May was a bit of a weird month. It kind of flew by, and I didn’t feel like I was getting a lot done. What really happened was a lot of little projects that sucked up a day here and a day there. Some of them were interesting, and I got to play with some new technologies which might show up in bigger projects.
I think the highlight of May was finishing the consolized MVS project. I’ve mentioned this here and there on this site and quite a bit on Twitter. It now has its own page here, and you can also find a build log over on BitBuilt. The final product isn’t perfect, but it turned out pretty well and I’m very excited to play some Metal Slug on real hardware!
I was planning to start working on the next demo of Ascension III (the Frangis demo I’ve mentioned here and there) after finishing up my Magical Girl Game Jam entry, but that didn’t happen. I’m somewhat less motivated given that there won’t be any events to demo it at this year, but I am still hoping to have at least a partial prototype by the end of 2020. However, I did spend some time working on the CommonCore backbone, including taking another step toward mod/addon support by refactoring the resource manager.
I was cagey about newip last time and that proved to be a solid bet. I’ll probably do a more formal post on it soon, but the long and short of it is that I was ridiculously optimistic about newip earlier this year, and I’m nowhere near a release or even a proper unveiling. I figured it was just around the corner for the past six months or so, but after stepping back and rethinking it, I now think it’s at least a year out.
June is going to be a bit of a messy month for me for a variety of reasons. I’m hoping to do some more work on CommonCore and/or Ascension III specifically, but the only really solid plan I have is to participate in SBIG Jam 2020. I’m going to make something bizarre this year, so stay tuned for that!