Staunch fans of the bloggity (if it can in fact be said there are any) may have noticed a slight two month hiatus in game development news and updates. I could have sworn that I posted an entry about why that was going to happen, but it looks like that slipped off of the bottom of the To-Do list before I got to it. So without further ado, here’s an explanation for what happened then and an update for what will be happening in the immediate future.

To get to the nub of the matter as quickly as possible, an extremely important project spun up at work with an incredibly tight deadline. In fact, not only tight but entirely inflexible as well, as it was being driven by vendor changes. Due to the scope of the project I not only started working earlier and staying later, I also started using my free time to work on it as well.

Naturally this put an extreme dent in time I could spend working on any game development tasks. I got a little burned out on digging for solutions to problems and slogging through the parts of development where you know exactly what you need to do but it’s just a time consuming task to grind it all out. Needless to say, that made the idea of spending what little free time I had left on doing the same thing something that seemed less than appealing.

My wife also experienced an increase in workload at the same time (including extended hours), so a large portion of my remaining free time was spent with her. With what was left I alternated between playing some simple games that didn’t require a lot of thinking and playing around with Sublime Text to get more familiar with how all of the parts hang together.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been giving more thoughts to upcoming plans, and ideas are sparking for various projects. Not that they always haven’t, but I’m starting to feel that old excitement to try out new ideas instead of pushing them away. I think I’ve recovered sufficiently from my burn out, and just in time.

Devember is fast approaching and I will once again be participating; I had a blast participating last year and i’m looking forward to doing so again. As last year, this year’s project will be a prototype remake of a game that I’ll try to polish as much as possible over the month.

There will be a future post before Devember officially kicks off with more details, but my current plan is to use the TypeScript port of my JavaScript “game engine” that I worked on last Devember. This time it will be a game that I haven’t actually played before, so I’ll have to do a bit of research to make sure I’m on the right general track, but unlike Rx I’m not going for a rigidly defined clone, just something along the same style. Then we can see what develops.

In the unlikely event that I manage to flesh out the new prototype to what I consider to be completion without running out of time in Devember, any remaining time will be spent working on some ideas for Sublime Text plugins. In fact that may be another section of the Bloggity that I’m going to spin up, possibly with some tutorial screencasts. Plans are still bubbling away on the back burner on that one.

All of this leaves ts-breakout at about 98% or so; there are only a couple of exercises left before that project can be considered finished. At this point I’m unsure if I will try to push those out before Devember starts or wait until the new year to finish them off. I think I’m going to need to spend a bit of time with the code to re-familiarize myself with how I put it together.

In any event, the upcoming months are going to be fun filled!