opportunity to have a go at some full-time indie game development!

I’d experimented a bit with iOS earlier in the year, and decided to use Marmalade (formerly ‘Airplay SDK’) – as this allowed me to develop in C++, using Visual Studio on Windows, and target both iOS and Android. It provided a ready-made platform abstraction layer and a good build system. And it let me use OpenGL ES directly.

My first game was initially going to be ‘Fluff’, a physics-based rotating-level platformer that I’d already started to prototype. But I quickly realised that it was quite an ambitious project, especially if I was going to do my own art. So really, I either needed to work with an artist, or work on something smaller, at least for my first iOS game.

Fluff had actually made some decent progress though, especially looking back at this screenshot (before I really messed up the grassy tileset, trying to reduce the chunky black outline/shadow on it!). But there wasn’t much gameplay there.

Fluff is currently on hold. It may be revisited in some form, eventually.

From Little Acorns…

But by July, I’d teamed up with Andy Gibson (who I’d worked with in the past at Gusto Games), to work on what at the time was called ‘Hurry Home Mr. Squirrel’. Andy had been trying to make this game himself for quite a while – but as an artist, it was his first programming project. So whilst the art style had made a lot of progress – the game code, based originally on the XNA Platformer Starter Kit wasn’t in such a good state…  Andy had been aiming to get it out on XBLIG, but really wanted to get it onto iOS.

Initially, it looked like a very simple project, maybe 2 months or so, keeping it really simple – a scrolling tile-based platformer with only a few enemy and collectable types. I adapted my existing level editor, ‘TwoDee’, to handle tilemaps for the project, and withing a few days there was a squirrel jumping around them on my iPhone.

An early build of Little Acorns, running on iPad, iPod, iPhone, and Windows (on a Mac…)

Soon that quick+simple project started to grow in scope… I wanted to add the grappling mechanic from one of my Ludum Dare games. We prototyped it, and both loved the results. I polished the controls, optimized the rendering to ensure we’d get a solid 60fps out of an iPhone 3GS or above, and it was starting to look rather good.

Playing other iOS platformers – which mostly had poor controls or bad framerates, motivated us further. More features! More polish! More levels! And a shorter name… ‘Little Acorns‘ fits nicely under the app icon!

After a surprisingly productive 3 months or so, the game wasn’t far from finished – it mostly needed levels building (but we had another level designer helping out, too). We sent a build to Chillingo, who liked it, and are now publishing it.

That led to a fair bit of tweaking and a bit more feature creep – and before I knew it, it was late November… That little project of ours had taken about 5 months (1 full-time-ish coder, 1 part time artist/musician, 1 occasional level designer)

Anyway, it’s finished now (at least on iOS), and I’m quite happy with the end result. It’s just down to Chillingo to spread the word – it’s going to be in the App Store on Feb 16th!

Little Acorns: Screenshot from the finished game

It’s got a preview thread on TouchArcade here, and a first trailer is here (cool, almost 1000 views!).

So that was my first 5 months of indie development. December was a bit of a write-off, I’m not really sure where it went. I did bits of work on Little Acorns porting (Android/PC), but we’re now holding back on that to see if the iOS version sells, and whether it’s worth investing further time on these.

I also started working on a word game prototype, some sort of mix of Scrabble, Tetris, and Greedy Bankers. The current working title is ‘Cunning Linguists‘, but that may have to change…

Other Stuff

So what else happened in 2011. Well,  I completely failed to do anything about my weight/health. I’d hoped that once I didn’t have a full-time job, having less stress and not being tied to a desk from 9:30-18:00 would have helped. But so far, it hasn’t. I’ve spent a similar number of hours at a desk anyway, but without the walk to and from work…  I really need to make more of an effort this year to cut down on the beer and snacks…

I’ve accumulated way too many mobile devices (6 iOS devices, 1 Android phone, and 1 WP7 phone so far), and expect to end up with even more if I get serious about Android… Or if Apple really do release an iPad 3 with a ‘new year’s resolution’ of 2048×1536 (1024×768 doubled) that I’d have to support…  But I started out with a reasonable amount of savings (saved whilst living cheaply, like a student, in a shared house whilst earning a reasonable salary for a couple of years!), so I’m not broke yet, and I’m anticipating at least another 6-12months of indie-ness, before having to find a job if I’m still not earning anything significant…

On the more positive side, Midlands Indies got started this year – monthy pub meetups, alternating between Leamington and Coventry. The turnout has been pretty good most of the time. And I managed to get to a couple of TIGJams, which were fun.  And of course, there were a couple more Ludum Dare entries!

So now it’s 2012…

Despite Little Acorns taking significantly longer than intended, maybe that wasn’t a bad first 6 months as full-time-indie. One game made, from start to finish. £0 income (yet) – but some reusable tools/code developed, and a fair bit of experience dealing with iOS. Also, my Photoshop skills have improved a fair bit.

So what’s to come this year?:

Firstly, Little Acorns updates and porting work. If we go ahead with the ports, or an update for iOS, this is likely to be keeping me occupied for at least a little while. We’ve got an Android build to tidy up, and have the option of releasing on PC, too (maybe via IndieCity), and it looks like we may be porting to WP7, which is a significantly bigger job.

Then I’d like to finish at least one, but ideally two more games this year. The first is likely to be the word game (iOS), and the second will be something a bit more ambitious. There’s the possibility of a momentum-based iOS action game. Tiny Wings meets Unirally, sort of. Or a fast-paced into-the-screen 3D game (influnced by STUN Runner, Trailblazer, and more). Or maybe I’ll resurrect Fluff…

Alternatively, I may do something with Flash (+Stage3D). Maybe finishing the twin-stick-shooty-game that I started for Ludum Dare 22, or maybe something rather more ambitious and multiplayer…

Also, I’ve got to avoid becoming too addicted to SWTOR or any other evil MMO!

And I’ve still not really done anything with this website/domain…

Ok, it’s the start of a new year, time to get it sorted out before getting back to coding!