Ping - 2025.52 - Happy New Year! (Again already?)
Hello and Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to everyone!
A Dragon and the Tower
A successful 1.1 release with Esperanto translation and Windows 95, 98, ME and 2000 support.
We have also opened all the scripts we used for packaging A Dragon and the Tower.
I would really want to extend INSTEAD-9x to more platforms. There's HX-DOS that can be used to run SDL apps on DOS. SDL 1.2 is available on ton of other platforms (what about bringing back Symbian, Haiku support, introducing AmigaOS support, maybe more). We are pretty limited by 640x480 resolution requirement, and I'm not sure what to do about that without butchering the graphics.
Don't Follow the Butterfly
Approximately 2/3 of the game's plot are implemented in engine. It doesn't mean that the game is 2/3 ready though. It's closer to 20-30%, since plot is only the foundation. We'll need to make the UI, polish the gameplay and flesh out the texts. We need music and sound (the sounds we'll be taking from available sources, but for the music we'll have to do it ourselves or find a real composer). This game will be much larger than A Dragon and the Tower, despite also being set in a quite constrained environment.
2026: This is our primary project for the year, and we intend to push it as far as we can.
This project is led by Sabra Naikomy and my role is purely implementing the stuff and, surprisingly, planning. As usual, it's going quite a lot slower than we originally anticipated. We don't even have the whole plot thought out, not even implemented. Planning a side-project is exceptionally hard, since nearly everything else has higher priority (work, daily routine, small errands and so on).
Snail
The beginning is set. The first published article was a result of long prototyping, trial and error. There are still things to research, but mainly the goals are known and we can proceed with making the Engine.
2026: We are going to make Snail into a foundation for our next games by defining the API, preparing the necessary libraries, and building the tools.
The idea of trying alternative runtimes is quite fresh. Initially, I was fully set on using Lua mainly for the reason "INSTEAD uses it". However making "my own INSTEAD" would be a fatal mistake. Although I need some features from INSTEAD, Snail needs to be designed for a completely different type of games, and thus has pretty different requirements. Not even speaking that INSTEAD never targeted the machines I'm going to target.
Awakening
This game was undeservedly (IMO) stuck in half-released state. I have had a lot of ideas of improving it, yet somehow never getting to them. I am also quite unhappy with the name, especially with ideas for a remake and a prequel story.
2026: Finalise the game, translate it to English, repackage it as version 1.0. Start the work on future remake.
The first pancake is always lumpy, I guess. This was my first "finished" project and I made a thousand of mistakes during it's development. However it's an important piece of my past, and nevertheless a curious game to be played. In the remake I would like to redo almost everything: the Na'vji'a'rr language, the puzzles, the gameplay, extend the plot and more. Essentially this will be a completely different game. That's why I think it important to preserve the original as is, translate it and make accessible to players as the origin of the story. I would also be happy to translate and repackage Princess Asurja's Morning, but it's too tiny to warrant a separate header.
Thank you for your attention! Until we meet again!