I just wanted to share my thoughts on some things that have been going on.

So, I regret to say that I have not worked on my Starship game in a long time :\. After careful examination I noticed that the game sort of fell apart with the engineer and them doing things required other players to mess up, but if the other players where fairly competent, then the engineer had nothing to do. I tried adding in an upgrade gun that would allow the engineer to upgrade parts in their down time, but I'm not sure overall that it adds much. My lesson that I take away from this is that I should prototype ideas first and find out what makes them fun. Adding in features for swapping ship parts, swapping ammo types, dynamically breaking parts was all excessive things that I did not need to address yet, and having tested the prototype ahead of time, may have lead me to understand whether or not these parts of the game are important.
That being said I still love the idea of asymmetrical local co-op. I think it has a huge potential. Just take a look at games like Artemis. Someday I hope to develop something like this, and I am usually looking for great ways to include local co-op in general.

Other news: I am working on a small game jam thing for funzies with a friend. Its a multiplayer mermaid fighting game where you collect as many points as possible and you can kill other players to steal some of their points. Screen shot:

I also competed in the global game jam 2015.

The theme was "what do we do now?". Our idea was to make a game that starts at the end where you have all of your equipment and you start by defeating the final boss. After that you have to go backwards through the adventure and tie up all of the loose ends that where left over from your adventure. For example, you borrowed a sword from somebody, now you have to go back and return it. I think it had the potential to be something really awesome, but because of the death of one of the people managing the event the 48 hour game jam was post-poned 24 hours and we only had 24 hours left to program what we needed. Furthermore, I ended up working with a great 3D artists named Leonard Nicolas, so we went with a 3D art style and the game's coding complexity grew. In the end we only managed to complete the starting boss fight. We had to present and in our presentation our computer's sound wasn't working. We also juuuuust finished and worked very shortly on presentation materials. After the presentation, we realized in retrospect that the idea behind the game was not present in what we actually made.

Link

Furthermore, after skimming the globalgamejam website, it looks like other people had the same idea for a game, so it was not all that original, but I showed up late and just found a group to program for.

Now I am looking at making a prototype for this idea here that I documented.

Documentation

I'm going to finish up the mermaid game first. I'm also working on a small simple game for my senior project. I'll talk more about that later.

Quick plug for this awesome game:

SHELTER

In Shelter you play a mother badger who has to take her babies to a new area while feeding and protecting them. I just finished the game and while its still fresh in my mind I wanted to say that it does a fantastic job of conveying its feeling. My one concern was that the game didn't do a great job of showing new mechanics at certain points and it's easy to lose one of your young because you didn't understand how some of the new mechanics worked at first. Anyways, the game is 10$ on steam and is worth it if you don't mind paying for a game that is fairly short. also, it comes with a bonus mode where you can nurture your young in real-time by logging on everyday to feed them and watch them grow. this game was recommended to me by some people that I showed my game design documentation to.