Novarunner

In space, no one can hear you shoot. Well, they can see the bullets, and you can now watch your ammo indicator to see if your ammunition is going down. Yes, the ammo indicator is now tied to your ship's weapons systems.
What else did I get up to since my last update?

• A lot of Animal Crossing DS. If you have it, and want to play on WiFi, drop your friend code in the comments. Mine is 0086-9644-9861. Beware, my town is a Lynch-esque land of defective personalities, bad language and worse interior design.
• Some more editor customization of Xcode.
• Projectile serialization as part of the game state.
• Projectile time-out, and other assorted projectile bugs
• Vignettes now have more game and camera control options, including emitting messages to the conversation window and zoom in/zoom out. No panning.

Stick Soldiers III

Working on the "XML Event" system, which provides multiplexed dispatch of events throughout the game system. Through this, you can wire up complex functionality using nothing more than a few building blocks and an XML script defining the multiplexing and filtering. It's remarkably powerful, and it will make weapon modification unbelievably more advanced than it was in Glow or is in Novarunner.

I am certain Andrew or Cow will post later with more.

Afterglow

Uhm, not much going on here, since I'm currently working on Novarunner and SS3. Bulked up the design document a bit more and fiddled around with polygon-polygon collision last night.

I'll take this time to mention my three primary problems with the original:

1. Not enough stuff. Needed a longer plotline, more stuff to do, more weapons with different strategies, more bad guys. A lot of people thought the game was actually incomplete, probably because of the next issue:
2. Stuff isn't more obvious. I refused to use special-case hard coding or scripts to programmatically emphasize certain scenes (the final gunfight with Greenbaumer, locating the bomb, dropping the bomb) and that confused a lot of players. It seemed anti-climactic to me.
3. Too hard. Many players are used to games where the enemies actually stop firing at you for a time, so they time their activity when there's dead periods in fire. I'm not that way; I was raised on Doom so I know enemies will never stop firing and so my job is to dodge bullets and shoot back at them. Making the game easier is a big goal here, but I have to do it without losing the brutal feel of the original.

Over the next few weeks, I'll give some more information about how I'm planning on tackling these three issues.

It's almost a year since I released the first version of Glow (September 26). Hard to believe it's been that long without a release from me, but recalling the difficulty of my third year it's amazing I had time to sleep. I'm glad everyone is patient with me.

As is tradition, I'll post up a postmortem of Glow probably around the one-year anniversary so you can see more in depth what I thought of the game.