This is some concept art I am working on. The game project this is for is a retro-pixel top down affair. The character won’t look like this in-game. It will look more like this. I made this stand in so that I could test the perspective, the shaders, and the animation pipeline, but I always knew that the character would end up looking different. At the time, I hadn’t determined what that different would be. I wanted a character and a style that fit the retro era of the game. So, sometime late 80’s to early 90’s. I wanted a touch of North American, a touch of European, and a touch of Japanese in the style. A game that could have spawned from that arcade, console, and micro-computer soup. This is the best I have come up with so far. ​

Best Games - Dead Connection The attract mode for Dead Connection opens with a screen that says Taito Film Presents. So far as I can tell there was never an official division of Taito called Taito Film. That fictional declaration helps to set the tone. This won’t be the usual arcade action fare. Aliens, zombies, monsters, you aren’t going to find any of those here. Dead Connection borrows from a lot of sources, not the least of which are the historical crime dramas Untouchables and the Godfather. Gesturing toward film makes sense. This is a game that oozes cinematic style. That is far from being the most interesting thing about Dead Connection.

I have been sort of off and on with the game project recently. Between finishing up some polish work on Neon Noodles and getting a couple more stories ready to submit, I haven’t done much work on the coding and mechanics side of my 2D game.

Best Games - Silpheed Silpheed wants to set a mood. The game opens with a few lines from the end of Julius Caesar over a simulated star field. “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown”

I’m in the cooldown period. Whenever I finish a draft of a story (this is the second of this particular story) I set it aside for a little while before looking it over again. The cooldown period could last anywhere from a few days to a week or so. Just enough time for me to not feel so close to it, but short enough that I haven’t forgotten how I want it to feel.

A while ago, I created a method of rendering out fixed direction Normal and Depth information from 3D models in milliseconds, rather than the seconds or tens of seconds that it would take using most common methods. That might not seem like a lot, but if you start rendering out animations, those seconds stack up.

As I type this, my son is downstairs playing Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. When he’s not playing it, he’s watching videos about it. The rest of the time, I’m probably playing it.

Best Games - Area 51 Arcade light gun games are a tough one. I can write about them here, but unless you happen to have an arcade or a barcade near you, I don’t know that there is an easy way to play them. You could always play them using a mouse on an emulator, but I can’t recommend that. It feels pretty bad.

I haven’t done a writing update in a while. So, what’s the state of my writing at the moment? Not good. Or fine. Maybe it’s actually good. I don’t know.

This week, I did my first bit of 2D, by hand, frame to frame, animation in more than twenty years. To be clear, this wasn’t on paper, it’s likely been even longer since I’ve done that, but it was the same sort of -flip back and forth making small changes by hand- style of animation that I haven’t done since school.

Best Games - Duke Nukem 3D I’ll start this off by addressing the realities of time. Just trust that I will get around to why Duke Nukem 3D deserves to be on the list of best games, but we have a necessary detour to travel first.

I’ve been working on a bunch of shaders recently. Some of them do things to the pixels as they are drawn to the screen and some of them do stuff to the geometry before the pixels get drawn to the screen. It doesn’t really matter, the result is the same. There is some input information, a program beats that up a little, and then it draws the result.

My 2D game project is coming along. Most of my time with it has just been learning the ins and outs of Godot 4. Like I said before, I have only really done a very small amount of dabbling with Godot, and that was quite a while ago. It seems like a very competent engine, and everything that I have wanted to do with it, I have been able to get working. After a while.

Best Games - Half-Life Half-Life isn’t a game. It’s a place. It’s somewhere you go for a while. You spend time there. Like going on vacation or travelling to an amusement park.

I like to ride my bike. If I’m going somewhere fairly nearby, I will probably take my bike. If I’m going somewhere further, but plan to stay a while, I will probably take my bike. If I’m going to be drinking, I will absolutely take my bike.