Why good day everyone. Long time no see! I haven't written anything on this Tumblr in like 3 months or so. Why? Well I'm not going to lie to you - simply put: I've been slacking off! I haven't worked on anything really as far as games go, no progress, no nothing. I've been a little busy with school and such but that is not really a valid excuse. I need to get myself together, and the way to do that is to open a personal concentration camp! So I'm making a game. And it's not Holochrist (and not "TLBSS" if you follow me on Twitter), because that sort of requires that I have a budget, and I really don't have that at this moment. But I'm still doing a horror game - and it's going to scare the fuck out of you, I promise! I'm kind of enforcing a slightly unrealistic deadline upon myself, I want to be done this year. Is that possible? No, but I'm doing it anyway. And I think that with a good plan and extreme discipline I'll be able to manage. So far I have an abstract plan of how the development should go down:

Two months & two weeks of engine and tools creation

Two months of graphic asset creation and level/game design

One month of Music composing and sound design

One month of bug fixing, polish, play-testing and story that wasn't done in the second two months. Plus marketing!

That's not an easy set of tasks! And if I succeed I'll be able to launch either very late this year or very early January. And that would be spectacular! I've been looking at what how I should approach this, what language etc. I've decided to go with D as it has a nice syntax, modern features, freedom (like C/C++) while still running native code! It feels well designed and thus kind of makes you write good code by default! And that is definitely a positive thing. I'm writing my own renderer because I'm just crazy like that. Really though, OpenGL is not too hard when you start to get it. I love computer graphics so it is a nice challenge. It doesn't have to be too advanced anyway. I am relying on the following libraries for other aspects though:

GLFW3 - Window creation and input

ODE - Physics Engine

OpenAL-soft - Audio library

Derelict3 - D Bindings to different libraries like GLFW and OpenAL

There's probably other things that I need, like image loading (SOIL?) and so forth. I've already figured out the basics of how the engine should work, but I'm probably saving that for one of the next posts. Some juicy details that I'll say though -  are that I'm going to use Squirrel as a scripting language, and the *engine* will most likely be released as free software (Zlib<3) that you can use later on to make your own game. The assets won't be freely available though, so don't think I'm saying that the game will be free. Only the cogs and pipes driving it! This was just an introductory post (thus 0/20) and there will be many ahead. I will tell things I learned and details about the engine. Probably no real details on the actual game will be revealed until later, except for maybe some minor teasers! ;) Cheers