NEWS

Sneak a peek -

hospital corridor

Building character -

Heyo!

Holding true to my promise of revamping all characters from sprites to proper hand-drawn characters (and in an effort to eliminate as much clichés from the game as possible), I've begun updating the core cast - both in appearance and personality, getting them up-to-date with this century at least.

TMC cast 2010
Just look at those fresh new threads and do's!

Other than that I've been spending some time building extentions to the game engine like proper ingame cutscenes, a profile creation system and a custom save/load system. One of these days I'd love to tackle the Mass Effect dialog system, but that is probably something for another game (dare I say Coyote 2?).

Who'd've thought -

Hey y'all, it's me again! I know, who'd've thought, right?

But all joking aside, I have some goodies for you. I've decided to leave the turbulent world of photo-manipulation and sprite art behind me and graduate to full hand-drawn graphics. This frees me from a number of nuisances, like not being able to scale my characters up far enough, and the general horridness of trying to find good reference photos.

So I've been working on a few new backgrounds that I'd like to share with you now. They're not finished yet, but you get the idea.

NYPD offices
Sketch for the main NYPD offices

Adam's office
The office of Adam and Jake [WIP]

What else is new -

I've overhauled a large chunk of the story due to it being cliché and not very interesting. I like it a lot better now, and it's a little closer to the original draft again, but new story means I need new puzzles. And coming up with puzzles is a bitch. I've got some that I'm pretty proud of right now, but I'm not satisfied with the rest. And improving them takes time. Time I don't really have right now.

So, see you in another year-and-a-half, yeah? Great.

Guess what -

Heeey! Guess what.

TMC? Far from done. Going to take a while. And all that.

Chris Jones has done some stellar work on v3 of the engine, and it contains so much shiny goodness that I've decided to port the whole game over to that. I'm rebuilding the game now from the ground up, all object-oriented and stuff. This also gives me the opportunity to polish up the gameplay and add little features I've wanted for a long time but weren't supported in the engine. It makes my life a lot easier. Or, as much as it can without building the entire game for me.

Which would be pretty awesome actually.

Hey CJ, get on that.

Things that are and will be -

Small update: The progress page now has dynamic status bars. Just open the page and look at em go! Mostly in the 60's now, that's good news, right?

Other than that, I decided to set a new deadline: in January, there will be an updated demo. The part of the game that will be in the demo is pretty much finalized, I'm just waiting on some animations and the intro cinematic. I've decided to animate the comic interludes using After Effects and stick 'em in as AVI's. Think digital graphic novels, like MGS or Awakening. All panels are seperate objects in the game now, but with more than 4 of those it is hell to keep organized. Once I finish the intro movie I'll put it up here.

Redesign -

As you can see, I finally sat down and overhauled the site. The design is not that stellar (rounded corners though!), but if you look at the code, pshaw! All standard compliant and everything, she's a beaut. Not that there's really any new content so far, that's next on my list. I really want to put out a new demo, but until I finish the walkcycles that's not going to happen. So go me!

Sup -

I've started game college, so my motivation is increased, yet my time unfortunately decreased. But I can work everywhere now, because I have a laptop. This also revealed some color issues in the sprites I missed on my old (crap) monitor. Today I've been working on Adam's apartment and inserting a new room. There's still a lot to be done but at least I'm making progress. Typing this I kinda wanna renew the site aswell, now that I'm proficient in CSS. This tables business is pretty silly.

Status -

Do not fear, TMC is still in production! I've just not done much work on it the past couple of months. But I have some great new ideas, so the project is certainly not dead. Just...delayed indefinitely. That is to say, there never was a release date to begin with...
But I concur it's getting ridiculous so I'll try to hurry up.