Aidan

Short story: In January my four year old Aidan's brain surgery didn't go as smoothly as we hoped. He had a bleed in the brain during one of the surgeries which ended up keeping him (and me) in the hospital much longer than originally planned. We got home in February and he is shunt-free and doing great! By great, i mean GREAT, amazingly well - it feels real good.

Long story: www.caringbridge.org/ca/aidanryan/history.htm

Background story: www.topmeadow.com/aidan

Future Games

One night back in January while sitting in my bed late at night in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, I made a list of possible future games to work on. The PICU isn't the easiest place to write code. Many of these game ideas have partially complete designs already - either on paper on in my head. Ended up with 26 games on the list and now wouldn't you know it, the game I work on next may not be any of those 26.

It always seems that eventually I get to a point in a project where I start to get tired of the current game project and ideas for the next game are much more exciting. Of course the problem is you can never complete the next game - you can only complete whatever it is that you are currently working on. I'm getting close to finishing off my current game.

Current Game

I didn't realize how much all the medical issues were taking away from my game-making efforts over the last couple of years until the last few weeks when everything has really calmed down here at home. Big difference in what I am getting done. On Minigolf Blast, I am getting close to having something for people to check out and give me feedback. If you are interested, email me kevin@topm.com, and I'll contact you when the game is ready for for some testing.

Last fall I had some spline based paths that I really needed to see in relation to everything else in the world so I modified the drawing routines slightly. So here is the obligatory screen shot showing the paths on one of the holes (standard disclaimer - not real artwork in there yet)...



At this point, I have polish to add, lots and lots of polish, but the gameplay and physics are pretty much done. I always focus on getting the gameplay working well first and worry about a polished look later. Lots of programmer artwork early and sometimes late into a project is pretty standard.