Tainted Skies - Dev Blog

Greetings!


I may as well go ahead and let you all know who I am, why I chose to start producing this game, what my ultimate goal is and why it's about ponies.

Who am I?

I'm an Aussie living in Switzerland in a 260 year old farm house out in the middle of nowhere in a village where cows are actually more frequent than human beings. You may ask yourself what by Celestia's beard am I doing on the other side of the globe? That in itself is another story, to give you the short version: I'm here because of my parent's failed attempt at a trip around the world. It's not awful though, in fact quite the opposite. I don't think I'd be able to develop computer games in a loud city (where they used to live). This village has everything a developer could ever want: Peace, a quiet route to go for walks, beautiful scenery, cows, and don't forget the Swiss chocolate!

Professionally, I'm an electronic engineer. I design complex circuitry for flow measuring devices, as well as program them. The job is fantastic and I don't think I would find anything better.

In my free time I develop computer games and have over 7 years of experience in doing so. I've been using the language "DarkBASIC Pro" for most of my projects, but recently have been growing more and more annoyed at the language's disadvantages. That is why I'll be moving "PonyCraft : Tainted Skies" to C++. I have good experience in the languages BASIC, C, C++, ASM, and a little bit of experience with HTML and JAVA (although JAVA is very much like C++).


Why am I making this game?

Right, so why did I choose to produce this game? I felt I needed to attempt something of larger scale. In the past 7 years I've programmed over 200 small projects. 180 of them are laughable and never saw the light of the internet. The other 20 are mostly just short mini games. I really feel ready to finally get out there and finish a serious project, and I am ready for it. This blog is proof of that.


What is my ultimate goal?

My ultimate goal is to create a game that combines two genres: RTS and RPG. I am in charge of producing a highly dynamic, easy to use engine for this. I want to let the general public and modders have the ability to change anything they want in the game, and use the game engine to create their own games.

While the game engine is based off a script interpreter (which means you have to program it with text), I will most likely also create an editor which does most of the scripting for you.


Why ponies?

First of all, it doesn't have to be ponies. This project supports any theme I want, or any theme you want, as you will have the power to make your own RTS/RPG games with it. So why ponies? I've been a brony since the beginning (se01ep09 to be exact), and I've enjoyed so much creativity in this fandom that I'd like to contribute my own.


You've just read the longest post on this blog, thank you for taking an interest in me! From now on out you can expect updates on the game's progress.


TheComet