While I really ought to be finishing iO a game idea popped into my head and I decided it was plenty simple enough put it together pretty quickly while the finer points of the iO game progression came to me.

If you take a wander over to the Code section you'll find a shiny new game to download. The aptly named Efficiency

Thought I'd catch up with the missing stuff from the Code section in preparation for new and exciting things. It helps keep it all in some sort of sensible chronological order.

It may seem on the surface of things that I've not been very productive over the course of the past year or so. Certainly, if your measure is that of finished projects then I haven't. However, this prolonged phase is (I hope) coming to an end. In anticipation I've decided to give some details of how my time has been spent, as much to inform everyone else as to prompt me into fervent action and timely completion.

For about 14 months I've been working on a personal game project, mostly consuming the very small amount of spare time I seem to have of late. For much of that time the game has been a series of nebulous ideas, with a number of core game play mechanics and a significant tendency towards a great deal of change around it's periphery. Only in the last three or four months has everything really started to settle into place (though that's no guarantee that there are not more changes ahead)

Now, As you might imagine given the time I've spent on it, this is not something of the same small scale as 'Radius'. This has characters and associated artwork, custom music tracks, a progression structure and even save games, in fact pretty much all the trappings of a full blown retail game. Admittedly still within the scope of something produced by one guy, but a pretty big pile of work all the same.

So where is it? Well, in keeping with the arcane traditions of the games industry, this post is really just to give you hints and clues about something as yet unreleased (and in several areas, unfinished). I've just been sat on all this work for so long that my capacity to keep quite about it has run out.

So you may now be wondering what there is to show for all this waffle. What tangible thing can you pear at or poke and make some judgements about. Well, there will be a dedicated page going up in a few days (read 'a week or so') and until then you can take a look at some of the game art in the Art section and you can listen to a couple of the background tracks in the Music section.

Finally, you might have noticed that I've failed to give any concrete details of the game itself. That's true. Though I could waffle some more, and go on about the setting and the story, or expound the virtues of it's game-play mechanics and feature set. I'm not going to because I'm whimsical and prone to change things and Besides that, I think the industry already promises to much and delivers to little, (but that's a rant for another day)

I'll say just this; It's called

Final sample piece of character art from iO. maybe I'll put some more later.

More sample character art from iO.

Another piece of sample artwork from iO.

Sample iO Character Art

A somewhat excitable track that features as background in the more hectic areas of iO. It's background music so don't expect it to really go anywhere, thought it does do a little more than the Calm track.