A Victim of Guitar Hero, Astoria, and Fear Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Since gnomie asked, I figured I'd briefly post about where Space Avenger is at the moment.

The short answer is: much further along but still not ready due to a number of real-life distractions. Between my move, my new job, my travels, the holidays and the like, Space Avenger has had to go to the back-burner.

And, lest you think that I have all good reasons for delaying the release of Space Avenger Beta 3, my girlfriend also bought me several new games for Christmas that have been sucking away my free time like never before:

• Guitar Hero (One),
• Katamari Damacy, and
• Soul Calibur III

Yes, they're all old games, but they're new to me, since I had foolishly jettisoned my PS2 in favor of an XBox. The PlayStation 2 still has the best games for any platform — hands down. There's no contest. I kept hearing about these great, innovative games coming out and they were all for the PS2. The XBox hasn't, IMHO, had a great game come out for it in a good while. Sorry, Microsoft. You've lost a customer due to your ridiculous assumption that the only games that people want to play are first-person shooters and GTA clones.

Space Avenger has a lot of work left before I can release it. The new version is far more complicated than previous versions and has required rewriting a good number of core game objects in order to make it work. Now that ship customization is becoming a core game element, I'm touching on a number of areas of Flash development that I haven't dealt with yet, so the learning curve has been pretty steep. This has also required a large number of new 3D models, which take a long time to create. I'm slowly improving in this area, but it's not easy.

At this point I think it would have been faster to start over from scratch, but then again, I didn't know that when I had first started the enhancements. C'est la vie. Now, of course, I'm staring down the myriad reasons that I will never finish the game. I am doing my best to ignore all of these fears and get back to doing development, but when I have all of these distractions and excuses, it's easy to let it fall by the wayside.