UPDATE: Changes are a-comin'.

Yeah, yeah. It has been awhile and all that. I won't bother throwing any excuses your way, I've mostly just been lazy. I've also been incredibly busy with school, sick, and working on a new SDL game that I haven't told you about.

So I guess I will bother throwing excuses your way. Whatevs.

Work on the Quake game has been nonexistant. There is a reason for this: I'm so bored with it! One of the little truths you discovier about game development is that the hardest part (and there are plenty of hard parts) is the very end, when all major development is done.

All of the major coding is done, the asset work is all done, and the map is finished. What remains is testing and tweaking, and MAN is it a drag. This last stage of development consists of tweaking some little value in the code or piece of the map, and then testing it out. Rinse and repeat a billion times. The only challenge is to your patience, and I guess lately I've been losing that battle.

That said, I really do want to get this game out and soon. With that in mind, I'm instituting something called "Quake Thursdays" around here.

Yes, every Thursday is now "Quake Thursday". I promise to work on the Quake game for at least a couple hours, at the end of which I'll post a bunch of screenshots here on the blog to show you what I'm doing. Hopefully this will see the game to a fairly quick release.

In other news, as I stated earlier I have started work on a new SDL game. I'll give more details soon, but for now I can say that it will be a little game that should be quick and easy to produce (coding wise, the assets are scaring me a bit), and will hopefully pretty fun. I'm toying with the idea of actually selling this one, so I'm pretty excited about it.

Hmm, what else? A gaming news site called Ultima Aiera has made its way into my list of daily must-visit sites. Specifically, it has news about the Ultima series of games and about the creators who had a hand in bringing the games to life.

'How much news could there be about a series that has been dead for a decade?', I hear you ask. Well as it turns out, a pretty good amount of news can be generated about a series that has been dead for a decade. Dick. There are tons of remakes and updates to the series to be reported on, as well as hopeful (though ultimately futile) rumors of the series being continued or restarted again. But more important and interesting are the articles that showcase the old design documents and artwork from the venerable games. It makes for some good game design reading, if you are into that sort of thing.

Other cool things: In Por Ylem 2 has gone into beta, marking yet another experiment with unrestricted PVP in an MMO environment. These experiments always prove interesting. You get to see just how much crap regular players, who make up the bulk of the playerbase, can take from unabashed a-hole players, who exist for no other reason than to ruin the game experience of those regular players, before the regular players give up and leave. Once the normal players leave, the a-holes, having nobody else to torment other than eachother, themselves leave and the game collapses.

We've seen this countless times (the original UO, the original In Por Ylem, Shadowbane, Darkfall) before. Yet there is always some designer who wants to try the experiment again, I guess thinking that this time it will be different. Who can blame him? On paper the concept of near-completely unrestricted PVP is brilliant. Sadly, it just never works, mostly because there are too many players who will take advantage of the loose ruleset and use it to ruin the game for the other players.

Anywho, I don't want to get into that. So many other, better and more experienced than me, designers have gone into it before.

All I want to say is that Azaroth is taking another crack at In Por Ylem. He has brought some interesting design decisions with him, and hopefully some lessons learned from the original In Por Ylem. If anybody can get open pvp right, it's Azaroth with IPY2.

Oh, and I beat Ultima 8: Pagan. I've been playing this thing for over 15 years! Everybody will tell you about much much crap Ultima 8 was, and it does have its annoyances and plot holes. Still, it was always be my favorite (and first) Ultima, and one of the games that originally made me want to make games myself. Cheers, Pagan.