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Ask HN: Whatever Happened with Black Annex?
1 point by cr0sh on Feb 21, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
This was a game that was greenlit on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/248590/Black_Annex/

...an isometric Syndicate-like cyberpunkish action shooter thingie. It got a ton of press several years back when it was first announced, because it was said to be programmed in QB64:

https://www.qb64.org/

...a cross-platform BASIC compiler that aims to be highly-compatible with QBASIC 1.1 and QuickBasic 4.5, while also employing many advanced features for modern platforms.

The game was written by Lance McDonald from Australia:

https://twitter.com/manfightdragon

There is also some form of source code, that the author made available:

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/8fdec5275b2c3e81e1e1/raw/blannex

...which does look like QB64 code - but whether it runs/compiles or whatnot is almost impossible to determine given the lack of the supporting graphic and any other files.

This was highlighted in an earlier HN submission that didn't seem to get any traction:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164068

If you google around, you can find some mention of the game as late as June 2018 - but really, there hasn't been any word from the author or anything else as to what has happened with this game, which again was highly anticipated. The author still seems to use twitter regularly, but beyond that, it's like the game never existed.

Does anyone know what happened? Did the author give up making it? Was it consigned to the dust bin? I had hoped to be able to purchase this game, as I'm sure many others were as well, but now it appears that is not going to be possible. Even so, some form of closure as to what ultimately happened to cause it to be "cancelled" would be welcomed from the author.



Oh hey! I'm Lance, the guy making black annex, I work on it quite often! It's really just a hobby project for me, as I left my day job recently, I'm a stay-at-home dad now, and I work on an unrelated YouTube channel for a little income that keeps me busy. I update the steam page sometimes, new screenshots and whatnot. It's just very slow going haha.

I'm really happy to see this show up in my Google Alerts haha, sorry it's taking so long but I promise I work on it and I'm really, REALLY enjoying it :D


Furthermore, here are some tweets from last year when I started polishing a few of the minigames that appear in the game. You might enjoy a small look at their progress:

https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/102773278750201446...

https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/103644777917270425...

https://twitter.com/manfightdragon/status/103679381310727782...




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