Got most of the game in place and working now. Pretty much all that's left is to add a whole bunch of level definitions and I should have a full playable game ready for RV next weekend.

New stuff in this build:

• Animated the various characters. Nothing fancy, just enough to add a little personality.
• All enemies now have distinct behaviours
• Autofire option targets nearest enemy
• Scores and high score table
• Fixed up all the collision boxes - some of them were way off

I'm really pleased with how this has turned out. After the ongoing clusterfuck that was DST it's nice to have a well-defined template to riff on, got me actually enjoying the whole game-making process again. :)

Wow, been a while. So, what's been going down in the Beercave since my last post?

Well, I rejoined the ranks of the gainfully employed back in June. The contracting thing just wasn't working out - think I'm just not mentally wired for chasing work to the extent that's needed. Anyway, the new gig's pretty good, much less corporate and soul-crushing than the last one.

Droidy Shooty Thing's temporarily shelved - I've never been entirely happy with the gameplay, figured I should quit beating that horse while there's at least a little life left in it and come back when I'm a bit less burned out on the damn thing.

In the meantime, I needed a project to keep myself moving. Something simple and fun where I could take classic gameplay and stamp a bit of me on it. And thus was born Lagertron.

Don't know why I didn't make this already.

So yeah, basically it's Robotron goes to the pub. Nasties have invaded the boozer, and only the mighty Beerman can save the beer. By drinking it all, obviously.

So far, it looks a little bit like this:

Not so very long ago, someone around these parts said something very much like this:

Still, I think I've pretty much found my toolset for the forseeable - Unity for 3D and heavy lifting, Java/libGDX for smaller stuff. I'm hoping to be able to bang out smallish mobile games reasonably quickly

You'd think I'd know by now not to go making grand pronouncements of The Way Things Are Gonna Be - seems like it's a great way to bring about Change.

So what happened this time? Well, it seems those nice chaps at Unity decided to make the iOS and Android versions available for FREE for the next month. Since free stuff is my very favourite kind of stuff, obviously I grabbed them as soon as their servers stopped melting.

Which leaves me with a minor dilemma. Do I carry on working with libGDX as my mobile development platform, thereby suffering the twin pains of building my own damn engine and having to code in bloody Java, or do I switch to developing exclusively with Unity, thus allowing me to once more get my C# on at the cost of losing the stuff I've done so far?

For future projects, it seems like a no-brainer, but Droidy Shooty Thing's pretty much done bar the polishing now. Not sure if the productivity gains I'd get from having a solid platform under me and a language I actually like would outweight the cost of rebuilding it from scratch...

Been a while since I updated, so here's what's been going on at the Beercave lately.

First off, the Beercave has moved. Still getting settled in and unpacked in the new place but I'm back to a point where I can get some work done again.

Playing Gods is coming along nicely. Had a minor hiccup in the early playtesting where it looked like the App Engine server I'd built wasn't really up to the job. I was having some pretty major stability issues with the Channel API, and some concerns about getting it talking to Unity. Fortunately, while poking around the Unity forums, I ran across SmartFox Server, a server platform designed for building multiplayer online games with a Unity API. Since SmartFox talks python it was a fairly minor job to port all the game logic from the App Enging server across, and I'm now much happier with what I've got.

I'm currently working on rebuilding the client in Unity. So far I've got a simplified board, player movement and card collection working, and it looks a little bit like this: