New Year, New Focus

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

So...

2012 wasn't much of a year for me, MUGEN-wise.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm proud of what McCready and I accomplished with the Strong Guy revamp, but that was about it, wasn't it?

We didn't even give you the traditional 12 Days of Christmas, which I know probably disappointed some of you. I'm really sorry about that one.

There are plenty of reasons why, but the most important can all be boiled down to one simple truism: there is paid work, and there is unpaid work, and if I have to choose between them, I prefer to get paid.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying I want people to pay me to release characters from my "secret hoard." Understand me clearly: no such hoard exists. Even long-in-development Scruffy characters like War Machine aren't sitting in a folder somewhere, waiting for some arbitrary brown-nosing quota from our fans. They're just unfinished and unpolished, and if there's one thing Scruffy has tried to stand for over the years, it's quality.

I'm also not saying that I won't do fan / for-fun projects anymore. That's clearly not the case, because last year saw the release of Infinite Dungeon, my love letter to the original Legend of Zelda game.

The truth is that I've spent most of the past year trying to improve my skills in my core area of interest: the creation of JavaScript-powered web games. For years, Flash and other browser plugins have been the platform of choice for that sort of thing, but the technologies collectively known as HTML5 are starting to change that. So I've been tinkering a lot in that space, and even though I have 15 years of experience in normal development, professional game dev is something I've wanted to do since I was a kid with the family ColecoVision, so it feels fresh and new to me in a way that a lot of modern web development doesn't.

So, what's a MUGEN creator with HTML5 gaming aspirations to do? My current answer looks like it's going to be a little side project I'm calling Fenjin.

Stay tuned for details; I'll try to blog more about this soon. Meanwhile, if you're on Github, you may want to watch this repository.

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