Now that National Make a Game Month is over I’ve been thinking on what to work on next. The game is obviously still in development. But there are several sub-projects that need to be worked on.

These are,

• Animation and Events Manager: I need a tool to deal with importing all the animations from individual sheets and assign timings and events (such as sfx and vfx like particles) on a per frame basis. It also needs to save/load the animations database for the game and produce texture sheets.
• DitherMe : I’ve been wanting a texture clean up tool for a while, and I was going to implement a noise/colour reduction tool as a paint.net plug in. Partially to process photos to textures, and also to clean up some scanned in pencil work. However, many dither algorithms are purely non-parallel, which paint.net assumes is available. So implementations of Floyd-Stienberg Dithering  tend to produce graphical artifacts.
• 3D Editor Tool: Of all the projects in the list this one is the most crazy. I’m thinking about building a 3D modelling tool, with the main intention of producing environments for the dungeon sections of the game. I find MilkShape3D a little hard to use and 3D Max or Maya is a little on the expensive side. This wouldn’t be a short project, so I should try to defer the idea as much as possible…
• New Website / CMS: I’m learning some ASP.NET MVC as well as jquery and I wouldn’t mind looking into MongoDB as a backing store.
• XNA / C# Profiler:  Been working on this a little while, did the first version earlier in the year, would be nice to finish it and release the code.

So that’s it – Each item is a project in it’s own, is it any wonder why games take so long to make?

So it’s actually the 1st here in New Zealand. But a friend of mine just dropped off some WIP animation work. So here it is…

NaGaDeMo may be over, but I have a lot more work to do…

Also, as a side note I’ve been dabbling with Asp.net MVC and learning me some CSS and JQuery so I might be coding up a new site soon…