To keep things tidy, I will edit this news post when there are new things to show on my first game of 2013 "Once Upon A Life". All development news can be found on the journal links below.

Backstory:

Once Upon A Life centers around a senior citizen named Harry who, one day whilst reminiscing over the pictures from his past, gets a nasty shock when a gust of wind blows through the window and sweeps his pictures away, scattering them throughout the world. Harry has walking sticks with built-in jet thrusters and goes on an adventure to recover them - an adventure that will take him from the retirement home all the way into space! I don't want to give too much away, but if you're interested in playing the game before it comes out, you can sign up for the beta just by going here!

Preview Screenshots:

• Intro Comic
• Harry's Baseball Memory
• Harry's Bartitsu Memory
• Introducing Gentleman Shark
• Debonair Dragon
• Harry Builds A Plane
• Love In Paris
• Brittler Bones Acceptance Letter
• Desert Level Preview (work in progress)

Soundtrack:

• Out With The Old
• Echoes Of The Past

Development Material:

• TIGSource DevLog Thread
• Timelapse Video: Designing the HUD for Once Upon A Life
• Development Journal #1
• Development Journal #2
• Development Journal #3

Preview Animations:

• Harry's 3 Attack Combo
• Harry's Core Sprites

Progress

• Total progress: 80% (Updated 5th March)

Summary:

The game is going great! The most time consuming part is the level design due to the fact that I'm adding something new in as many levels as possible. This includes set-pieces that help propel the story forward as well new mechanics and frame-by-frame animations of single objects - for example, you can smash parking meters whilst downtown to get extra money out of them, or freeing someone from a cage so they can help you. There is a very low amount of re-usable assets as the game moves through so many locations, so whilst it's taking slightly longer than what an ordinary online platformer might take, I'm trying my best to keep this fresh with every new level!

Don't forget, you can follow progress in real time on my Facebook (I'm using it as my primary dev log), and also my Twitter!

Whilst listening to the radio on an early morning car trip I heard the most beautiful announcement along the lines of "Welcome to another day on Planet Earth" - bearing in mind that this was broadcast while the sun was rising on the dawn of a new day and all the potential that entails, I found it particularly poignant and so will steal the sentiment to - until the next time - wish you a great day on Planet Earth!

The lovely folks over at GameDevTuts+ have just published my new article featuring tips on how to make an addictive game. If you're a developer and think this might help you, check it out here!

We self-released Slay With Santa 3 days ago today, and it's been played about 155,000 times which is not too bad considering we decided to release without a publisher. Most plays come from arcade sites hosting hacked Flash games. I played a hacked version myself and can say I really enjoyed the fact that the ability to die has been removed which means you can just blast zombies endlessly!

Hey everybody! I'm very happy to announce the release of a new game with the launch of my redesigned website; it's a platformer with shooting and upgrade elements. Zombies and all sorts of nasties have broken into the elves' workshop at midnight on Christmas eve and eaten up all the presents. Playing as Santa, you head out with your rifle and open them up in order to retrieve them for the chlidren. There is no 'end' to the game, simply recover as many presents as possible and try to get the highest score on the worldwide leaderboards!

This was a collaboration with the awesome Marsh Games, who proposed we make a little something for the Christmas period. We only had about a week and a half to get something ready for release which was really difficult, but we crunched hard and managed to finish in time. During the process we realised we both loved the way the engine works so will most likely look toward creating a much larger adventure game utilizing it in the future.

Here's a video of me designing the office for the boss elf. You may notice some very slight changes in the final version. 'Til next time!