Explod’Head

My sittuation have changed a lot those last weeks.

I’m currently unemployed and looking for a new job. Technically I’m still employed but on leave until the end of this month, that is the end of my contract.

For the last days I’ve rest and cleaned my appartment and i’m still working on making it a better place to live and work. I’ve been working on my CV too and will soon be able to hunt for a new position.

This time of transition is perfect to get back to NetRush more efficiently and maybe some other (webcomics) projects (for left brain fun). As soon as my home workspace is cleaned – and it’s not an easy task to clean it, I’ve neglected it a lot lately – I’ll work on NetRush as much as I can until I  find a new job.

I’m really missing my laptop – that died last year -, it would have been better to go work in a park all day, enjoy the beautiful weather and nature. I really need some (long and far) vacations. Unfortunately I am not able to take some now, for money reasons. I’ll take some time to walk out, but I’m more interested in finishing NetRush currently.

Those last months I’ve been busy with a lot of things but I’ve managed to advance a bit with NetRush. Among other minor works, I’ve decided to try Falcon as scripting language of the project. For some reasons I think it might be a better solution than Lua for NetRush. I’ve been working on intergrating Falcon code in the project but didn’t have a big enough time window to finish that.

I’ve also started to integrate Google Protobuf to generate and manage the game state data format. That will be ideal as most ot those data need to be sent to network and serialized on disk. It’s not a perfect solution for every project, but for some NetRush game state data I think it will be of great help.

I’ve started – finally! – to setup the code for the “real” game session. I’m plugging systems togethers, adding some other systems to fill missing parts, to get a playground as soon as I can. There is still a lot of work until I get to something playable but now it’s the priority because I really want to have the editor of the game usable as soon as I can. The editor will be in the game so the code of the game is in great part shared with the editor – that will be available to the player too. I’m trying to get this level design tool quickly as it will be of great help fo debugging, balancing and starting the real game level design.

I also made some technical decisions that will allow me to easily extend the game base in some awesome ways later. But it’s still too soon to talk about this. :)

Last night I’ve read the news about the IGF submissions already open until the 1st November. That fills me with motivation and challenge but I don’t think I’ll be able to achieve enough work to send something in time. I hope that this unemploymed transition will be a great boost on the project, but will it be enough?

I’ll make it possible. Stay tuned.