I have finally gotten around to utilizing one of the old machines that has been sitting around for some time for something useful: a source control server. The machine is incredibly underpowered by today's standards, but for the purpose of being a repository for source control stuff it works perfectly fine. In conjunction with the regular backups I make, having things under proper source control is going to be very nice. In the past, all of my source/revision control was done by hand, which can be a major pain. I hope to utilize this new "source server" for all my future projects. There are still a bit of quirks to work out such as integrating everything properly with Xcode. At times I find that I need to do things by hand (via the command line) since Xcode doesn't offer an option through its interface. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it simply hinders progress as I have to go out and learn how to couple everything together.

After getting that machine set up I started the framework for a new project and tested everything out. It's working fine, as far as I can tell. As for the new project itself -- right now it's simply at the framework stages and I'm going to see if it is something I want to run with. As I see it currently, this project could be the offshoot from my previous unfinished project -- utilizing the characters and story, but presenting it in a much more fun way to play.

The framework itself pulls a lot from Fruit of the Loomsoft, so for you people who cannot guess: it is set up to be a side-scrollin/platformer. My initial direction is to run at a very low resolution, and scale up. This will give me less of a hard time when it comes to creating artwork. All of that said, nothing is set in stone and the beginnings of this project are just to simply test out whether my ideas about what I want to do are feasible.

And no: although what I'm writing is leaning towards a platformer, this is not a revival of Lune!

Once again an entire month has passed without an update. Unfortunately, there isn't very much to write about in terms of updates this post. Essentially no work has been done on any game projects during that time. The main reason for that was essentially a full courseload. Even though classes are now over (for now), I still haven't picked up on the previous project I have been working on--which leads me to a topic I'd like to discuss more: that project itself.

Obviously, even though I have been working on it for what seems to be much too long, I have never put out much information pertaining to it. I suppose this is both a good and bad thing. For obvious reasons, it is good that I haven't hyped up a project that I may no longer be continuing. On the downside, if I had showed it off to more people from the get-go, I would have probably discovered that there were some major flaws with it earlier on. Unfortunately, the game does have some serious issues. While on paper it sounded fun and lots of people were interested in it, in execution the game wasn't very fun at all.

There are things that could be done to alter the game and make it less boring/monotonous, but I've recently been exploring ideas that may make use of the game world and characters, which are essentially the elements of the game that I'm most fond of. If I can still tell the same story using the same characters in a way that is more fun, I would like to do that instead of trying to polish up a game that, at its essence, has some playability problems.

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt, however. I'm exlporing ideas for different game ideas as well as trying to determing if I really want to stop working on the previous project or not. It is my hope that next semester isn't as demanding and I will have more time to work on any projects whatsoever.