I put up an image a few weeks ago. It was a screen capture of a game I have been working on for a little bit. Here it is again. That shot was from the old version of the game.

Best Games - Elevator Action Returns Elevator Action is a classic arcade game from 1983, where you play as a spy infiltrating an office tower. Your mission involves ascending that tower to search for secret documents, and that will require the use of a lot of elevators. All the while, patrolling enemies will attempt to thwart your efforts. You have a few ways to fight them, but using the elevators against them is probably the most fun. It’s a great game. That’s not the game I’m writing about here.

During the Alberta Game Jam, Kyle Nissen and I created this nightmare. You are tasked with cleaning a set of teeth that will not stop chomping down on trash food. You can play it here.

​Everything I have ever learned about logo design, I learned by tracing. I’ve dealt with a lot of logos. I’ve probably only designed a few. More than ten, less than twenty, maybe. Might be more, but not a ton more. The amount of logos I have dealt with, I couldn’t even begin to count. And so very many of those I traced.

Neon Noodles, the game I did most of the art for, came out in full release this week. I think you should play it. You can find it here Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/990900/Neon_Noodles__Cyberpunk_Kitchen_Automation/

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.