It's not all doom and gloom. Not entirely.

It's been many years since I made a computer game. I was cut down in my prime by Windows Vista, and never really recovered. I can't bring myself to commit to anything Microsoft-related, now, because I can't trust them to still be supporting it six months from now. The new OS travesty, Windows 10, has the awesome feature of Microsoft being able to add and remove features as and when they like. If they one day decide not enough people are using the same steering wheel or webcam as you, bam, support dropped.

Oh, the manufacturer hasn't paid the fee to have their perfectly functional drivers badged my MS? Tough luck. Mandatory auto-update.

Anyway. As technology moves on, I do still have some options. My old 2D classics could, in theory, be remade entirely in Javascript and HTML5, to run in a browser. I had some fun educational games (maths and spelling) with Isegrim running around a maze. I had a pac-man clone, that I made just as a path-finding exercise. I even had a 3D game, where you race a hovertank around hunting down drones. That was fun.

My masterpiece was a repton/boulderdash game, which we just called Rocks and Monsters. It had an editor, action replays, even an in-game story system. It was awesome (imo). I'd love to come back to that sometime.

HTML isn't my only option, although at present that's the system I'm most fluent in. Unity might be better for a complex 2D game (and certainly for anything 3D), though they take a weird approach that I can't quite get my head around. I could probably shoehorn something to work the way I want it.

At the moment I'm looking into Ren'py, and the medium of Visual Novel Games. I like games, but I also like drawing, and I also like writing stories. This lets me do all three, in a single package, with (comparatively) little work required.

Watch this space, I'll keep you posted.

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