Damn. I've gone over a year without posting now. Missed the whole of 2020, and not even because of COVID! Thought it might be time to give a small update.

2020 was a busy year for me, despite the lockdowns and all that. I moved to a new city, Helsinki, the capital of Finland, in January and started a new (IT) job. Since March many people, including me, have been working mostly from home, but I've still had plenty of opportunities to get to know the city and have even managed to make new friends. The current socializing restrictions have also given me the free time to learn something new: I've spent a lot of my past year learning music production, a skill I've been wanting to pick up since childhood.

My MMORPG project MUTA is still under development, however, the past year has been one of the least intense I've had in terms of development speed. The main reason is the fact I was focusing on learning the ropes of making music. As of the beginning of 2021, I'm beginning to be comfortable enough with music that I have again been able to dedicate almost proper time to MUTA, though some of the time is still shared with music practice and making. My hope is that I'll one day be able to apply those acquired musical skills to MUTA's soundtrack.

MUTA's world editor is now in a good state, as is the client/server relationship, for developing gameplay features. The first feature I have started working on this week is the inventory system and picking up items. I had a realization about this concept recently: I have been taught by many previous games to think of items and world objects as separate things, and there's no reason they should be separate. In MUTA, I'm planning on making these things the same: if you see an object in the world and it isn't locked down, and you have sufficient inventory space and enough strength to lift the thing, you can pick it up. The inventory will also be one of the first major features of the UI, and I've recently been working a lot on the Lua based UI system of the game.

Right now I'm building a website for the game, something I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm very fond of old school MMORPG websites, like for example World of Warcraft's or Shadowbane's old websites that both had lots of game information links on the side bars and cool images of game content spread around. It will probably be released as a sub-page of this website, we'll see.

That's pretty much all I wanted to say for now, I think. Stay safe everyone!