I started thinking about the game design for the Turtle Arena successor, Extraordinary Beat X, at the beginning of 2016. It was the first time I seriously thought about it since 2013.

There is a lot of ways that the Spearmint engine could be improved and new features that could be added. However the main issues for EBX are the lack of game assets and overall design. In particular the critical component of music. While I had found some decent music under free content licenses, they’re just not what I want for the game. If I want to make the game, I have to make the music too. It’s pretty easy to imagine spending 5 years or more on just creating the music. Though I haven’t actually created any music tracks so it’s more like guessing than imagining.

My goals for Spearmint have changed over time from it’s original 2011 goal to be a better (or alternative) base engine for standalone games [based on ioquake3] to focusing more on multi-game support and adding features from other games based on Quake 3. It was still based on the idea that I would eventually create a new game using Spearmint.

In the months leading up to the Spearmint 0.4 release I had been seriously considering ceasing to follow ioquake3 development. Having Spearmint completely branch off on its own; remove the opengl2 renderer, rewrite over half the code base, and reorganize most of the rest code base. I would probably stop contributing (as many) patches to ioquake3 due to differing code bases.

Completely separating Spearmint from ioquake3 goes against what I’ve tried to do with Turtle Arena since the beginning; contribute as much back to ioquake3 as possible so even if my project fails and I abandon it, at least it will benefit others later. Spearmint was born out of trying to make Turtle Arena code that I couldn’t include in ioquake3 be available in a more useful way.

ioquake3 was the third engine I used for creating a ninja turtle game. I don’t have any attachment to playing any of the Quake 3 based games. I switched from creating a game engine to using ioquake3 in 2008 because 1) ioquake3 is a full working game. 2) I was in over my head creating an engine.

I came to the conclusion that instead of continuing to improve or completely overhaul Spearmint for a game that I might make five years from now; I should create a new engine for EBX when I’m actually ready to make the game.

It’s been 10 months since Spearmint 0.4 was released. So far absolutely nothing has happened on the music side and just a few minor changes on the Spearmint side.

I started working on making a new engine for EBX under the title Clover’s Toy Box.[sarcasm] Yeah I’m totally not programming EBX before making the music, just look at the title. My current plans for Clover’s Toy Box are kart racing and first person shooter game modes. I’m still creating a basic engine so it’ll be a while before there is actually a playable game. I also zero commitment to actually work on it; I’ll just do it if I feel like it.

Summary

I’d like to make a new game (with music!) not using a Quake 3 based engine and I have zero commitment to it. Spearmint is more or less finished because I’m not planning to make a game using it.