some say easter is a time for miracles…
That’s right, we are not dead! You might be forgiven for thinking that the games company that has not posted anything new to their website since April 14 2022 was actually dead. But oh no, we are very much alive. Though in fairness for a large part of that time, we might have been technically dead, but we are certainly not dead now.
What have we been doing then? Well, I got a very busy and important job back in May 2022 with Ready Player Me (which I still have) and that plus a combination of tricky life circumstances left very little time for 4MB.
There was also the issue of just rock bottom motivation when it came to my games and complete “writer’s block” on what to do next. Continue working on the existing projects and try and improve them? Start something brand new but quite small? Start something brand new and enormous? Didn’t have a clue.
Now some time has passed and we are somehow in 2024, the itch to get back into game dev just needs to be scratched. This itch was not helped an in-house game jam we did back in February which had me and a small team crunching away on a little game and boy did I enjoy being back in Unreal Engine.
And now it is Easter, the time of new beginnings. 4MB is not starting over from scratch or anything, but we are actually going to be making some games again which is fun.
So what are we doing? Too much is the answer there but unfortunately I am a mad person who absolutely does not know when to leave a project alone and move on to something else. Also, I love making prototypes and then moving on to another thing before really figuring out what to do with it.
Behold – the list of things we are aiming to do before 2025 at the very latest!
OMVORM v2.0
This is definitely the first thing on the list in terms of release but the rest are in a totally random order, anyway, our first update will be to Omvorm. That game was always…fine…but never quite what I wanted. Over this weekend I have been working on a new mode which is absolutely inspired by something else (all shall become clear) and which is way more fun.
Hopefully not a whole load of work to get it finished, then we can get it out into the wild. I had already completed a variety of bug fixes and improvements to vanilla Omvorm so this should be a decent improvement.
Expect to see this update in early May on PC and Nintendo Switch.
BALLZOUT v2.0
No pics for new Ballzout just yet as she is in a full-on state of disrepair, but the work has very slowly started happening on a minor reboot. It is up and running in Unreal Engine 5 and now just needs the small task of dramatically improving the gameplay and adding a single-player mode. Easy.
This will be tackled after Omvorm I think, the amount of work is not actually horrendous so I think it should be a relatively quick win (famous last words of course)
GALACTIC DEFENCE SQUADRON v3.0
GDS is a game I originally made in about 2-weeks, then did a small amount of additional work like two years later. It is a bit of a mess behind the scenes but I like the bones and I want to improve it. And so I shall! I have all the plans of what I want to do but absolutely no work has happened on this other than getting the project up and running in Unreal Engine 5.3.2
No idea when we might see updates for this one, but it will be in 2024.
UNDEAD BLACKOUT v4.0
Bonus update before I get into the real stuff – Undead Blackout 3.2 is available on Steam now! It features an upgrade of the original game to Unreal Engine 5.2 and fixes a few minor bugs
Copied!
Ok now for the real update. Undead Blackout has been floating around forever. It is not the best game. But it is my first game and therefore somehow the best despite being built by a version of me who knew almost nothing about Unreal Engine or Steam or really just life in general.
And I absolutely cannot abandon it and so Undead Blackout 4.0 is on the way.
I likely would have started work on this sooner but there was some mad issue where my Unreal Engine would stop working for all other projects whenever I opened Undead Blackout and vice versa, it made jumping between projects (something I clearly love) an absolute nightmare.
But 2-weeks ago I finally figured this out and fixed the issue. All my games are now running on the same version of Unreal and so the work continues.
I have a plan for Undead Blackout, I know what needs improving and I know what can stay with a bit of polish. It will be a fairly large task to get it to the level I want it to be, the level I see in my head. But we won’t stop until we get there.
prototype #1 – b5 (working title)
Naturally, with all that work I have also spent ages working on some new prototypes, all of which I like and all of which I want to release at some point. The good news is that they are all relatively small projects I think I can finish…soon. We shall see.
First up, B5! This was inspired by a session I had playing Super Smash TV and so I wanted to recreate that kind of fun for myself.
The prototype is not too far along but we have a character running around an arena which fills with enemies and we can shoot them. They do not yet shoot back which is no fun. This also has a multiplayer mode working as well, so decent progress but lots more to do.
prototype #2 – bakudan (working title)
Remember that game Intelligent Cube? You ran across a small level trying to make blocks disappear before the crush you? Yeah, that game was awesome. So I am also trying to make a version of that! But this time with bombs instead of blocks.
Drop little bombs of your own to clear the oncoming explosives, each colour representing a different type of bomb such as extra points or an explosion that takes out a nearby bomb as well.
Fun already, I got the prototype up and running in about two days and now it needs lots more love and attention to get over the finish line
prototype #3 – escape the clyde (working title)
I was sat on the toilet reading Retro Gamer when I suddenly decided I wanted to make a modern version of Pac-Man. And so, I did! In a tale you have heard twice already I got the prototype working pretty quickly. We have levels that get progressively harder with more enemies and more “pills” to collect and we also have a weapon (the equivalent of the fruit!) you can use against said enemies.
Much like Bakudan, it needs a lot more care and attention but the core game is there. Whether I create 256 distinct levels remains to be seen but the answer is almost certainly no.
Seven things Jeremy, seven? That is ridiculous. Yep. I am with you on that one slightly misquoted Peep Show line. Better get on with it then…
Written by Tom Gilchrist