October 10th 2018 is the 10 year anniversary of when I started modding ioquake3. It was my third attempt at creating a Ninja Turtle fangame within a three year time period. I intend to release Spearmint 1.0 as the end result of 10 years of working on the Quake 3 engine.

On October 10th I’m planning to cease development on my projects based on the Quake 3 engine (Spearmint, Turtle Arena, Lilium Voyager, flexible HUD mod for ioq3, …) and resign from being a ioquake3 maintainer (since 2011). I’ll no longer be following ioquake3 development or providing support on the ioquake3 forum.

Continue reading 10 Years of Quake 3 →

I am planning to release Spearmint 0.5 and Turtle Arena 0.7 on Friday the 13th of October 2017.

Turtle Arena 0.7 is does not fix any issues with the melee attacking or overall design. It restores a few aspects of the game to earlier versions (before 0.5.x started changing the game for EBX), fixes some issues, and inherits many improvements from Spearmint including better compatibility with recent operating systems. It also unintentionally makes all the levels brighter because I fixed the external lightmap support… I don’t expect serious development to resume but new releases will probably be more frequent than every 5 years after this.

EBX was originally a continuation of Turtle Arena without Ninja Turtles (or any other playable characters due to lack of 3D models…). The small differences of the existing EBX code/data are being reintegrated into Turtle Arena. The EBX code/content repositories will be deleted. This will make Turtle Arena development easier as currently I work on EBX then merge the changes into Turtle Arena.

Whether EBX will be a separate game based on Spearmint or uses a new engine is unknown. Though there is a high probability EBX will never be created at all. At this point EBX is little more than a title for a game with Sonic style single player / co-op, Quake 3 like first person shooter multiplayer, hot pink blood, electronic dance music / hardcore techno, and a human character named Clover.

I am nearing the end of my 11th year of game development. I’ve spent about a 2 years working with Sonic Robo Blast 2 (Doom Engine), about 3 months with SDL 1.2 / OpenGL 1.x, about 8 years with Quake 3, and whatever the last year was.

I’m currently working toward making a new Spearmint release and hopefully a new Turtle Arena release in the next few months.

To clarify my post from last month; My plan to rewrite/overhaul Spearmint was replaced with making a new engine. I don’t have concrete future plans for Spearmint or Turtle Arena. However that does not mean I am abandoning them.

My Toy Box engine project is planned to rewrite the engine core, add and expand upon features I’ve added to Spearmint, and add new features I’ve wanted in Spearmint for years. This is essentially my plan to “rewrite/overhaul Spearmint” but starting from scratch and dropping Quake 3 data compatibility. Though, technically it’s just a game engine aiming to have a similar feature set.

New things I develop in my Toy Box engine project may be merged into Spearmint. For example, Toy Box currently runs the unfinished Alternate UI I made for Spearmint. It’s inflexible and kind of a mess. If I made a new UI it will most likely go into both Toy Box and Spearmint.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with Toy Box and Spearmint in future. What I do know is that spending another 8 years fixing small issues in Quake 3 sounds pretty uninteresting.

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. Continue reading EBX Reboot and the Downfall of Spearmint!? →

Today’s Spearmint release is canceled due to my lack of interest in developing it. No future release dates are ready to be announced at this time.

I’ve barely done any game development since Spearmint 0.4 was released in July 2016.

Spearmint engine development is still happening, development on Turtle Arena and Extraordinary Beat X is on hold. Plus I’m probably going to port the game code for RTCW and ET to Spearmint before focusing on Turtle Arena or EBX.

It will probably be `a few’ more months before I focus on game development instead of engine development.

Continue reading Engine dev: yes; Game dev: no, yet planning more games →

I posted some EBX info: some concept art, game design document, some character info. See http://ztm.x10host.com/ebx/.

EBX hasn’t been progressing much, though it is finally a separate project from Turtle Arena on github and has a few small differences. Turtle Arena is also on github now as well, following ioquake3 which moved to github in January 2013.

Interestingly the main changes made after EBX and TA were separate were to TA, which now has the pre-TA0.6 icon at loading screen (TA0.6 icon was always meant for EBX) and has katanas and sais on CTF flags similar to TA 0.2 (instead of EBX character icons). TA’s neutral CTF flag now has a shuriken on it again too. Splitting off EBX stuff will make TA a more enjoyable consistent experience.

There should be a new Turtle Arena 0.7 release in the near-future, hopefully next month. Mainly need to record some new announcer lines. After listening to the announcer lines and realizing how inconsistent they are, I’m probably going to re-record them all. I will be using a Blue Yeti USB microphone, instead of a ~15 year old Labtec AM-242 microphone as I have in the past so should be better audio quality too.

Turtle Arena now plays sounds (well, they’re missing right now) for red and blue team instead of your team and the enemy team. For example now Turtle Arena will announce when red and blue bases are under attack in the Overload game mode, instead of “your base is under attack” which was ambiguous in splitscreen with players on red and blue team. Same type of issue with team picked up the flag sounds. Announcer will now specify which local player picked up a CTF flag in splitscreen “Player [1|2|3|4] has the flag”, instead of “you have the flag” which is ambiguous. These changes were made December 14, 2012 (Turtle Arena r2022), longer ago than I thought…