Bad Things Happen to Bad Things and Everything Else

Hi! Ok, so while I was trying to upgrade my PC to Windows 8.1 RC, I ended up deleting all my game project files forever! And also all my documents. Basically, I've lost about 30 hours of work on Bad Things (the last three days of the ultracrunch) and everything else from the beginning of July. Yep, that means the source for echobox is gone forever. Which is bad. As I mentioned before, I have to give a presentation on echobox and the Rift integration in about two weeks. So this is pretty terrible. Of course, the actual executables are still available for the panic build and the echobox demo. Those might prove useful for decompiling later, but I don't know if it's worth spending time figuring out how to get that information (a cursory search suggests that it is not that hard!?).

Should I give up on Bad Things?

Well, I guess the major advantage of continuing to work on Bad Things instead of starting, or resuming work on other game projects is that I've already got a bunch of people interested in Bad Things. And if I don't make Bad Things, then, obviously, it will never get made, and therefore I'll never get to play it. The whole reason I'm making this game in the first place is that it's the game that I want to play!

Some disadvantages:

• I will have to redo about 30 hours of fairly monotonous work.
• It is unclear to me that I will be able to solve some of the mechanical problems in the demo.
• It is unclear to me that I will be able to find a suitable multiplayer implementation for the physics based interactions.

Keep in mind, I am just exploring options, and the default action here is to keep working on Bad Things. I'll talk a little bit about the game I was working on before.

Magenta! The Kitten Eating Ghost

Note that Magenta is actually lavender. And the squid in a box is not particularly relevant, except that there are octopi in the game. Magenta is a multiplayer action platformer about eating kittens and defeating puppies. Think of it as Castlevania, meets Megaman, meets Castle Crashers. There is lore. There is a lot of lore. In fact, I have spent probably way too much time inventing the universe in which this game takes place.

You run around, each kitten is supposed to be a unique challenge to eat. Each kitten you eat confers an ability that will sometimes help you but sometimes not really help. The attitude of the game is "neither happy nor sad" with a hefty helping of 'lomgcao' which is a word that I invented that means something like "actively not trying." The power of a ghost is proportional to its ability to be lomgcao. And there is dubstep. A ghost is planar convergence tied to the Nexus via wub. The Nexus is a large laserite crystal that is lodged in the center of ghostown.

The advantage of making Magenta! is that the mechanics are pretty much already sorted out. I mean, they're simple, the ways of interacting with things are limited to jumping, using your essential artifact (for Magenta, this is fangs, for other ghosts, this varies), and using your tongue to deal damage without wub and to also eat kittens. And to invoke a kitten. The kittens want to be eaten. The interface is the digestive system of the ghost. 

The reason I stopped working on Magenta! is that I needed something less ambitious and more well defined than Magenta. Now that Bad Things is becoming less well defined, it would be kind of fun to try and go back to working on Magenta.

Immediately:

I will spend the next week remaking echobox and perhaps integrating it with Hyper Rave Cube. This is necessary because I need to have some source to show off for the presentation, and also I need some time for my Ugh field to dissipate.

If you've got any thoughts on what I should do, or what you'd like to see, feel free to comment. Thanks!