So as you might have noticed, I just finished a few projects. I made the prototype for Comic Game, I worked on Sunny Day at the Triangle Game Jam, and I made Daly Homes inc for my dad’s birthday. Now it is time to choose what to work on next. However, I’ve been trying to decide what to work on next for a few weeks, and there are just too many good options. Allow me to enumerate.

Start a new project

One option is to start a new game project. I’ve got quite a long list of ideas that I’m excited about working on, but the one that comes to the front of the list would be a game similar to the SNES Mario Kart. Here are the reasons I’m interested in a nutshell:

• The mechanics of the original Mario Kart are really simple and I don’t think it would take long to reproduce the experience
• Mario Kart was a really fun party game; the Xbox 360 needs games like that
• I’d like to experiment with an idea I had of a friction gauge that makes the mechanics of when you turn, skid, slide, etc a little more obvious to the player
• I’d like to take the random stage hazards and random items out of the game – these just kept making newer Mario Kart games worse
• I’d like to experiment with an idea I had for auto-balancing gameplay in which the further behind you are, the easier it is to perform skill-based maneuvers to catch up
• If I used bitmap files and XML as the level editor, I could make it really easy to mod so anyone could easily add their own track

Release an old project on Xbox Indie Games

I’ve create a bunch of crappy games and posted them here. However, making those games is a lot of work and not that many people visit this webpage or subscribe to this blog. It would be nice to have more people appreciate what I work on by actually releasing it in a way that lots of people will be aware of it. However, given the state of my current projects, I would want to polish them up a little more before doing this. This is what I’m thinking:

• Add a puzzle mode, online multiplayer, a better tutorial, and a graphics overhaul to Connexus
• Add the last few effects, a soundtrack, better AI, and online multiplayer to Orbital

Port Comic Game to the web

A while back, I created the Comic Game prototype. I could do a whole lot more with it:

• Create an interactive comic editor so that anyone can create branching comic storylines
• Create a library of re-useable art that anyone can use in the editor
• Create a few more comic stories
• Port the viewer and editor to the web so that anyone can view and create interactive comics from anywhere
• Beg my favorite webcomic authors to create interactive comics for the webpage

Develop my skills of an artist

I am not a talented artist. However, I like the idea of being one. I think it would be cool to take some time off from programming, and just practice drawing, digital painting, re-vitalize my knowledge of 3d modeling to make it current, and just generally do lots of study and practice. I’ve found that the limited set of art skills that I already have come in pretty handy on a regular basis so it couldn’t hurt to expand that. I also spend a lot of my time browsing digital art; I really wish I could create some of the stuff I appreciate so much. I also have a theory that if I spend my free time doing art instead of programming, it will keep me from getting burned out as easily on programming, which I do for my day job already.

Slack off and play video games for a while

This is what I’ve already been doing for the past few weeks. I’ve been playing Command & conquer: Red Alert 3, Battlefield: Bad Company, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and more Defense Grid: The Awakening. There are a handful of games out there that I’m interested in playing and it would be nice to be a little closer in touch with the state of the game industry. Plus, it would be easy and fun.

This reminds me, I just recently finished the story for Professor Layton and the Curious Village. This game is super-awesome. I recommend it for anyone with access to a DS.

The Point

Why am I going on and on about my hobby options? As I mentioned before, I’ve been having some trouble deciding. So I want your input. If you read this blog/news feed, I would like you to post a comment saying what you think I should work on. Jody just added a feature so that you don’t have to be registered to submit a comment. I also want to figure out if anybody still ever reads news posts.

For the sake of color, here is a picture that I drew/colored while trying to decide what to do next. It is a fanarts; do you recognize the character?

If you guess right, your vote counts twice