Plan for Jeff Thompson

Work work work

I haven't posted a new plan in a long time, so here we go... :)

My day job has kept me fully engaged these last several months. We have been working on new products, and are nearly finished designing our next major version of VirtualDesktop. It's looking to be pretty cool, and will be written in a far more portable way. ;)

On to games. I've written my own game engine from scratch based on some articles on GameDev.net (the Enginuity series), and now have a nearly completed pong clone going. By nearly, I mean the game play is all done, and I'm just putting in the final graphics and tweaking the menu system. I'll post once its up and running. The engine is cross-platform between windows and osx and builds using MingW for both platforms on OSX. I've been using Jam as my build system and support distcc so I can develop using my iBook on my couch but leverage the rest of the computing power i have available. I hope to get it all packaged up in some fashion in the not too distant future.

Once I finish up my pong clone this weekend, I'll be on to developing two new more interesting games. These will both be clones as I want to stick to good existing game designs while I shake out my engine. I'm looking to do a more modernized version of Pipe Dream (which I loved playing on my RPN calculator), and also Chiral which is a fun chemistry based game (imagine that!). I intend to to redo the games so they utilize a new anology (not being a plumber, and not using atoms), but maintain the game play basis that the original games developed.

Once completed, it's on to phase 3: profit! :) At that point its time to get the ol' web site up and running and also look to partner with Real Arcade. I'd also like to figure out how to connect with Yahoo! as well, but it hasn't been completely obvious with the look I gave their games section today.

This won't all be completed until end of year, but thats the road map. Watch this space for progress reports!

-Jeff