Argh, things always take longer than you expect. I’m still hoping I can manage to release 4 games before the end of the year, but don’t hold me to it. However, it means that I’m still working on “stuff” and that many of my current projects are in pretty advanced stages of development.

Now, what exactly are my current projects, I hear you ask?

• First there’s my Doctor Who graphical adventure game (I won’t post any more pictures here until it’s finished, so you’ll have to search my Twitter-feed to see pictures of it). The game is 2/3 finished and hasn’t run into problems or anything, we’re just trying to come up with some good puzzles for the last third of the game (but haven’t really given them much thought lately).
• Then there’s a vector version of Berzerk. That is also almost finished. The big problem here is coming up with some good animations for the maincharacter. Not a big deal…but of course one has to actually sit down and make them.
• I’m also working on a game for the ZX Spectrum. It’s a Cybernoid clone and code is basically finished and I could polish it off and release it in a week or so. The holdup here is the graphics which are all temporary. There is an artist attached but he has taken on lots of paid graphics work which means his focus is on other things. I can’t expect a project that doesn’t pay to be prioritized over something that does, so I have to wait until his schedule allows him to finish the graphics for the game. I’m sure it’ll look good in the end though.
• One exciting thing (for me anyway) is that I’m also working on an arcade game. This game is Speccies 2 but intended to run on real JAMMA arcade hardware. And it does. The game itself is actually finished and has been tested on the real hardware, but there’s a problem with inconsistent soundeffects volumes and I need to figure out what causes that before I release it. To run this game you can either burn the ROM to chips and plop them into a suitable arcade PCB, but it will run happily in MAME as well. I made this game – which is nice and simple – to learn how to code for the hardware, but once I’ve finished these 4 games I have plans for bigger, better and faster arcade games. One thing at the time though. There’s a screenshot of the menu below.

Speccies 2 arcade menu.

On top of these 4 projects I have several other games that I also hope I can finish soon, but we’ll just have to see when me and the people I work with can find the time to finish off the last bits of these games.

I’ll write more when I have more to tell. 🙂