Heads up on DKP and life.

Lately I was very busy with a lot of distractions, applying for some schools, taking TOEFL iBT test out of the blue and everything that can happen to mess with my life, but fear no more, the way is forward, as of always will be.

I still write in my monthly column in Iran’s first and only game development magazine, called “BaziSzai” (which can be roughly translated to Game Development), be sure to check it out if you are interested, I just handed this month’s article which is about Locomalito.

To update things about DKP, I finally finished spawning problem and I’m knee deep in level transition. Our game is largely based on a lot of small rooms rather than like 10 levels which normal platofrmers do, so we need a good way of transition between levels and keeping logic on how and when transit between those “rooms”. Currently I can load multiple levels but collision detection gets very angry during the process and I’m doing brain surgery on the underlying code in order to tame that quad-beast.

After that, there shall be a system like a Judge in FFTA games to determine the goal of the room, based on the theme it has, and give permission to advance to next room, I expect this will be challenging too. Next is connecting current orphan features to the Judge, like spawn manager to report back so the Judge can decide accordingly.

What makes game development even harder, besides having to work in my bedroom with lots of noises and construction site machinery sounds, is sudden surge of great games, namely Dark Souls, RAGE. CoD:MW3, Rayman origins, Sonic Generations, Batman: Arkhan City, TinTin, Gears of War 3, TES V: SKYRIM, El Shaddai, Uncharted 3. While playing Skyrim and Uncharted 3 is guaranteed of anything but fun, I’m really keen to invest a big chunk of time to Dark Souls because I’ve already read numerous articles on how it’s gameplay been great and when it’s predecessor came, Demon’s Soul, I couldn’t touch it because I don’t have a PlayStation 3 but the new installment is multi-platform and I can play it and see the interesting and masochistically hard mechanics. Of course Skyrim is fun and sound but it’s hardly anything new after TES III: Morrowind or TES IV: Oblivion, they just get bigger and more beautiful but I’m at some point in my life that I rather play a great game called Ghost Tricks (DS) which introduces new gameplay mechanics and next generation of Adventure games, which I’m a big and old fan of, rather than something that we’ve already played two years ago just with resized graphics. But that’s just me. With all the “game industry” thing, all these money sucking publishers, all these needless new installments are inevitable, even when their creators say that they do not want to create a new version, you will be surprised to see the same game again with a II after it next year.

Oh, that’s life.