Hello friends! For anyone wondering where I’ve been and what has been going on with Portal Walker, I took a break from working on the game for a bit to pursue some… personal interests (playing video games and drinking beer). Truthfully, I was wandering the desert of game development despair in search for the elusive inspirato oasis. I started to feel the tug during yet another started-but-not-finished effort at Final Fantasy VII, but it turned out that that particular ember wouldn’t catch. In an attempt to stop using a bunch of mixed-up metaphors, my heart immediately fluttered as soon as I laid eyes on my new mistress, Runescape 2007 (aka Oldschool Runescape), where I literally spent hours trying to light tinder to make virtual campfires. And it was awesome.
For the uninitiated, Runescape started as a web-browser Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. Over many years the game has evolved in both content and technology, as most social MMO-style games do. Unhappy with the direction development of the game was going in, fans of the “classic” version of Runescape were numerous enough to spur the developers to put up servers for an older build of the game. Today, Oldschool Runescape has a larger player base than it’s modern counterpart, and after putting in some time playing myself, I finally see what all the fuss is about. I’m not going to review the game here, but it’s a really interesting fantasy MMO game that has some awesome skilling systems, if you enjoy grindy gameplay that rewards playing as much as you can. Also, the game uses a 3D engine that was designed to work inside of a Java browser plug-in almost 15 YEARS AGO! By today’s standards, Oldschool Runescape looks like a hot pile of dog poop. However, it by no means looks terrible, and the graphics are very well designed and have a charm to them that nostalgic gamers can appreciate. I was too busy making the big bucks and being able to afford a World of Warcraft account to notice Runescape back in the day, and only really checked it out recently because they just released a patch that lets you play full screen. I feel like I missed out. In many ways, Runescape is the MMO I always wanted games like WoW and Guild Wars 2 to be.
But enough of that, the most important thing is that playing Runescape has reinvigorated my motivation to work on Portal Walker! While I haven’t been working much, there have been a few behind-the-scenes developments since I’ve been away. By far the most critical of these has been getting the mobile version of Portal Walker up and running. At this point, it would be a huge shenanigan to keep expanding the game without being sure that it is going to run on mobile phones, so I had to check. And it worked! After many battles and frustrations, the first version of the Android Portal Walker client is installed and working pretty much as intended on my Samsung Galaxy S5 Active! I spent all night playing around with it and am super excited to get back to development now that I know the mobile version works!
Okay, with that out of the way… I think I’m going to start streaming development on Twitch.tv again soon, just want to get a few things taken care of first that would have made for a very boring comeback stream (such as getting the Android client working, what an awful stream that would have been, unless you enjoy watching people read API documentation live on camera over the internet, you sick weirdo). Stay tuned, I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Portal Walker in the coming weeks!