I’ll try not to cram this first blog entry with all my thoughts and keep some for future days.

I’m known as Baltirow on the webs and have been hobbying with game making on-and-off for a good 12 years. This has been mostly on since I discovered Game Maker early 2005, a wonderful and versatile game-making program everybody here’s probably heard of. Since May 2006 I’ve joined the ranks of Poppenkast, which has been fun, inspirational and best of all has helped me lots with getting my GM work done.

My current list of finished titles can be found on the Poppenkast site. Orbital Booty Interceptor is probably the best known as it had some publicity on Indiegames and was an entry in the VGNG comp at TIGsource.

Orbital Booty Interceptor (you’re the alien btw)

The list on the Poppenkast site also shows two WIP projects of mine. In reality I have many, many potential WIPs, but my favourite (and probably most known) remains Vanguard, a metroid-esque game in 4 color CGA style. Ever since I started with it nearly 3 years ago it has had many revamps and has its fair share of collecting dust on my hard drive. The biggest issue continuing with this project has been having to work with code and design choices made during my early GM years which obviously means codeswamp and what-not.

Several people have urged me to continue with this work, but the cumbersome construction (which was functioning only so-so) made working on it a real chore. Recently I have found the drive to re-do the entire game engine using the original graphics.

Recent screenie of Vanguard

It has been a blast working on it so far! I have even come up/implemented some fresh new ideas for gameplay which is always a good sign with any project. I do however have to refrain myself from adding loads of content and quick-code or I’ll end up with the same problems as first. Maybe I’ll even make a level editor for this one, though it always kind of scares me as it’s almost a game in itself.

I probably won’t be posting demos of the game here (just yet?), but I will be using this blog here for updates on this project and any other thing that comes up. Also, I have noticed that demos tend to slow me down as they unrightfully feel like finished projects, so I’m going to minimise it until I have the engine working the way I want with the content I want.