2021-04-25

Well, it’s been a while.

The Punk Collective met last Wednesday in the city. Burgers for lunch, following an impromtu tour of a nearby co-working space. Really conveniently located; accessible directly from the main underground train station, and just a 10-minute journey from my local train station. Seriously considering a membership; it’s around $150/mo for five days access per month, which is around what I think I need (basically get out of the house and meet up with other solo developers once a week or so).

Apart from that, have been working on Blattix! I’ve added walls, collisions, shooting, sound effects and music (purchasing ten punk rock tracks for unrestricted commercial use for $99). Controls feel tight, and it’s fast.

Next steps are to get a simple game loop happening (I’ll just make Asteroids for now) and get builds shipped out to the other punks. This will mark the end of the first month of development, and we’re limiting ourselves to just three months. In the second month, I will focus on refactoring and fleshing out the gameplay, adding waves of different enemy types, progression through levels, boss battles and so on. The final month will be bugfixing, polish and optimisation.

Remember that I’m trying to limit myself to spending just a third of my time on this particular project, so next month I plan to make some room to continue work on Gumshoe and HackTile. Busy times.

Unfortunately we’ve gone into a snap lockdown due to some community transmission in Perth. I’m focusing on a three-day gamejam to distract me from those concerns, and things will hopefully be back to normal soon…