Where I’ve Been
So I haven’t been on here in a year or two.
It all started with a new, crippling gaming obsession sparked by the discovery of Dark Souls.
I’m sure most of you can relate, sometimes I get into a state where I don’t want to work on games, I just want to play them, which can last anywhere from a week to a year.

What I’m Up To
Since I’ve been able to pry myself from my gaming, I’ve revived my dream game project, Credence Filter.
It’s a sci-fi, metroidvania/action-RPG about the apocalypse, aliens, ghosts, cyborgs, mothmen, and not a small amount of an overwhelming sense of dread.
If you’re interested you can follow the project on Tumblr or Tigsource:
http://credencefilter.tumblr.com
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=49470.0

I also recently did Ludum Dare 33 and got 8th place overall for my competition entry, Trullskoll. I’m planning to add a few new features and enemies and wrap it up with a nice bow and put it here on Gamejolt!
Until then, you can check it out on the Ludum Dare website:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=15812

And perhaps most relevant;
What Happened To Grimgala
The production ran way, way past my projected “New Years 2014.”
I had so many cool, interesting ideas for bosses and random things to find and it got to a point where I was developing a new feature every day, it was really fun and the game was growing into something amazing.
Until early in 2014, my desktop’s harddrive stopped working.
It’s not what you think; I still have the source file.
The issue was that when I installed a new, better harddrive, I tried to reinstall Game Maker 7, but the company that handled the registrations had recently stopped existing.
I purchased Game Maker: Studio at a discount, using my GM7 key, but when attempting to import Grimgala I was faced with so many errors, bugs, glitches, crashes, everything that could go wrong.
After weeks of trying to fix it to work in GM:S, I gave up.
What happened was that I built Grimgala around a home-brewed, surface-based draw pipe-line, exploiting nuances in GM7’s handling of surfaces that no longer exist in GM:S.
I’d have to basically re-create the entire core of the game in order for it to function in a way that even remotely resembled the original.

By the time I had entirely given up hope, it was six months past New Years, and I was ashamed to come back here and give the bad news, so I didn’t, and now here I am, nearly two years later.

This isn’t the end of Grimgala, no. I have plans for a new roguelike that would be a successor to Grimgala, featuring at least nine different playable characters, more item types, at least five different kinds of procedural room generation that would alternate randomly floor-by-floor, and a lot more.
The default playable class will be the character of Grimgala, and the graphics will be better but the same aesthetic.
While I have a lot of ideas for this new rogue-like, I won’t be working on it until I’m finished Credence Filter, which I’m not prepared to make any kind of statement on release date for.

A thousand apologies to anyone who was hopeful for Grimgala; I declare it officially dead.
Just give me some time, I’ll make you something better.

-Charlie C.

TL;DR - I’m awful.