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Version Three - Spiral Island Trilogy

Looking over aged discs of end-of-year projects burned off from my multimedia classes, the transitions to the Spiral Island Trilogy was decided by the time my Sophomore year ended, although the proper fonts and logo designs for the title screens for the other two titles didn't come until later. Unfortunately I cannot find an exact date for this, as my Junior year's data disc is degraded and unreadable. However based on modified dates on other copies of the files, apparently the correct logo titles for the first two were created in summer of 2002, and the third game's title was made in early 2003 from the look of it.

As I began rewriting the storyline to remove the old fanfic aspects of it, I ended up eliminating a lot of characters. From the protagonist main characters I ended up down to Amy Carter, Marcus Tilden, and the leadership of The Anaconda's PMC. On the antagonists side, I had a number of divisions under Orion in the enemy company, the Omegan Army, with several division leaders. Looking over the archive page for the first two titles, as I was writing the storyline further I found absolutely no use for the other characters, so I stripped the important main characters on that side down to Orion and his assistant, Xedre Kopta. To keep with the heritage of the first game, I continued with 12 PC's for Spiral Island 1, creating new characters with stories and purposes for the new progression.

I worked on the game, coding everything from scratch. I had intended on releasing it right after graduating, but for reasons I no longer remember something prevented me from doing much to it. And then as I started employment, I re-evaluated the gaming market, and it was no longer feasible at the time, in late 2003, to work on the game in 2D any further, and I shelved the project, intending to learn more about 3D programming to restart the project in 3D. I spent the time since then fine tuning the story, as well as writing new stories for more games.

Now we catch up to 2008, where we are now. The console now is the ruling force, the game market has been turned on it's side with the sudden creation of the casual game market, and the industry's on the verge of shifting yet again with the hobby and indie developers being opened to a new mass distribution method, with Microsoft's XNA platform. Which brings us to the point I am at now, reviving the original Spiral Island in 2D on XNA.


Date posted: 02 August, 2008
Tags: programming spiral_island writing
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