Tough year

Well, a few days ago summer gave way to autumn.  That's important because I once told Zzap Amiga!  that we were aiming for a summer 2024 release. Now that summer has gone, where's the game?

It's been a bit of a tough year. After halting work over the Christmas period I did start to work on the graphics again in January. I didn't get into a massively good flow with it at first though. Natalie wasn't as enthusiastic with the programming as she had been in the run up to the game jam either, so not much work got done on that front. That wasn't massively significant though because we agreed that the thing that needed the most work, and that the priority should be enemy AI. We though that was vital in order to make the game more fun and more playable. Whilst Natalie has done really well, she's still very new to programming, and AI, even the lowly AI found in 16 bit games is on the more challenging end for someone new to the craft. My day job is programming so it seemed sensible that I should jump in and handle that bit. Speaking of the day job...

Development on the game came to a complete halt in early March when I was made redundant from my job. We spent the next ten weeks watching the funds in our bank account slowly ebb away. Simultaneously I spent all hours getting back up to date on the various technologies that I've used previous, but not for a few years, in order to give myself the best chance of landing a new job. Eventually I'm happy to say I landed a new job. Annoyingly though it was in the exact same tech stack as my previous role and it dawned on me how much of a wasted effort the previous ten weeks had been, and just how much I could have got done on the game in that time since I would have been able to treat it like a fulltime job. Still, it was the right thing to do at the time. To add extra spice to such an unremarkable year, no sooner had I secured new employment we had a bereavement in the family. This lead to having to spend every weekend sorting through things and now DIY in order to sell a house that we now have to pay the mortgage on every month. Just what you need when you've just used up all your savings! Anyway, being in a new job with all the new people to meet, things to learn about the company, new codebase to learn etc, while spending every weekend grafting is fairly exhausting, and I was in no position to start working on Rise of the Round table again. Now, several months later and with some of what I've just mentioned coming to a a close, I feel like I've got the energy to start working on the game again.

Going forward, and fairly radically,  I've decided to start the game from scratch. Hear me out. In starting the game I've learned a lot about how the Amiga works and it's strengths and limitations, and I think we can make a better looking game that what we were on course to make. The genesis of this idea was watching a live stream about the AmiGameJam games. When Rise of the Round Table was shown RetroHitch was fairly damming of my graphics. I can't remember the exact quote but it was along the lines of "Does this actually need AGA?". Some people are really averse to criticism these days, but if it's constructive criticism, no matter how blunt, it's useful.  I've decided to abandon dual playfield use. the upshot of this is that while that may make lots of parallax difficult, it will mean one 256 colour layer rather than two 16 colour layers. I've a whole host of ideas to make the graphics better but I'll save sharing those for future updates when I've got something to show.

The bottom line is; it's been a tough year so far, development is really behind but the wheels are turning again...