A new project! Mine, this time.

In 5 years I want to be floating in a pool of pina coladas, digging large holes in the garden for the pleasure of later filling them in and generally being incredibly obnoxious to people who have to work for a living while I explain that I don't use VB or C# because they're too mainstream and I would only ever code for the love of it now.

So here comes brand new project # 431...

Constraints:

It should give me something to think about which isn't work.
It should reinvent my old game To Catch a Thief, and put it into a context. What context? A context where I could A: Get some visibility on my funny game and B: Eventually make some money out of it. (See above, re Pina Coladas). What's a pina colada anyway? I think it involves orange juice.

I think there are a few places where money flows on the web:

1) App store
2) XBox Live
3) ITunes
4) Blog advertising

And I'm not sure about the last one. Certainly if you take the amount of money my family spends on online services they go on 3,2,1,4 in that order. And I'm not aware that I've ever clicked on a blog ad. Mostly because people who advertise on their blog always seem to me to be spammy. I'll eat those words when it seems like a good idea to me to do so. Yum!

So the problem with App Store is I don't have a mac. I also don't know Objective-C or whatever it's called that you use to develop iOS stuff.

What I want to do here is the least possible work to make my game, which should be the simplest possible game, playable by the most people.

Basically my elevator pitch:

I want to make an episodic, Sierra style game that people would play for 20 minutes at a time, on a train. The controls are simple. The timeline of the game is player instigated, which means that you can just drop it into your pocket and you won't die. You just won't do anything. It would almost be a text based adventure except that I really like my animation that I had for ShadowCat, the main character. (He's a D&D character of mine).

So why do I play this game?

I think the game narration is funny.
I like watching the main character walk around.
I'm interested in the plot.

In that order.

So here's what we don't need:

Ragdoll.
High level animation.
High detail graphics.
High fidelity timelining.
Twitch reflexes.
Multitouch.
Accelerometer.

I'm going to do it in a browser. And when I sell it on the appstore I think I'll put it in a UIWebView and STILL put it in a browser.

Why not Flash? Can't be used with the App Store. And that's where I think anybody pays money.

Now the weird thing about this is that it's going to be the opposite of my normal practices. I'm going to use a language that I'm already reasonably familiar with, I'm going to do as little engineering as possible. I am, in short, going to try very hard not to build a framework.