It’s rare for you to hear any really juicy Firestorm news, seeing as I tend to include a lot of… um… “padding”, shall we say, made up of tidbits you’ve probably seen and heard before on other sites. Happily, today is no exception! Or is it?… <insert dramatic tension here>

To kick things off, an announcement that a new version of Millenipede is available - v1.1.1 fixes a few bugs and is more of a maintenance release to prepare for “other stuff”. You can see the full list of changes right here. The headline features are in the audio department; the laggy sound effects on some PCs have been cured, and the Mac version should now support mod music, meaning no more bulky .ogg files - but doing a Mac compile is turning out to be more troublesome than before, so ironically it may be a short while before a Mac version is actually ready for download… Still, all you Windows users can enjoy this lovely direct download right now.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to set things out for the rest of the year, I thought it might be good to post some decisions, ideas and rough plans that may see the light of day over the course of 2008. Yes folks, a news update with real news in it! Whatever next? Unfortunately, not all of it is good news.

With that somewhat pessimistic disclaimer out of the way, let’s get on with it, eh?

Mordor: Return to Dejenol

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first to pave the way for brighter things.

I haven’t been looking forward to posting this very much, since I know it will disappoint a lot of people. From the lack of obvious progress over the past few months, though, it may not come as a huge surprise when you hear that I’ve decided to discontinue the Return to Dejenol project. The decision was made shortly after Christmas, in fact, when I spent quite a lot of time and consideration on how to progress.

Essentially it boils down to this: the project is simply too big and ambitious for me to accomplish alone. While I’ve had one or two offers of help from other people (and they’ve been greatly appreciated - sincere thanks to those involved), I’m a terrible project manager and M:RtD wasn’t designed well enough for any more than one person to work on it at a time. Using BlitzMax to create the game made finding other coders difficult; I daresay it would be perfectly up to the job for someone with more time, knowledge and determination - after all, take a look at the recently released Eschalon: Book I, coded entirely in Max - but I’ve come to realise that unfortunately I am not that person.

It’s better to hold your hands up and admit defeat than to keep chasing after an unreachable goal. As far as Mordor goes, this is what I choose to do. The project’s subsite will be updated appropriately later this week. Sorry for getting your hopes up, folks.

One small positive might come in the form of a tidied map editor for Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, something I’ve threatened to do before but never got around to. It’s possible to create stuff pretty easily within Return’s mapper, and it shouldn’t take all that much hacking to chop out the redundant bits and re-release it as a pretty functional MData11 editor for the modding community.

Oil’s Well Redrilled

The game which hasn’t been mentioned at all since the most recent site redesign may well get resurrected. Probably not quite in the way I originally hoped to take it, though - it would be retro-ised with another resolution downgrade to 320×240 (the original engine used 800×600 and was reduced to 640×480 a bit later on). That way I at least stand a chance of making some graphics myself that fit the retro theme. The flexibility for using different graphical tilesets will be retained, though, so there is still the chance for pixel artists / graphics designers to help in improving the visual quality of the game at a later stage. It also means I can rip out the video scaling code from Millenipede and save myself a bit of work that way

Some interesting ideas that I had written down on a tentative to-do list:

• Doors that have to be opened by hitting a switch (or chomping a key of some sort)
• Timed environmental hazards like intermittent steam leaks, energy beams, acid drops, etc.
• Flooded tunnels that the drill will move and retract more slowly in
• Levels bigger than a single screen; add some sort of vertical scrolling?
• If the above is added, pipe hub waypoints in deeper parts of the level would be needed (i.e. instead of the drill being anchored to the top of the level, you could find a hub and start drilling from there instead)
• Different enemy types (e.g. patrollers, whizzers, wanderers)

Millenipede

I never expected a mini-project bodged together in one week to become this popular Millenipede will definitely be seeing at least one major new version sometime this year, and maybe more after that. Today’s update lays the groundwork for the future, which may or may not include some of this:

• New enemies (Invaders, Hunters)
• Wave time limits to prevent easy farming of highscores and grant bonus points for zapping the ‘pedes quickly
• Powerups (double and triple strength shots, shields, enemy slowdowns / freezes, venus flytraps, smart bombs)
• Lifetime statistics tracking (similar to those in Poing! PC)
• An online highscore table (very tentative, so don’t get your hopes up)
• Miscellaneous polishing here, there and everywhere
• More varied mushroom graphics
• More sounds
• More music
• More particles
• More fun!

Other Projects

I don’t necessarily want to become a “one trick pony”, as they say, so depending on how things pan out (and especially on what themes the SoCoder Wedenesday Workshops use through the year), there might be one or two completely new games born. For example, I’ve toyed with the idea of making something along the lines of Crystal Quest (PC users might be more familiar with the DOS classic XQuest 2), but my early experiments in coding the fairly unique mouse control system didn’t get very far, so this is probably the least likely concept to get off the ground unless something changes in that department.

Another idea is something I’ve codenamed Dodge, an arcade game to test your reflexes in evading beams of energy generated between random fixed points in a single-screen arena. I hastily prototyped one of the graphics routines for a “lightning line” and was mildly impressed with the results, but there’s still the fundamentals of the game to consider. Anyhow, I’m confident I can make a fun game based on the idea if I spend enough time on it.

My last thought on a future game idea is a Roguelike-esque venture into ASCII role-playing. It certainly wouldn’t hold a candle to the heavyweights like Dwarf Fortress or Angband, and learning about topics like A* pathfinding and line-of-sight would be a challenge for me - but games of that style have a special place in my heart and I’m certain that Blitz could handle it, even if I couldn’t!

The Website

There will almost certainly be more changes to the website, probably in the second half of the year. Not just the usual “lick of paint and a new logo” routine, either. The grandly-titled Firestorm Productions seems to give the impression of a team of coders beavering away in the background with me as their spokesperson who generally Sorts Stuff Out; this is slightly incorrect. Aside from the help that one or two colleagues have given me with cross-platform compilation and the associated bug hunting, the only coder is… well… me. No-one is permanently on call to do dedicated graphics or audio work. There isn’t a dedicated group of beta testers. There’s no fixed team at all.

With that in mind, I believe it would be more sensible to transform the site into something closer to a personal site at a completely different (and while the opportunity present itself, a much shorter) domain name. This isn’t to take anything away from the other folks that have been involved with Firestorm’s games up to this point - but it feels wrong to keep alive the impression that this site is a team homepage when, for the larger part, it isn’t.

In Summary

There’s lots of stuff ahead, and you’ll still be getting the semi-regular padding news that there’s always been over the past year. Again, my apologies for having to announce the cancellation of Mordor: Return to Dejenol. I hope the work that may be done on other projects through the year can compensate for it - only time will tell. If I can tear myself away from the time sink that is World of Warcraft and engage in a few coding frenzies similar to the one that created Millenipede, who knows what might happen?

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you on the next update!