I’m sad to say I lost a lot of steam with the game project especially now that I can’t do sprite work on the work PC’s, which is where the bulk of what I had was done. It’s not been a total loss, however; the recent coloring/drawing style I’ve been employing is essentially a larger-scale version of how I had been doing the sprite artwork combined with limited painting techniques and whatnot.

Guardian Spirits is thusly; pretty unlikely to be DONE any time soon, but I still hope to have some related demo material by years’ end. It doesn’t help much that I’ve been running other game ideas through my head, but I suppose it’s all ultimately moot before my utter lack of programming skill. For example, CSS tweaking for new WordPress skins gives me a mild head-throb.

Just to sum up and possibly gauge interest in said ventures, here’s a handful of things I’ve been musing:

• A strategy rpg featuring the Revolver Knight setting has been a pipe dream of mine for some time. Where the player can assume one of the major factions like say, GunCon or the TomaH-Tech and play out a scenario allowing them to recruit all sorts of characters and creatures.
• The announcement of Bangai-Oh Spirits, awesome as it may be, makes me long for a more open ended mass-destruction experience, and it seems like a good premise for my nixed “KillJoy” shmup setting, wherein the player takes the role of Chloe, the Angel of Woe, who comes to earth to keep it from becoming too happy a place. Collateral damage will be a must, pain as it’d be to render… it’d be worth it to send a Ferris Wheel careening through a crowded amusement park.
• As alluded to once before, there’s also an old-fashioned pen-and-paper mecha campaign I’ve been messing with, loosely inspired by SRW: Original Generation. The setting is pretty much complete, but my (probably ill-advised) choice of Dream Pod 9’s Silhouette System as the engine is hampering me at several turns with its obtuse construction rules. I’m attempting a retrofit wherein basic weapons are made available and more elaborate versions can be created by combining numerous Perks and enhancements; this also will be accompanied by a new set of mech-specific generation rules essentially turning the building of mecha into large-scale character creation (turning Agility into a Manuever score, etc.)

Well, this has been astronomically nerdy of me. I’d better eat some red meat or pretend to care about football now.