Projects Into The New Year

Oh so many things left undone:

I'm still working on some interactive fiction using Adobe's AIR. This was to be my Text the Halls entry, but dog and holidays intervened. Right now the setup is a combination of HTML and keyboard input. Basically the user is granted letters by making their way through rooms and they can use these letters to perform actions in the room. It's a halfway point between the traditional parser where users might try random words and the interface in Randolph Carter where they were totally limited by what was on the screen. My biggest hangup here is, oddly enough, writer's block. I've got the framework back into a condition where I can mostly just write (my design goal for Carter) ... but now I'm unsure what to write.

Yesterday, I broke out WOTGreal and started poking around some of my remaining UT2004 code. I did this partially because the gametype I had in mind last week I knew I could get coded in UnrealScript in a few hours ... and got it coded in a few hours. Now I'm looking at what needs to be cleaned up and I'll probably release a pack of four or five gametypes. After that, I don't know if I'd try to finish up any of my larger unfinished projects (I still have a prototype for turn-based combat in Unreal) or move on to another engine. Thanks goes to Matt for pointing out the OpenArena project to me - it's an interesting codebase.

Outside of that I'd like to tap into playing with Facebook - realizing that social apps actually make web based games more interesting. Also, I wouldn't mind taking another stab at ASCII Adventurer using Flex instead of DHTML, since that might solve my performance problems.

In the dead pile is the old music shooter I had started way back when. Maybe if I could steal P's computer for a month I would get the Universal Binary stuff worked out. Otherwise I'd probably drop the music part and see how a shooter would work in AIR or Flex.