what i've been doing

I guess I'll go ahead and tell you what I was working on that was so important. Well, I had it in my head that I was going to get rich by making an Xbox Live Indie Game. I got quite a lot of work done, but ultimately I decided to scrap the project because the XBLIG service doesn't really look that profitable. There are too many junk games on it smothering the few decent ones and I don't think there's a very huge target audience anyway.

Here's a screenshot of what I had so far. As you can see, I drew my inspiration from many sources. It was a turn based strategy game somewhat influenced by XCOM with elements from games like FFT and Disgaea. The story was a ripoff of Aliens and the alien designs were inspired by Half-Life 2, Warhammer 40k, and Alien.

I made a lot of progress, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth it so I came by to my true love, roguelikes! At first I toyed around with a new game about surviving in a post-nuclear war wasteland. Before you go shouting "FALLOUTRL!?", no. I decided to explore the nuclear winter idea because I haven't seen that done often. As a result, I spent a bit of time implementing an interesting heat generation and propagation system, which you can see in this screenshot.

I also worked on a simple electricity system which turned out pretty interesting...

I learned a few things while working on this game and it gave me a few ideas. It's still something I'd like to go back and work on eventually, but in the end I can't stay away from CPRL!

The screenshot I posted yesterday was to show off my new scrolling, seamless map system. Now you'll be able to walk from one end of the world to the other with no notable map transitions!