I’m back! I mentioned before in my previous post that I’d be away for awhile, but I ended up being gone for far longer than I intended. In this post I’ll talk about what happened, what I’ve been doing, and what’s next.

What Happened?

I flew down to Louisiana on November 15th to spend time with my family over the holidays. I had a great time catching up with friends and family well through Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was gearing up to dive back into work head first when the unthinkable happened!

Due to incorrect assumptions on my part of how Dropbox (a free file backup/sharing application) handled synchronization, I ignorantly re-partitioned my hard drive without backing up the files first (assuming that Dropbox would still have my files on the server). When I finished getting my partitions exactly how I wanted them, I re-installed Dropbox and started syncing.

Much to my dismay, when I returned to my computer, I noticed my Dropbox was finished syncing, but I only had 1 folder and it was empty! Luckily, when I contacted Dropbox support, they were able to rollback the event for me. It only took about a week for them to respond and soon enough, all of my files were returned to their rightful place. Unfortunately, at this time I had already been struck with the next stroke of bad luck.

Shortly after Christmas, I fell sick with flu-like symptoms – an illness that would plague me for right around 3 weeks straight. I spent a lot of time in bed, 14-18 hours most days (including New Year’s).

What I’ve Been Doing

On January 15th, I was finally able to start working again. I had discovered Terraria during my sick days and it inspired me to continue with what I started way back in the Flash Game License Competition. Instead of build from what I had, however, I decided to start fresh (since most of the code was hastily slapped together for the competition). I also decided to document the whole process, just as I had done for the contest version.

After a few days I decided to challenge myself with a little 72-Hour Game Jam to see what I could throw together. For this, I recorded the entire 72 hour period, not just the parts where I got work done. I spent a lot of time after the period ended putting together the footage I took, and learning how to use some simple editing software. I ended up making some videos of it by cropping out the inactive sections. Overall I think the project turned out well (more on this in a few days).

During the duration of the Game Jam, I thought a lot about what I wanted to do with the new digging game I was working on. I knew that I definitely needed to add multiplayer in at some point so I began looking into Player.IO as my solution. After about a week of playing with Player.IO and getting a few different things running, my plans for the project spiraled out of control. It was something that I was (and still am) extremely excited to work on, but to do that I needed a way to earn some more immediate revenue.

In early February, one of my childhood friends approached me with a plan to visit Japan in June. Making a trip to Japan is something that he and I have been meaning to do for the last 8 years, but couldn’t due to whatever reasons cropped up at the time. This got me excited about learning the language again, and I spent 2 weeks straight doing only that. My Japanese is a lot better now as a result, and I plan to maintain my studies as the months go.

Around February 20th I was satisfied with my level enough to slow down a bit and get some more work done. I finished Range Man, a fun little spin-off of Melee Man (more on this tomorrow that post is live now) with the help of Andy Brown and Daniel Davis. Andy helped me out with the level design while Daniel applied is retro wizardry to game’s audio. The game is already out now (as of February 18th), so if you don’t want to wait for the official announcement post, you can play it here.

After getting Range Man out the door I went back to work polishing up the result of the 72 Hour Game Jam that I mentioned earlier. I’ve been working with Andy and Daniel again to get what is now called “Recursion” ready for sponsorship bidding on Flash Game License. The game just acquired its name yesterday (up until then it was just called “72 Hour Game” or “Game Title”), and I spent the bulk of today working on the game’s opening slideshow cut-scene.

What’s Next

As of this post, I’m only waiting on 2-3 more levels from Andy and the audio from Daniel. It’s been great working with these two talented artists on yet another project and I hope I get the chance to work with them again in the near future. Once I get the final assets and give the game a few play tests, I’ll be uploading it to Flash Game License for primary sponsorship bidding.

Tomorrow I plan to write the official Range Man Viral Launch post (edit: now available here), and add it to the Melee Man website, my Products section, and my flash portal experiment. On Friday I’ll write a little more about Recursion and provide a few screenshots and videos from its development.

Once Recursion is launched, I plan to devote some more time into getting my Player.IO project (now called 2D Heroes) running. I’ve got lots of very ambitious plans for it, and will likely need the help of my fans in early alpha testing rounds soon. I’ll post an announcement here when it’s ready to start accepting testers.

I have been working on a secret side project off and on during the events that I mentioned in this post. It will also be up for primary sponsorship bidding on Flash Game License sometime next week. Fans of some of my previous work should be very excited when they find out what it is, as it’s something many of them have asked for repeatedly. Stay tuned for more about that in the following weeks.

Conclusion

I’m glad I finally got around to writing this post. I’ve been wanting to get this blog back up and running for a few months now, but I couldn’t figure out the best way to get the ball rolling. Now that I’ve got some games coming out soon, I’m confident that I can create enough content to write here about my weekly adventures. Expect a lot more transparency of my development process in the weeks to come.