I'm making a free Giant Bomb themed sports game inspired by retro classics Windjammers, Sanrio World Smash Ball! and many other "ponglikes". This is my pathetic attempt to blog about its development. If you'd like to understand my madness a little better than you might care to check out my other entries below.

1. Games of future past: Giant Bomb Jammers

2. Dev Log #465 - Hard Knocks & Cannibalism

3. Gone with the Wind: Jammers Dev Log #3

With only about a week left before PAX prime I've decided to keep this post short, giving just a very basic rundown on some of the progress I've made over the past week. This is because blog posts take me a while to write and I'd like to stay focused on finishing up the first public alpha. I've set August 28 as my deadline for its release. This is because I think PAX is the perfect opportunity to allow a game like this to be played with actual human beings. Unfortunately, I won't be attending PAX myself, but I wanted to give other duders the chance to play it there anyway. So if you're going to PAX prime with a laptop and a few xbox controllers and would like to play this there. Please feel free to do so (once it's released).

I've finally decided to change the game's name from "Giant Bomb Jammers" to "Bombjammers". While I still don't feel like this is the best possible name, I think it's unique and descriptive enough to work. There has already been another community project by the same name too, but that open source project seems to have unfortunately died. So I don't believe there will be any issues with using the same name here.

The player input control system has become a real pain for me. I initially started creating a much more complex and robust system to allow for any kind of player input (keyboard/mouse/gamepad), but I quickly realized this was making the process take much too long. So I've decided to go with Xbox controller support only for the initial release. I also struggled a bit with how I should implement the new player selection screen, but in the end, I decided to go with a simple design that works pretty well.

Here's a preview of some of the visual/interface changes I've been making. Fire effect and backgrounds are not finished yet.

If you'll be going to PAX prime and would like to host and/or partake in a Bombjammers session, then leave a comment below, or send me a private message. So I can let you know the moment it's released. I'll also be announcing it through my twitter account. Thanks for reading and see you next week!