Regardless, the premise is simple. You kill ridiculously large monsters with ridiculously large swords and ridiculously large guns. There’s an amount of corpse-scavenging, an amount of crafting and the whole thing is designed for multiplayer. Sounds just like Monster Hunter, you cry. And you’d be right – it’s very like Monster Hunter. But with one important difference (well, two, but I’ll get to that); it doesn’t have the same brutally difficult leaning curve, particularly with regards to the controls. You can, to an extent, get away with flailing wildly at things in the early missions but you’d do well to learn to duck, weave and dodge. The difference is, God Eater Burst has fluid, fast and responsive controls and (in my opinion) Monster Hunter… doesn’t.

I’ve only played through the tutorials and 1st Tier missions, so I’m not hugely far in, but I have gone backhand replayed missions to improve my rank as well as to just try some things out and see what different strategies yield. All in all, I can see myself spending rather a lot of time with this one.

Except they’ve added dungeons. And monsters. And levels. And stats. And more OCD-triggering collectibles than you can shake a stick at. In short: I’m doomed.

So anyway, I’ve played the first four hours and here’s what I’ve achieved. Got some land organised, tidied away some sticks to kick start my woodpile once I get an axe, grown some radishes and potatoes and things. Met most of the people in the town – including one called Sharron. I have designs on Sharron. Oh yes

After doing a fair bit of ploughing and preparing the ground, I was given a pass for the first cavern system (which, incidentally, you can plant crops in and which stay the same season! Handy!). Sadly, I almost got ganked by a monster as soon as I went in, and if your HP falls to zero, you die. Not good. So I ran away. I’ve also done rather a lot of fishing. There’s something deeply relaxing about it.

So – plan B. I’m going to leave the caves alone for the first year, at least until I can afford some decent gear.

Oh! And there’s mining.

I’m very glad it’s nearly the end of January. This month has seen my budgeting system really pushed to the limits after some unexpected drama at Christmas. Getting there, though – slowly but surely.

You’ve perhaps noticed a few more blog postings than usual on here. I seem to have fallen into the same trap as everyone else and allowed facebook to take over my usual ramblings. I’m not entirely sure how this happened, but I’m not really happy with it. Facebook itself is a nasty and intrusive goblin of a site and I think the sooner I wean myself off it the better.

Anyhoo – I seem to have wandered off the point. Happy Friday, everyone! I’ll see you on the other side.

The ultimate goal is to produce a giant, complicated jRPG but I’ve been out of the loop a lot, so I’m going to start with something simple. Enter Modular Bob.

MB will be a platform game at heart – a Metroidvania stylee thing. For those wondering what the hell I mean by Metroidvania, I mean an action-RPG-platform game involving a lot of backtracking as new abilities become available.

Modular Bob’s particular upgrade path is a little unusual. He’s modular. This means there’ll be many potential upgrades available but not all can be equipped at the same time, and each will have cons as well as pros. For example, Superspringyfeet have the advantage of providing Bob with the ability to jump to higher areas, but also increase his height and slow down his movement.

Currently, all of this exists only in my head. Coding so far has consisted of setting up a dev environment (CodeBlocks under Windows) and working out the SDL initialisation routines, but at least I have a black window to show for my efforts

Also – I’m planning building the thing reasonably resolution independent, so I should be able to get the bugger working on anything that is supported by SDL, including ‘droid devices.