Hey Newgrounds! I have found some time over a week-long holiday to do some work on the Pimps Quest 2 TechDemo. All this work is still foundational only, in that I am working on the game engine more than any content or story.

Pimps Quest 2 Tech Demo changelog 

Car shootout scene fully implemented 

• Cars now infinitely Spawn
• Cars will explode if shot too many times 
• Cars will slow down if you blow out their tires
• You now have ammo and have to reload to keep shooting
• Now has gunshot and explosion sounds 
• 2 new medals/achievements for the car shootout level.

Placeholder text-to-speech for chat bubbles 

• Now characters will talk using a pseudo animal crossing like speech system
• This is only placeholder to help time out speech length for when we use real audio

Chat bubbles get better graphics

• Now uses more comic like font

Reimplemented audio system 

• Should fix bugs that caused sounds on iOS not to fire correctly.
• Added new sounds

Inventory system refinements 

• Used items will now be removed from your UI
• A better sound will always play when picking up objects

Misc QoL improvements 

• now will tell you to rotate your device if playing portrait
• Can now pause the game 
• Visual bugs with poring out your drink are now fixed 
• Sped up player speed on most scenes
• Better icon for small inventory items 
• No longer make unnecessary calls to Newgrounds.io

I am doing this because I want to firm up the game engine more before committing to creating all-new artwork, story and get voice actors for PQ2. I am also still investigating a better animation system to use as I want to make animating faster. if you have any ideas on making fast animations in Phaser 3 please feel free to reach out to me.

As mentioned in my last post, I have recently gotten an itch for HTML5 development and I am using the Pimps Quest 2 Tech demo

as my canvas.

My focus this month was to “solidify” the game framework. What I mean by this is to put in place subsystems and frameworks that I can use to easily expand the game onto. Some example of these are ;

• Proper inventory management
• —before the inventory was a dumb list that could only be added too, now it is a dynamic array that you can remove items from at anytime and will sort it’s self when an item is removed
• Completely rehauled text bubbles
• — a charm of the original Pimps quest was its use of comic bubbles instead of “subtitles”. I rehauled the maths behind creating speech bubbles so now they not only look a lot nicer, but act the way you expect (tails will always look good no matter what angle)
• Started work on the next gen car shootout mechanics
• — I wanted the shoot out scenes to blow the original Pimps quest out of the water , to do this, I have made it so you can shoot off car tires like in the original, but you can also blow them up with explosions to boot!
• First implementation of phaser 3 shaders!
• — did you know in the original Pimps quest, Hooch am an drink the Bums bottle of Jager and drink? The only real effect is inverting the keyboard controls. I want the whole screen to have a drunk filter ala GTAV or RDR2. Whiles The shader works, I have to make inventory items interactive and still making some game design decisions if it’s even required.
• Actual asset optimization
• — when building this game I would compile it and then attach assets in at the end. Because I want to make working on the game easier I finally got around to installing plugins to do it for me and the plug-in tells me what files are too large. After some cleanup and resizing, I have saved over 60% space and more importantly Load time!

Looking back, some of these things should of been no brainers, but the funny thing about working on Pimps Quest is that I try not to take the development too seriously, as I think that’s apathetical to the legacy of Pimps Quest. But that’s no excuse for sloppy work and I have pulled the project out of a technical slump and it’s much healthier now!

The next large goal is to give the tech demo some real content and hopefully secure a decent art pipeline in regards to animations as right now I am not sure about the best course of action on how to animate and easily import into Phaser. We shall find out together!

Hey guys, just to prove I'm not dead I have made some minor bug fixes to the Pimps Quest tech demo and completely updated its engine to use the latest Phaser 3.51.

As mentioned before, I have put Pimps Quest 2 on the back burner in order to work on my own projects that will make money, however, I still have the itch to work on HTML5 games. I am using the Pimps Quest 2 Tech Demo as my personal playground to work on features when I fancy. I want to bring the game to a more stable place where I could offer it on Github however in its current state it is not ready for other people to work on.

Apart from updating Phaser, I made tweaks to the physics model so the player won't get caught on scenery, the chat bubbles tails now find where they come from and point at it (still wip) and I gave the shootout car health and you can shoot it until it explodes! For the full realize the entre first scene needs to be built from the ground up which I have planned but will need to wait until I have some downtime to give it the attention it needs.

This is a slow iterative process, however, I think at the end of this I will be able to offer a pretty robust "diorama point and click" game engine that could be used to build similar games to the original pimps quest but with all the lovely modern features like working on a phone, scaling with hi-DPI screens and Newgrounds medals.

In other Pimps Quest news, Tom featured it (along with Ben Spurgin) in one of his drawing tablet giveaway threads https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1461540

RIP Ben.

Hey Newgrounds, it feels like its been a while since I have posted and I just wanted to give a general update to whats going on.

Firstly, Pimps Quest 2 is still being worked on but very scarcely, this isn't due to a lack of motivation but more because of the whole "worlds on fire" thing I have decided to focus more time on working on my own IP so I can make some money down the road since PQ2 will always be 100% non-profit.

My current focus is re-making my game Reach for the Star! for iOS and Android (and later Web) but with a complete new art set and more gameplay mechanics all built in Unity and will have some IAP built in.

Here are my first screenshots and some behind the scene art assets never before seen! Some of the character art has been built of the great work by KennyNL.

Feedback and all that Jazz are welcome!

Stay safe and stay cozy.

I have been working on opening up Pimps Quest 2 codebase to the public, however during this time I found a much bigger issue.

its hard as hell to make levels

The reason for this is a mixture of the way items are placed (you have to define its X, Y position in code as well as what it is, attach animations and any functions to it) along with some weird issues like technically having 2 games scenes at all time.

this is all standard practice if your a programmer, however I want to make the game a little bit more accessible to people who are game designers and come from a more traditional flash background.

so what I’ve done is started work on making a very robust level/scene editor. I hope is to make it easier for people to simply drag and drop what they want in the scene and define the object interaction type with a GUI interface. This will also open up the yes way dialogue is added (which is all embedded in code)

I decided to do this after listening to a talk by John Romero (of doom fame) and two things I took away is;

• when making games, polish as you go
• make an amazing level editor.

Hopefully if I can achieve this it will open up more contributors to the game and intern lead to some great and fun funny stuff!

Hey guys! I am out of the hospital and back in work, I wanted to say thanks so much for all the feedback, really kept me company whiles I was banged up inside.

I will soon be starting a collaboration BBS post were I will open up Pimps Quest 2 to the community, I will be accepting pretty much any form of work, be it Art, VA, Programming or even just Ideas.

I need to cleanup the base game to open it up for other developers and also got it lay down some ground work for how Voice acting will be processed. also need to make sure I choose an opensource licence that will respect contributing artists rights whiles waiving my own.

If your interested in helping out then feel free to reachout to me or wait for the forum post.

I also should write out the story I have so far as I do want to follow it (however I am not married to anything at this point).

Again thanks so much to the NG community for being awesome!

The full announcement is here https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1444676#bbspost26381837_post_text

I am stuck in a Chinese hospital because I got pneumonia off my son, o decided to just launch the techdemo since life keeps delaying me And hopefully the NG community will keep me company.

Coming soon to a game portal near you

Follow me for updates on this new (old) game!

Just a heads up, this game was originally made in 2014 but has been updated semi regularly for the past 4 years, I recently re-discovered my old NG account and decided to share one of my games.

It's a mobile game but works fine with a keyboard and mouse.

The next game

My next game will be a lot more of a "Newgrounds" style game and involves a very old and beloved NG game from 2002. I will make more announcements when I have stuff to share but I hope people will like it!