At least I’m getting a new post out before the previous one is older than a year…

I recently finished a huge academic project that took up most of my time, especially since New Year’s Eve. But with this out of the way, I’m free to concentrate on new things!

What I’ve been playing

I’ve pretty much finished exactly one game since the last post. It was Black Mesa, the remake of the original Half Life. And I loved it, they put a lot of work in it.

I started playing (again) Minecraft which will probably not be “finished” anytime soon… At the moment I’m trying to fix a village that has been spawned on top of hills and partly in a lake, when I’m not exploring an epic cave system in a mountain nearby :-)

What I’m up to

I’m working on a larger game project in Unity, which I’m planning to have presentable around GDC Europe this year. More info coming when the time is right.

Besides that, I’m planning several small games for testing out techniques, genres and programming languages. For the first one, I’m playing around with the idea of combining the classics Breakout and Pong. PongOut is the obvious name, which has already been developed: http://www.allgamesallfree.com/games1079-pongout.html albeit in a different form than I’m thinking of. The existing PongOut is a single-player game where you play Pong and Breakout simultaneously; my idea is to make it a two-player game that starts out with Breakout and becomes Pong while playing. A first quick gameplay test shows that it’s pretty bland at the moment, and only becomes challenging when the two balls are in play and the Breakout part is over. Concerning game design, I’ll therefore think about ways to integrate the Breakout part into the two-player aspect more.

Technically, I’ve built the prototype you see above in Unity. However, I’ve got a relatively good working knowledge of Unity, which is why I’m planning to port it to HTML 5. Good thing that udacity has just started a free HTML 5 Game Development class today :-) I’ll be posting about my progress here.