Early competition update

Phew, I never thought I’d think of something to remake for the upcoming ‘Retro Remakes 2008 Competition‘.
When entering the two previous competitions I didn’t know what I wanted remake until at least a month in, which is a big waste of time given the limited time available, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to come up with something worth doing this time either.

Now I’ve finally come up with a couple of possible games, however, if I actually do remake any of them will depend entirely on the rules which won’t be out for a couple of weeks. I hope they’ll be okay to do though, as it’s hasn’t been easy to think of something.

The trick is to not only find a game you’d like to remake, but also one it’ll actually be possible to remake in the time available AND you still have to take into account how much time you think you’re going to put into it. If you’re entering a competition it doesn’t make sense to remake something that’s clearly not possible to do if you want to finish in time – like something with A LOT of ressources or locations in it.

Because of that my choices are relatively small games. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a small but fun game, and should I actually finish something early – well, who knows…perhaps I can find the time to do two games. That’s my plan anyway. I don’t want to take on too much.

Let’s see what happens on september 1st. 🙂

(Very) small update

See, this is why I’ve made a ‘Works in progress‘ section – so readers don’t have to go through the newspages to see if there’s anything in development.
Now it’s easier to spot and I’ve just updated the section with X-Quest 2 which I’m working on (sometimes).

Also, I found the time to update the games pages, so they all look right now. Who would’ve thought it would be f****d all up just because I edited the stylesheet to allow for wider posts.
…like I’ve ‘always’ said “I you want problems, get a computer“. 🙂

Long needed overhaul.

Finally I’ve decided on a new theme for my site. I’ve looked at hundreds of themes and ended up with about 10 choices, but I still couldn’t commit to one because none of them really satisfied all my requirements. Among other things I wanted was something more simple and elegant than my previous site – something that also looked “less designed”. Well, the answer was right in front of me the whole time. I decided to try the theme used at Retro Remakes – just for fun really, and actually saw most of the things I wanted right there. An acknowledgment of their good choice. 🙂
A bit of tweaking later and here it is.

There is now also a subsection called “Works in progress” to get an easier overview of what I’m working on.
– Nothing there yet though.
A new section called “Other retro stuff” which will be used for retrostuff that falls outside my own games.
I’ve added an RSS feed and soon there will also be Gravatar support.
However, it’ll be a few days until I’ve completed tweaking old posts and pictures to look better under this theme.

Perhaps I can get my ass in gear soon and ramp up my programming efforts. I’m only programming about once a week and that unfortunately means I’m getting close to nowhere with my WIP’s…and I so want to get on with my projects.

See you later. 🙂

/Sokurah

Falling down

Not just the title of the song I’ve just listened to, but also a description of my state of mind. Well, actually that may be exaggerating just a bit – I’m not about to go into a Burger King, waving a gun and complain why the burger I got didn’t look like the one pictured, but I’m not my normal self either. Depressed?…dunno – a bit perhaps, but when it comes to programming I AM feeling a bit burned out. So, Am I really burned out on programming or am I just having a midlife crisis?

This is all very existential and I wish I had an answer to it. As for the ‘midlife crisis’ – I am having my 41st birthday today (see, notice I didn’t write ‘I’m celebrating my…‘? But, I don’t actually think it’s a ‘real’ midlife crisis (wouldn’t it make more sense if I’d had it a year ago then?) – why would I lose my ‘programming-mojo’ just because I’m having a birthday? – no, I’ve actually not felt like like doing anything much, programming wise, for the last month or so. Don’t know why but it’s probably more likely to be the stress of needing graphics for a game and not feeling like doing it, and then completely losing my drive all together because of it…I think (and to be quite honest there are a few other non-programming factors involved as well).

Basically it means that I won’t be able to finish my project for The RR CD50 Project by the end of june as planned. Unfortunately.
It’ll still get done though. Perhaps if there’s enough contributions to the project this one can get on CD2 but it won’t be finished in 3 weeks as planned.

For what it’s worth I can’t be completely burned out because I’ve actually started up 2 new projects up over the last couple of weeks (both are games that are pretty light on graphics) and these will be finished – just as my other projects, but I just don’t want the stress of absolutely having to finish something specific to meet any sort of deadline right now.

For now I just need to recharge my mental batteries and fool around with something fun for a while. More ‘news’ when I feel like it.