Recently finished working on
The Lady, a short but creepily-sweet 2D puzzle-adventure. It had a lot of thought and sweat put into it - I invite you to
give it a spin - it's only $5. Especially if you like introspective, symbolic experiences.
It was built almost entirely from scratch in Forth - FORTH Inc's SwiftForth package specifically. (not my favorite, but it has decent support)
Taking advantage of the opportunity to do this, I learned a lot about developing large applications in the language and built up quite the toolset not the least of which is a preliminary version of a fine 2D game engine, along with the game, within a 4-5 month timeframe most of which was part-time (10-20 hours a week) while I recovered from surgery, worked on my album, home improvement and my job search.
The engine runs officially on Windows 7 and up but it can be ported to Linux and Mac given time and resources, and then any other platform with relative ease once a certain level of refinement was reached besides the relatively small amount of time likely required.
I'd long been interested in Forth but figuring out how to best utilize it for large applications was a tough nut to crack until I had gained several years of experience developing games in other languages. Its highlights such as interactivity, rapid experimentation, brevity, and modularity afforded by its permissive attitude and runtime structure gave rise to accomplishments such as:
- Spriter support built in a month while working on other things simultaneously.
- A functional custom level editor built in 2 days.
- A basic particle engine created in about the same amount of time.
- A menu system coded in 4 hours and in <50 lines of code.
- A fully-featured tweening module in <90 lines of code. (hard to say how long it took - it was an old custom component I ported to the engine)
- A scripting language for actors with language extensions that make events that happen over time more natural to code with no need for counters or timer objects.
- A framework for building a game modularly, allowing you to build pieces of it much more easily than in other languages, allowing for more rapid testing and "deeper" program designs.
- A robust object-oriented language extension that affords private namespaces, override-able "methods", inheritance, and an innovative concept called "smart fields" that make accessing objects more convenient, controlled, and less verbose.
All of these are meant to show off the workflow advantages as there are many other cool features of the engine, but almost everything was developed and refined DURING the development of The Lady on top of a pre-existing framework I had built as a starting point. Only a small portion is custom for the game and even then, that can be easily adapted for a different project.
Most of the backend work was front-loaded, but refinements continued to be done until the last day, when an improvement to the way cutscenes were handled was needed.
So I'm available right now to help someone develop any* kind of 2D game intended for initially desktop release. I can live on $1500 a month which I would gladly do this for. Being able to work on it full-time, combined with the fact that the engine and framework are solid, will ensure excellent turnaround. I'm interested in exploring the increased creativity that such an easy-to-use engine frees up mental space for as well.
The ultimate goal is to develop this toolset into a sort of secret weapon by forging it in real-world projects. I would very much like to do it full-time because that allows the required concentration to develop a game while simultaneously improving the tools rather than spending long swaths of time developing tools that turn out to be less-than-optimal slight incremental improvements on previous ones.
My rate is effectively free considering the cost-vs-returns ratio and which my ultimate goal is to improve even further by leaps and bounds by concentrating on workflow first, and
then performance. Forth has the malleability to take workflow to new levels in a way that will rival Unity.
Send me your concept and expected timeframe - if I'm interested we'll start a discussion.
(P.S. *No in-game transactions, spec work, remakes, or MMO's.)
(P.P.S. I can develop 3D games too since it's built on OpenGL, but Unity is much better outfitted.)
Jobs
