Michal Marcinkowski, Sigvatr (aka Eric Vaughn), and Hamish McLeod have teamed up with two other talented artists to form Transhuman Design. You might recall that MM and Sigvatr were already collaborating on Link Dead, a spiritual sequel of sorts to the ever-popular Soldat. Now they are planning a new online game that will use the Link Dead engine:
MM is saying the game will be much simpler than Link Dead and will be released before the latter as a test of the new engine.
I have to say, with the amount of indie strength on board, I have high hopes for this one. And I do enjoy a bit of the ultra-violence now and again.
(Thanks to BMcC, Terry, Tim, Xander, and ithamore for keeping things going while I was away. It’s good to be back!)
Dustin Gunn recently posted this trailer for the upcoming game Furry 2, a sequel to Furry which was made a number of years back by Hamish McLeod (now of Moonpod fame). If you’re a fan of old school DOS style action platformers, giant green enemies wielding chainsaws, or Tequila; you should give this trailer a watch. No word on a release date yet, but we’ll keep you informed once we get one.
Hamish McLeod has a nice post-mortem for War Angels up on his blog. An entertaining and self-reflective article, and certainly anyone who has been on a project that’s spiraled out of control can empathize. I especially like the graph shown above! It’s a pretty accurate depiction of game development.
I think where scheduling can be useful is in planning and executing a game project that can be finished before you get to the point where the red, blue, and green lines start diverging. Creativity is boundless, but time, resources, and skills are not. You have to manage that on a large-scale project. And, to a certain extent, I feel like a lack of satisfaction with one’s work goes hand-in-hand with being a creator. It’s what drives you, right?
Regardless, I hope that Hamish gets back into game development sometime in the near future. C’mon, man, you know you still got that itch!