This article was originally posted on my blog where you can find many more like it.
Hello everyone,
Yes, I know I'm a little late but it seems that's just how I roll (This IS the guy who is currently writing a DOS game). Some time ago we completed 2017, the first full year of development on Chuck Jones: Space Cop of the Future (Development began in 2016, just in case anyone was wondering). I figured I may as well give an update on what was done in 2017 and hopefully give an idea of where the game stands as of now.
Some early notes
Back at the beginning of 2017 the game consisted of no more than a single room, some animations and an El Camino inside of a partially functional adventure game engine and a huge stack of design notes. The engine had a glitchy sprite system, an incomplete scripting language and could make some irritating noises on an adlib card.
Chuck Jones circa 2016
For the rest of the article, I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll go over a few things I found particularly interesting then try to sum of the current state of the game.
Firstly I wanna talk about the engine cause its pretty much done (finally). I did two things in 2017 that really made a difference: I started using version control and a bug tracker. Even for solo development and small projects these two things are incredibly important, the ability to keep track of all your changes and revert them if necessary is invaluable. Some new features added to engine were:
- A full midi based music system with support for multiple classic sound cards
- A memory manager to make the most of 640k of ram
- Massive speed improvements on slower hardware like the 286
- A Vastly improved scripting language
- A much improved editor
Working on some engine code
Next lets take a look at the art. As you can hopefully see compared to the 2016 screenshot, I've learned a heck of a lot about making art for games.
Some more recent art
Additionally I've finally nailed down my process for music creation in the game and I'm really excited to keep working on new compositions.
So where do we stand then? Well the engine is feature complete, as in I cant think of anything else to add so I'm gonna call that 98%. About 75% of the planned locations have been created as pixel art and a few more consist as sketches. About half of the music has been written and the rest is coming along. Finally everyone probably wants to know when I'm gonna be done, well... I can't tell you quite yet but I will say I hope not to be writing a second new year post for this game.
