Let’s have a quick moan before jumping on a train in the early hours of the morning.

I think one of the reasons why I haven’t managed to get Quirks done much this month is that I’ve fallen into the trap of building up GLESGAE rather than the game itself - I’ve been building an engine rather than a game. ( Of course, the main reason is more lack of time, but this one doesn’t help either! )

This is a trap I have a habit of falling into a lot, due to striving to try and get things “right” first time. That never happens! You code to what you need at that specific moment in time, and make it flexible enough to update later on, when your requirements change - part of the reason why I love component systems so much, as that’s effectively what they’re designed to do.

A lot of the Ludum Dare projects I’ve done have been built on top of my old SGZEngine ( or SGZ2D, or whatever I named it at that point in time ) which had already had a good year or so of development time pushed into it, so was pretty full fledged already. GLESGAE, on the other hand, is still in it’s infancy. Getting it to do things requires actually writing the thing to do, and I think that once I get the component system and Lua bindings in, it should be easier to work with. That said, I did manage to do Thieving Fingers with it - even if it didn’t get submitted in time - and that was additionally with the broken and convoluted Resource System, so using it is doable and especially so since I’ve fixed a fair amount of things since then.

But, sitting writing an engine isn’t going to get the game done - and there’s a constant fear of implementing engine features that aren’t going to be used, which of course just wastes time.

But writing a game without an engine can make it hard to strip things out to reuse the code.

Hmm… sod it, let’s go license iD Tech for Little Quirks.. I’m sure they’d find that hilarious ;)

Well.. this hasn’t gone to plan.

I do have something on screen now! And I have Box2D Physics all bound up and active! ( Though I haven’t thoroughly tested it for the needs of the game, as yet. ) But that’s about it!

Actually, I fixed a couple more engine bugs and abstracted some bits and pieces out to make them easier to deal with, so that’s good.. but still, progress overall has been rather minimal.

With only this weekend left, which has already been taken for something more important, there’s probably not much of a chance of Little Quirks getting out in time for the October Challenge.

So, what now?

I think that abandoning the Quirks ( again ) would be a bad choice. Some of the people I’ve talked to about it do think there’s something in it, and that’s always a good sign that gibbering about whatever game you’re working on sparks interest in those not affiliated with it, so it would be good to actually finish something that people might actually play.

But when will that happen?

That’s a trickier question - the remainder of this year is going to be pretty hectic for me, and finding time to work on anything outside standard work-related tasks could be particularly difficult. As this stuff doesn’t fall under the “standard work-related tasks” banner, it gets pushed to the side till free time comes available. So it’s cough done when it’s done.

The next few months are going to be mental compared to most of the year, so we’ll have to see what happens. I would like to have it done - or at least playable - by Christmas though.

That said, I have been known to randomly pull things out from nowhere, so we’ll see what happens on the run up to Tuesday.

So much for regular updates!

Anyway, where are we?

Err.. nothing on the screen yet, but the design’s been thrashed out a bit better, so let’s go over that.

In Little Quirks you play a Wizard, gazing into your Crystal Ball, and guiding the Little Quirks around the land to keep them being eaten, squished, burnt, splattered, or otherwise mangled. Your energy can be used to remodel the ground, or it can be used to build contraptions and traps. Contraptions directly help the Quirks, and you activate them by touching them, whereas Traps are more for keeping other beasties at bay - but won’t differentiate between Quirk or baddie so you have to be wary of them.

This can give multiple ways of completing a level - you either use all your energy to remodel the land as best you can to help them, or you create contraptions to manually shunt them about the place. There’s a clue there in what you do with the contraptions - you can manipulate them. So, for example, with a catapult contraption, it won’t activate till you touch it, so you can be rather selective in what you use it to fling - be it a Quirk, or something else! It also gives you a bit more interactivity than just setting out the world to play while you watch the Quirks go from A->B.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned, there’s a strong nod to Lemmings. In fact, Quirks has a bigger nod to Lemmings than it’s bigger brother Tiny Critters does. Tiny Critters is more influenced by the rather stunning Lemmings-clone, Troddlers, one of my favourite games that came after the Lemmings phenomenon. But one major point in which both games differ from Lemmings is there is no direct control over the creatures themselves. Quirks has you creating traps and contraptions, as well as manipulating land and contraptions ( but not traps! which will operate themselves. ) Critters gives you an actual character in the game world - much like Troddlers - where again, you influence the direction of the creatures in the world by magic walls and directional arrows, but don’t really directly control what they do like in Lemmings where you give them unique jobs.

Anyway, next time, I’m hoping to have something on the screen.. while I doubt I’ll get much done in the twelve days remaining ( especially seeing as next weekend is effectively taken again, ) I’ll give it my best shot. I’ve still got to implement physics ( going with Box2D, ) audio ( OpenAL, ) and support more than just Linux.