Why Am I Dead

Here’s an overdue update on the little Flash game I’ve been working on recently. On the story/concept side of things, the title is “Why Am I Dead”. I won’t talk too much about the story, because that would defeat the whole point of playing the game, but the premise is that you’re dead, and you need to figure out how and why this happened. You do this by going around and taking control of other characters in the area and using their unique characteristics to get important information out of people. Anyone can be possessed and moved around, so the puzzle is figuring out what dialogue between which two characters will get you closer to the truth.

I wanted to come up with something that would be interesting but wouldn’t require very complex game mechanics. Even so, the programming has gone slower so far than I would’ve liked, mostly because I’m pretty rusty with AS3 and I’ve gotten used to the .NET family of programming languages and all that comes with them. So far I’ve got basic collision detection and navigation going, but the other mechanics are still being worked on.

I wish I could say I’ll just put everything else aside so I can finish this exactly on schedule, but that’s not realistic or practical. But I’ll probably just go over a day or two. After that I’ll try to get the swf file of the engine up, and then I can begin creating game assets to be used.

Getting the Ball Rolling

Things have been pretty hectic for a while but now that they’ve finally started to settle down, I’ll be able to really get stuff going here. Some disparate things that I’ve been up to which will almost definitely pop up in the future:

– I’ve nailed down the concept/outline of my first Flash project, which is meant to be a small and unambitious game just to get my feet wet in Flex production. As a result my timeline is pretty short as well; I hope to get all the programming and writing finished by June 1.

– I’d really like to start getting into the world of open-source programming, and so my first step in that is schooling myself in version control. Basically, I’m reading Pro Git.

– I’ve been polishing and fine tuning a previous project of mine, called ‘Mandate’, to the point where I feel comfortable putting it online for all to see and try out. No particular timeline for this outside of ‘very soon’.

Hello World

Why hello there, person currently reading my blog! This, if you had not yet noticed, is the first post out of hopefully many others to come.

Let’s talk about what these hypothetical future posts will contain for a second. My main interests include programming, game design, the study of history, and to a much much more limited extent, art. So, you can expect a lot of posts to be about what I’m currently learning and trying out in programming. You can also expect some to be about what game pet project I’m working on, at which times this will mirror an indie dev blog. Some posts may just be me remarking on history that I’m reading, or wondering aloud about the study of history in a meta sense. And some may be me posting illustrations and trying to make progress in that area; eventually I’d like to migrate to digital art, but at the moment I’m content with sketching basic anatomy. Baby steps, and all that. And most importantly, somewhere in all of this I might actually do or say interesting things.

So, if any of that sounds up your alley, stick around!

I’m not yet sure what the schedule will be as far as updates go; for now I’m just going to post everything whenever I want and we’ll see what sticks. Alright, let’s do this thing.