NEW RELESE: JUMP 666

 I just made one of the dumbest things I've ever made.

Ladies & gents, it's JUMP 666, the title says it all, check it out today on potatoclockgames.com!

I made this game in a few hours, following this tutorial for the bulk of it, after learning that you can do keyframe animations in CSS. WHAT!? Why in the name of fuck would you want to do that? Who is sitting around wishing that CSS was more fiddly and complicated? JUMP 666 aims to answer these questions and more.

For the haxorz, the scholars, the rascals:

• JUMP 666 HTML
• JUMP 666 CSS
• JUMP 666 JavaScript
  

PCG 2020 Shareholders Profits Report

 Welcome, welcome. Your time is valuable so we'll cut to the chase. As you can see, we are on track to complete BRS version 0.3 last summer? Wait ....

BRS Progress Report

Huh. Well, shit.

Black Road Sky Version 0.2 Released

I know I said March, but fuck it, here you go:

potatoclockgames.com/BRS

I had planned on waiting to release this until I had put together some sort of tutorial, but who knows when/if I'll find the motivation to do that. I've already started working on the next version update. Making a tutorial system for a game that's constantly changing and nowhere near finished feels pointless. I'll probably make some drunken YouTube video tutorials at some point.

Let me be clear: this is a buggy, shitty looking tech demo with basically no gameplay. That said, I've been working on it since October 2018 and I'm pretty proud of the state it's in. The physics simulation is working, with realistic orbital mechanics and Newtonian flight. There's a full scale solar system spread across billions of kilometers with no loading screens. You can walk around your ship while in flight, you can dock with space stations, and you can get out of your ship to walk around the stations you dock with, all seamlessly. These are all difficult technical problems to solve, NOT TO TOOT MY OWN HORN HERE OR ANYTHING, which I've never seen combined into a single game (with the exception of the now cancelled Rogue System).

The next version, which I expect to take anywhere from 6 to 12 months to complete, is going to be a pretty boring one. There's a ton of behind-the-scenes kind of stuff I need to take care of before moving on. I'll be adding some very basic space trucking gameplay with contracts to accept and money to manage, but most of v0.3 will focus on cleaning shit up and getting the codebase ready to start implementing ship systems.

Man, I need a fucking hype man or something.

Black Road Sky is dead. Long live Black Road Sky.

How to make a video game:

1. Try.
2. Fail.
3. Despair.
4. Return to Step 1.
5. Inexplicably end up at step 5 with a jankity tech demo.

ACTUAL GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE UNPARALLELED REALISM

The rebooted Black Road Sky will be available in the form of a shitty looking tech demo with basically no gameplay in about a month.

CONTAIN YRSELFZ.

848 Days Later, Somewhere in Egypt

My eyes snap open to darkness, body of hair and bone surrounded by cold stone and the stench of my own death. I push against the smooth walls of my tiny prison and feel them give. The sarcophagus lid slides away, falls to the ground, shatters. An unearthly howl escapes from the depths of my body, the wail of a thousand unspeakable deaths rattling across black teeth, withered tongue and lips.

The booming echo of the shattered sarcophagus fades, chasing itself through the labyrinthine corridors of this ancient hell, pyramid of death, and home, home at last.

My wretched face contorts in the sick imitation of a grin. "Showtime."

Potato Clock Games Fall Sabbatical

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ SEE YA.

xoxo
Potato Clock Games

Black Road Sky #4: Electrical System (First Pass) Complete

Here's a huge and probably incomprehensible GIF showing the current startup procedure, followed by a death-defying orbital maneuver and a quick shutdown:

I feel like things are coming together pretty well. I had to sketch out half-ass versions of a few other systems, as you can see above, just to get the electrical system running & tested, and in the process I was able to generalize a lot of the code base; adding new systems (as well as their UI panels) should be quite a bit easier from here on out.

Next up is the temperature management system. I'm not sure how deep I'll dig in on this first pass, but the plan is for the system to eventually consist of a number of freon (or something)-fed cooling loops with deployable radiators. I need to do some research on current and experimental industrial cooling technologies first, though, to get an idea of what's going to make sense here. Pretty much everything in the ship will produce heat, and overheating damage will eventually be a thing, so temperature management will be an important system that I'd like to get sketched out sooner than later.

I want the pressure dynamics in the pipes to make sense, and I don't really know anything about pressure dynamics, so this update may take a while as I dig into some research. But I'm hoping to have something to show & to be able to move on within a few weeks.