Redrew Arthur’s animations. Added a new background. Implemented violence. Planned the first level. More in a bit.

A nasty little ferret with a nasty little knife.

Just implemented some basic movement, animation, gravity, and player/environment collisions. I’ll stick up a few shots (possibly a short video) when I’ve improved Arthur’s movement a bit.

Mellivorous, standing on a girder, probably about to kick in a ferret or something.

There’s some basic scene management and resource caching going on here. Intending to get stuff animated next.

I may use this image in some sort of title screen.

Quick concept sketch of Mellivorous.

So, Anateki is a PC game, and I felt the need to explain why.

A lot of developers prefer working in the web or mobile space, for a variety of commercial and technical reasons. For selling games, iOS (iPad/iPhone) is definitely a more lucrative proposition than PC - assuming your title is a runaway success, or very cheap to make.

But I think the (arguable) decline of AAA games on the PC in recent years has left a lot of space for indies to do interesting stuff, and there’s an established core of players who take an active interest in the independent scene (the readerships of Rock Paper Shotgun and Penny Arcade provide examples).

Additionally, mobile gaming is dominated by iOS, and the web is dominated by Flash: both are slightly weird proprietary technologies that require additional financial outlay, whereas I can start building a PC game with the stuff already on my desk.

Currently I’m developing Anateki on a Linux machine, and intending to port the game over to Windows and OSX - using SFML allows for a degree of platform independence (although there’ll no doubt be the odd bug that only manifests on one platform, or whatever).

I haven’t made a decision about whether to commercialise this thing or not, but a key strength of working on the PC is that I get to decide. iOS has exactly one, tightly-controlled, path to market; Android is slightly more open but depends on the whim of the operator; web games follow a completely different model that doesn’t really fit this kind of project. On the PC, there’s a whole range of different distribution services for selling the game if that becomes an option; equally, I can distribute it as freeware, go open source, whatever.

I’d really like it if there were some way to defer the platform decision until later in the project. But picking one platform over another determines the technology you can use for development: Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, ActionScript for Flash, and exactly one API per platform. And basically all of the gameplay decisions are affected by the input methods available, which are a property of the hardware.

The Golden Honey Biscuits of Anateki is a 2D action-platformer.

The protagonist is Arthur Mellivorous, a badger who habitually saves the world while wearing a smoking-jacket. He is visited by an old acquaintance, Percival Crankfoot, who sends him on a mission to recover the Golden Honey Biscuits of Anateki, a priceless treasure belonging to the Apide bee-people of Cryptonesia.

Mellivorous is aided in his travails by Mr Matthew Halfcook, a batrachian misanthrope who is also an airship pilot, and by the enigmatic Miss Tunnock, the foremost expert on the Apide. He is opposed by the diabolical Doctor Ethan Scaptor, a mole possessing avarice beyond measure as well as a giant digging machine.

I’m planning 4-6 short levels with brief breaks in between for comic-book sequences presenting transitions and plot. I’ll be hand-drawing the animation and backgrounds; the style I’m looking for is inspired by the games from the Amiga era, and Bryan Talbot’s Grandville. I’ll be writing the code in C++, probably using the SFML library for the sake of familiarity.

I’ll also be blogging the entire process in excruciating detail.

Rock Paper Shotgun sent me a biscuit, along with the following request:

Once you receive your biscuit, we’d like you to record the event it in whatever form you choose. Ideally this’d be a YouTube video or a simple sound recording of you eating it, but we’d also be happy with a short text description of what the biscuit meant to you, or even a tiny indie game that recreates what it was like to eat your biscuit. Or something else entirely! Just express yourself, then send your contribution to me with (if you like) a link to your site and/or games. I will then publish these collected biscuit memoirs in a post commemorating this event.

I have decided to write a short game about biscuits.