Brief Overview
Some things happened, but not as quickly as I would have liked.
Better Overview
2013 was an odd but productive year for the website, Unearthed, and myself.
I had some grand ideas for Unearthed when the year began, including aspirations for a playable demo to be release by the summertime. Obviously that didn’t pan out the way I wanted it too… but perhaps it worked out for the best in the long run. Instead of finishing up a sparse tech demo I worked with the SM.net community to make hundreds of new sprites for the game.
I also had the chance to polish up a lot of game’s static assets (items, abilities, etc…), finalize the enemy listings, and revise my asset lists. So when the tech demo finally does get released it should be a pretty robust little hack!
In non-Unearthed news, I found out this April that HyperBound had been featured in the book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Anthropy. This was a bit of a surprise for me! I had not received very much HyperBound press after the initial deluge in 2007/2008, and I was never contacted about my inclusion in the book. The fact that I didn’t find out until nearly a year after it was released is testament to that, and I was certainly thrilled to be included.
As for the website itself: Radiostorm and myself have been hard at work writing reviews, game design articles, and other miscellaneous tidbits to keep things active around here. I’ll always be putting up game project updates (Unearthed, HyperBound, etc…), but it is nice to have a little variety. Especially when I’m just making asset lists or fixing coding errors, and don’t have fun sprites/maps/videos to show-off.
And whats coming down the pipe for next year? Well, I don’t want to make empty promises or set unrealistic deadlines so I’ll just say this: I am going to get as much work down on Unearthed as I can. I can’t guarantee a tech demo or a finished game, but I can promise good quality progress throughout the entire year.
Expect a few more updates throughout the month December, followed by a brief Christmas hiatus by about the 21st or so. I generally get back up to speed by the first week of January, so look forward to more game updates and activity on the website then. Happy Holidays!
