Another year, another review post. Like last year there wasn’t any defining achievement or goal reached, mostly slow progress on everything. Though I left my job and started working as a contractor. Luckily my former employer gave me my first contract due to their rapid growth so I’ve been able to start with a solid foundation.

Games Played

2017 had some really good games. Here’s my ranking of all the games I played:

1. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2. Mario x Rabbids: Kingdom Battle
3. Finding Paradise
4. Sonic Mania
5. Life Is Strange: Before the Storm
6. Super Mario Odyssey
7. Horizon Zero Dawn
8. Crash Bandicoot: N.Sane Trilogy
9. Sniper Elite 4
10. Golf Story
11. South Park: The Fractured But Whole

I was disappointed by South Park and Crash Bandicoot. South Park was more of a South Park-themed RPG than a South Park game and I gave up playing it after a few hours – it wasn’t as funny as the Stick of Truth. Crash Bandicoot would have been perfect if they hadn’t changed the jump – it broke the balance of the game and it felt like wearing shoes on the wrong feet.

Breath of the Wild was pretty amazing and it really made me re-think a lot of game design concepts that I considered ‘solved’. Mario x Rabbids was also a surprising amount of fun and I really hope there’s some sort of sequel in the works!

Code Wrote

I made a lot of mini2Dx releases that improved compatibility with Slick2D, improved performance and added a lot of new features. I already have plans for 2.0 but it’ll more than likely be Q4 2018 or Q1 2019 before it’s released.

Some new projects I implemented were:

• gradle-mali-plugin for running the Mali Texture Compression Tool during builds.
• Jarn (pronounced with a soft ‘j’) a Java-based interpreter for the Yarn dialogue editor.

Then I mostly continued working on Alchemic Cutie with Sebastien. In my 2016 post I said we would have an alpha soon – I guess soon means 2018! The unannounced game that I’m working on with Mike Clarke also hasn’t reached a demo-able state yet; the design is finalised but we’re still coding and seeking a pixel artist.

Looking Forward

I’m attending 3 conferences in April to present Alchemic Cutie to publishers and journalists. The next 3 months of preparation, bug fixing and polishing will be quite intense and stressful but I’m hoping that finally all our work will pay off.