It’s been a minute!
Looks like my last post here was March 2022. That was probably when I decided to hide the blog here and focus on social media instead. Also, I had a couple of project-specific blogs on itch.io that I was updating in that time, as well as a fledgling YouTube empire.
They were successful enough, but there has definitely been a push recently to have your own space where you can say whatever you like, with people flocking to SubStack and other platforms. I did wonder whether I should dip my toe in there myself, then I remembered I had a website with a blog!
It’s taken some time to get round to updating the theme and figuring out what I want to have on here, but I reckon I’ve got a nice little place to yabber on about games I’ve been playing, as well as tell you all about my own work of course.
To that end, I’ve made a My Games page, with some details on the handful of prototypes I’ve been working on. Some are more advanced than others. Some are quite old now and need updating. Some I literally started on last week. All of them are interesting (to me at least) story-rich games, that are engaging minute-to-minute and I can’t pick just one to focus on.
Now, the old me would think that’s a terrible thing to do, and bury my head back to working on the latest feature for a game that in all reality would take me 5 years to make. But I had a rethink of my overall strategy recently, and I figured it would be much better to concentrate on making a shorter game instead – either in terms of length, or development time, or both.
To that end I went through my big spreadsheet of ideas, picked out ten shorter games, and then whittled that down to four that were interesting enough to me to prototype. And that’s what I am doing now – bouncing back and forth between them, adding a feature here, blocking out a level there – to see what I can come up with by the end of the year. Then, the one that’s either the furthest on, or has the most promise, I’ll work up into a proper demo.
It’s a bit different to how I’ve worked before, but I’m excited by the process, as well as the games themselves! And what are these games? Well, just for you, my good old lists return:
- Demon Detective: The Ghost of Tellsey Manor
- A comedy locked room murder-mystery set in a fantasy world, where you play an immortal demon sent to track down a killer.
- The Water Remembers
- A time loop adventure game sees you trapped on an island where the sea inorexably rises and drowns you.
- Clones Game (temp name)
- A puzzle-lite platformer where you have to create clones of yourself to help escape a research station falling out of orbit. The problem is, your clones might not want to help you…
- Project X (temp name)
- Dead Space meets Die Hard in a comedy action game set on a space station where science has gone very wrong, and you need to escape!
But where is Time Scavengers I hear you cry? The short answer is on my hard drive. The long answer is this is one of those games that would take me 5 years to make. I still love the idea, the story and the characters, but I just can’t commit that much time to a project until I know I can complete a shorter one first.
So, that’s my new plan laid out. I’m going to keep you updated on my very own blog with my progress, and I promise more screenshots next time 🙂
Tony.