I was in Port Orchard for a few days with family and without the ability to write any code or work on any projects (except by knocking together the odd sprite on my phone) I found myself thinking about the decaying puddle of old ideas that I still can’t let go of. I decided to do a drawing for each one of them that I still liked and write down the next step if I wanted to go work on it THAT MINUTE. That way, when I find time, I always have a concrete Next Task to accomplish.

“Space Family” is the working title for a game where the player is a caretaker on a space station and they balance their various chores with spending time with their family. Each task is a ritual that can be performed with some DDR-style directional arrows and they use up some of the day. At the end of the day, the game keeps track of what they spent their time doing, and they can transmit a Demon Soul’s -style message composed of words made available by their actions.

So far, I have the “star-gazing” ritual in, and I want to add the rest of them before adding the other family members. All the rituals will use the same class (which I’ve already written), so adding the rest shouldn’t take long.

Super Chicken is a single-screen blasty game with some weirdo enemy design and art that is more involved than my other things (it’s maybe a notch above Together Fight). It should be done by now, but it suffered from Way Too Many Ideas For One Game, which is the natural consequence of planning a game with a first grader. Shoot the Butts had similar issues for a long time. To get back to basics, I had to do some thinking about Super Chicken’s main verb, and how I wanted to structure bonuses. At its heart, this is a Bubble Bobble / Gauntlet mashup, so Super Chicken will “pump up” enemies with a basic attack, and then burst them with a charge attack, which will release bonus letters, which will access additional bonus attacks, for POINTS POINTS POINTS and lots of sparkles and blobs.

I decided to make Super Chicken’s basic attack his “cluck”, so I need to put that into the game along with the rest of the mechanic. After that is fun, I’ll start adding bonus items et cetera.

Junibibi and Kunibibi is a user-designed time trial platformer about planting flowers and having a picnic with your friend. It is SO CLOSE TO BEING DONE; it’s in that regrettable polish phase where I have to find an elegant way to explain its weird controls and its in-game editor, I need to fix a bug in the online database that it uses, and I need to add sound. The biggest priority is the bug, and then the UI stuff after that.

I’m really excited about trying some more procedural things with the sound to make exploring all the different object interactions aurally rich, since the gameplay for this one is pretty basic.

Hungry Forest is an arcade RTS where you play as a forest god defending your home from HUMANS. I LOVE Hungry Forest but it needs a lot of work. I spent too much time messing with procedural generation for level layout and not enough time programming AI and implementing the player’s build options. I was also WAY ENAMORED of the ant colony -esque pathfinding I had made, so it takes too long before you are in conflict with the humans.

The number one thing I need to start working on this is to increase the rate at which humans spawn (and die at the hands – branches? – of the forest). Then I can start adding human types, king abilities, and forest structures / animals to begin balancing it.

Bentley Bear In The Ascent of the Soul is my take on Crystal Castles, where Bentley Bear uses his powers of meditation to cause gems to appear inside his soul castles, which he collects to open up an Inward Door.

Bentley’s verb set is basically complete (except I need to add a “WHOA” animation and a brief pause before he falls into water, to prevent UNDUE PLAYER FRUSTRATION), and there is one territory control -type enemy, but I need to add a hunting enemy to increase tension during meditation. Then it’s just a matter of adding enemy types, designing levels, and adding sounds. This one is actually pretty close.

SO. Them’s all my Irons, right there in the Fire. GOALS. Yes.