Ping - 2024.52 - Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, everyone!
Time to summarise the last year:
- A Dragon and the Tower was released with 499 downloads across all platforms (gathered on 29.11.2024 в 19:18 UTC);
- My first successful attempt at writing music for a game; I'm not sure if I want to continue;
- Kitty, my second short-story released on this website;
- I've returned to streaming. Sadly, running two channels in parallel is not realistic, so I need to choose:
- I will finish current stream-series on my Russian channel and after that will move completely to English -- this will let me focus on a single channel;
And to share our plans:
- Ping will come out monthly, we will use week numbers for them;
- We are working on a new game. Right now we can only share so much:
- It is going to be a fantasy text adventure, noticeably larger than A Dragon and the Tower, but it will also has less graphics. We are actively working on prologue and chapter 1 right now. This is our primary priority for 2025 and we will put maximum effort into this project. Important thing is that it will most likely be pay-to-play;
- Plans for A Dragon and the Tower 1.1 finally decided:
- Main effort will be on game optimisation and lowering system requirements:
- Simplified graphics mode -- removing animation in main menu, replacing alpha transparency with more light-weight effect in the endings;
- Working build of INSTEAD using SDL1, compatible with Windows 9x-2000. So far results are like this:
- Playing on my Pentium 3 is much more pleasant. There are no freezes on Windows XP and on Windows 98 the game runs even smoother;
- There are currently issues with file-system -- no saves, engine crashes when trying to show the list of games. These should be quite fixable;
- I need to investigate running on non-SSE machines -- some of the dependencies included are built with SSE, thus requiring a Pentium 3 or higher CPU;
- Compatibility with Plainstead. Despite graphics being an important part of the game, the gameplay does not depend on it that much, so we can reduce the requirements;
- We will work on improving translations support as well -- details will come later(it still needs some further checks);
- Think (but do not promise) on possible support for resolutions lower than 640x480 -- here things are limited by the art, which is made for 960х600 and is cut for smaller screens;
- We are starting the work on an engine for new games. Primary project goals are:
- Maximum API stability. A game written for an older version of the engine should work on newer ones without changes;
- Efficient sprite-based 2D graphics and formatted text;
- Maximum cross-platform support without sacrificing either of the above;
- Smaller plans:
- I'll focus on streaming games from INSTEAD repository on my Russian-languaged Youtube channel. Streams will happen twice a week, unless otherwise noted;
- This will most likely be the last series of streams in Russian for the foreseeable future;
- I would like to make a video-review on Outer Wilds in English. I'm not sure if I finish it this month, though;
- Reviews will not be something regular, most likely I will switch to a textual format -- videos are taking too much time and effort, but I still would like to share opinion on some projects later;
- Write at least one short-story this year as well;
- And finally some technical points:
- Most likely we will remove bug tracker soon -- we have switched to another tool anyway;
- We are still looking for a solution for EMail-subscriptions (it's not critical yet with our posting regularity);
- If the next game is going to be pay-to-play, we need to implement some authorisation mechanism for downloading it (we'll return to this closer to the release).
Thank you for your attention! Until we meet again!