Last weekend I was a judge for Hits Playtime, a French student video game competition. I played and judged 19 games for PC and Android and helped pick winners in 4 categories. My personal favourites were Kinesis, Namaspamus, Hanging Garden, and The Space We Live In. If you have 4 Android devices, a PC, and understand French, then The Space We Live In gives you another fun way to cooperatively fly a spaceship together :)
Now I’m getting ready to leave on my honeymoon with Admiral Spaceteam, also known as my wife Sara :) We’re going back to Greece for a bit of island hopping and to revisit a couple of places we loved for some relaxation. I’ve spent the last few weeks wrapping up the remaining Spaceteam projects so that when I come back in July I can finish up CaptainsMess and focus mostly full-time on Blabyrinth.
Both Spaceteam ESL and the Six New Languages are going into Apple review tomorrow and should be ready for launch next month.
Thanks to the Humble Bundle folks, Spaceteam for Android is also now available for download/purchase outside the Google Play store, from this page: spaceteamadmiralsclub.com/forum/androidBuilds
There’s still a Bluetooth bug with this version that needs to be fixed but otherwise it’s the same game and I’ll keep it in sync with the Google Play version.
Now that these projects are wrapping up it means that, other than bug-fixes and custom versions, Spaceteam will not be getting any new features (sorry to everyone who wanted the “moment-of-failure-face-photo-collage”, a fantastic idea that I just don’t have time for). I’ll still build custom versions on commission, since they’re a good way to help me to stay sustainable, when combined with in-app purchases and Admiral’s Club patronage.
I already have a few new requests for customizations but you never know what’s going to stick.
I was able to spend a bit of time on Blabyrinth but it’s still mostly foundational work, figuring out the best way to represent game messages/data and send them across the network. Spaceteam didn’t actually have much network data to send and it was pretty rigidly defined and fragile. I want Blabyrinth to be more reliable, flexible, and possibly support reading level data from the web, so I’m experimenting with JSONModel to make things easier. It’s going well so far.
See you in July!