It's Friday, so I'll not feel so guilty about not being able to concentrate. It might be because this is my first full week back from the holidays, it might be all the admin, or it might be because of the hot weather (actually, this is probably the main factor), but I'm mentally exhausted even though I haven't really done that much this week. At least I'll be reasonably ready for next week.

I think I've decided on what I'll do for my next project. So far the details are vague concepts floating around in my mind, but I can tell you this much: it's an arcadey-themed game code-named "Project Everest", will be about some cute cartoon character that wants to climb cute cartoon mountains, and will play almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Ice Climber.

The main challenges with this project will be the artwork (which aren't extensive but will be a fair amount of work for me), building a slightly more solid engine than with Pierre and the Fish (that one isn't too hard to achieve!) and the algorithmic challenge of procedurally generating the mountain terrain. However, all these things I'll have to include in the three projects I'm thinking of doing later (Projects Luxor, Hamlet and Ivan: read through the journal for the details [wink]), so it's a good practice game. I'm a bit concerned that my present guess is this will take me three months to complete, but I haven't done a complete factoring of the work involved and I might be overestimating the time it takes to do the art. I've got little idea of how long the artwork will take me, so I'm factoring in a month for art alone.

I'll see if I can mock up a few sample pieces of concept art for how the main character should look over the weekend. I've already got some ideas for the music.