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A small side project I programmed is up online and available to play. It’s based on several popular college drinking games and you can play it at www.circleofdrunk.com! I’m looking towards starting a new side project now and I think it’d be really cool to do an adventure game. I use to play adventure games all the time, especially the “Hugo” series by David Gray (http://www.dgray.com/hwpage.htm) and with the current popularity the genre is gaining from the Double Fine Adventure project I think now would be a great time to start working on one. I’ve been doing a bit of research on creating a really clean and easy to use GUI for one. I like the way “Been There, Dan That” handled click actions but I think I want a button menu along the bottom of the screen. As far as theme goes I’m thinking up something with a modern setting and I think I want to do a few outdoor areas and stay away from the mansion settings that seem to somewhat monopolize the genre. I do want to have a section involving cave exploration because I have some fun ideas for a few puzzles and think it would be fun to loosely base a portion of it on Ted’s Caving Page…

Looking at everything I’ve got due in the next week or two I think I’ll be working some long nights this week, both at work and at home. I’ve got several projects I need to wrap up at the office this week and I’m really hoping to finally launch the side project I’ve been working on this week as well. I’m aiming for a Thursday night release but that could be Friday depending on how quickly I get my hands on the remaining final art assets.

This weekend I don’t have any plans so I’m hoping to possibly start work on a new side project or maybe just setup some generic base code for some future projects I have in mind…

Today is going to be filled with my least favorite thing to do… Fixing bugs.
I’ve got a pretty huge backlog of minor fixes I need to make for different projects so I’m slowly making my way through that list today so we can include all the changes in the next patch for each of the different projects. So far they’ve all been pretty basic fixes and haven’t taken me too long but I have run across a few odd ones…

One bug report stated a sound file wasn’t playing in the background of a certain game. After going through the code for about fifteen minutes and not being able to find the error I booted the game up only to find out this bug had been fixed awhile back and never removed from my list.

Another one stated an animation wasn’t playing and when I looked into it all the code was in place it had just been commented out and there was a note saying that the animation wasn’t to be played. So I just added it back in, though I wouldn’t be surprised if in another month or two I get another bug report saying to remove it once again…

I’ve been pretty busy with work. I keep getting new projects added to my long list of things to work on. I’m pretty sure my current list is at least 20+ games long… I’m hoping to be able to get some work done on a side project though tonight and a bit more later in the week.

I’m finished with the majority of the programming on my side project but I’m still waiting on a bit of the art. I figure while I wait I might just program the mobile version as well. I was going to wait until I got a Pro license for Unity3D and just rebuild the project for mobile but now I think it might just be easier to do it from scratch for the Android platform. I can optimize it better that way and it’ll give me some experience with another development engine.

The other day I needed to test the award screen for winning a game and couldn’t even beat it so I needed to eventually program in cheats for myself so I could test the winning conditions. Now in the bug list I was sent there was a concern about if I had forgotten to add in the losing event because apparently the designer got really lucky and beat it every single time he tested it without much trouble. Either he’s super lucky or I’m super unlucky…

Also, I bought a domain for the side project I’m working on. Planning on making a few improvements to it tonight as well. Now I just need to fix up the website, my site design skills have gotten a tad rusty… 

Finished up a game yesterday and made some changes to another today. I’m busy working on a title for a mid-February release but I just got a list of a bunch of new games I need to convert to Facebook. Looks like the next couple of months are going to be fairly busy.

Outside of work I’ve made some more progress to one of my independent projects. I plan on doing some additional play testing with it this coming weekend and hopefully I’ll have it online and playable by the end of February… Most of it’s done already I just need to add in some sounds, an options menu, and replace all my placeholder artwork. 

I had a group of around twelve people play testing my current game project this weekend. We found a couple bugs but for the most part it went well and people seemed to enjoy it. I have a new list of things I want to change and a few small features I’d like to add but I really don’t think there’s too much left before it’s finished…

Made a few more additions to the game I’ve been working on. Added a bunch more placeholder art but I got some of the final art in too. It’s looking pretty nice, I’ll probably post a screen shot once I’ve got a bit more done and then once it’s finished I’ll give a download link…