It is the courage to continue that counts.

It's unbelievable how close TAG is to completion. The list of things left to do is shrinking everyday and the feeling is almost indescribable. I've never had a project that took this long and I remember so many moments along the way where I felt that there was an infinite amount of work left.

One section of the game I saved for last was the underwater diving scenes. My girlfriend reminded me the other day that when I was originally sketching out the ideas for TAG, the underwater treasure hunting was one of the first things I thought of. Over two years later I got around to putting it together. It was worth the wait. I had a lot of fun doing it and I think it's one of the best parts of the game. That really only leaves a few things left.

Here's what's left to do (off the top of my head):

• Final cut scenes
• Flashback cut scene
• Final boss
• Credits
• About half of the game dialog (currently a lot of place-holder dialog)
• Complete game play-through
• A few minor bug fixes (some of them could be considered busy-workish)
• Playtesting (which means someone besides me and Robbie will play the game *gasp*)

Speaking of Robbie (http://twitter.com/beta_red), he is still working on a couple more tracks. I'm currently listening to the new song for the pyramid/volcano levels and it's really beautiful. The soundtrack for the game has come together so nicely and you can expect to see digital download of it available on BandCamp and maybe even a CD run too. If I could get Robbie to create music for me for free for the rest of my life I'd always have a stupidly happy grin on my face. He seems to really get what I'm looking for. I can use a couple words to describe the feeling or mood I want and he just nails it every time. If you're a developer looking for a talented musician for a project, you can not do wrong by hooking up with him. 

I suppose that's all the news for now. I'm going to keep plugging away at that list and try to get this game into your hands sometime this fall! 

The past life of Robit Studios

Before I began working on TAG, a friend and I were using the Robit Studios name in an attempt to have a t-shirt empire. Although it was a lot of fun, and there was much success along the way, it was harder to break into that business than we were prepared for. You can still see our designs here: http://rumplo.com/people/person/RobitStudios. We were very much into geek culture and trying to design shirts that's made you think a little too. One of our most popular shirts was Joust, based on the classic arcade game.

A couple of months ago I was contacted by Lonnie McDonald, who is a Joust champion. He can run the score of any Joust machine up to 9999999 (the max the machine can show on screen). He wanted to puachase a Joust shirt from me so he could wear them at competitions and events. Since I didn't have anymore in stock I sent him the original design files so he could get them printed up himself. 

And he did just that. He rocked the Robit Studios Joust shirt at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY over the weekend and sent me a couple photos. The fact that a video game champion (not unlike Steve Sanders and Billy Mitchell) would hunt me down for a t-shirt I created moved me so much. 

... but it does have happy endings.

After a full month of living at my parents house (while my dad recovered from pneumonia) I'm finally back home in Virginia! My dad made a great recovery and was released from the hospital just a couple of days ago. Thanks to everyone who sent me kind messages! It was definitely appreciated.

Living back home with my mom is something I've tried to avoid since I was old enough to leave home. But, I'm glad I spent that time there helping any way I could, while the family was in need. Plus, my 5-year old sister got a chance to play-test Treasure Adventure Game. She quickly became a big fan and would ask me to let her play it every day. She also told me she wants to make video games when she grows up -- Awesome!

Since I've been home I finally had some time to spend working on TAG. I jumped right into where I left off: the most complex boss fight I've done yet. Luckily I was able to pick it right back up and things are going pretty smoothly so far. Progress on TAG will now continue at a steady pace, and I hope to have the game finished this fall.

I've decided that I'm going to be using Unity for my next project. I'm absolutely in love with this dev-tool. It's been a little daunting for me in the past, because I have a limited amount of experience with scripting/programming. But, over the past month I took any free-time I had to watch tutorials and read everything I could find about Unity. The absolute best tutorial series I've ever seen on the subject is by Walker Boys Studio (link). It's as detailed as a full college course and I'm convinced that once I'm done with these videos and labs I'll be ready to create my next game in Unity.