Now What?
Going through that awkward (sometimes scary) in between place.
Infinite Level game discussed: The Future Project
In case you're not aware, my latest game titled The Future Project was released on Steam and EGS back in late July, making it just a little over a month since its release by the time this dev blog goes live. Even though I roughly knew what I was getting myself into, the game still took quite a while to make, so it's nice to finally have the finished product out there. In addition, I've patched the game one time since release, with another incoming patch that I expect to put out in the next few days. Other than that, however, things have been quiet. In fact, I'll confess that it's maybe been a bit quieter than expected. But perhaps that's not such a bad thing. It's certainly given me a lot of time to think, whether that be about The Future Project, a, erm...future project (please laugh), or something else entirely. I don't have much in the ways of concrete answers yet, but I suppose the odd bit of sharing here and there won't hurt.
Firstly, The Future Project and its immediate future. As a general rule, whenever I release a game, I consider that the end of it. I have to confess that I'm not particularly fond of the gaming industry's current mindset of patching games forever, never letting them just be completed works. Games that are more focused on competition between players is one thing, but there are some games that I feel like are never truly "done" because the developers just won't stop patching or otherwise adding to the game. All that said, that didn't stop me from doing a level pack update for War Ender back in the day, and it appears that won't stop me from doing a post-release content update for The Future Project as well. I'll refrain from talking about what will be in the update for now, but I can tell you it was an idea I originally had for the base game but couldn't figure out how to integrate it into the main game. That and I was running out of the time, so content had to be cut somewhere. There's a few other miscellaneous things I'd like to include in this update as well, but that will be dependent on time and interest. I'll have more to say about this in October's dev blog, so you'll have to wait until then to get more updates.
Beyond The Future Project, well, I can't really say with certainty yet. There's games I had started on during the early days of The Future Project's development, but had to set aside to focus entirely on the FPS metroidvania. Now that the game is out, I can return to these ideas and see where they go. There's been little experiments I've been meaning to conduct with some pre-existing projects in the hopes of finalizing ideas about them and proceeding onto full development from there...or dropping it if I start to find it doesn't work. In addition, I've also had a wealth of fresh new ideas enter my mind that do greatly intrigue me and I should probably take the time to write down, but I have no idea when I would start to make those games, if indeed they even happen. I don't even know what the gameplay would look like with one of those ideas, truth be told, and the other is probably too expensive to make in my current position. But, never say die. I may get lucky one day and have the means to make some of these crazy ideas.
So, that's pretty much left me with analyzing my own works, myself, and playing the odd game here and there to get inspiration and think about things a bit. I can't remember if I've mentioned it here, but right before The Future Project released my first kid was born, so I'm now having to consider all this with a little one in mind. Big games like The Future Project will probably be hard to do when performing dad duties, so whatever I do next will have to be considerably smaller in scale. That's fine by me, personally. I was ready for a break from massive projects anyway. Again, it was fun to put The Future Project together, but it was definitely a tough journey making it happen. A smaller scaled game will probably feel like a vacation in comparison. Plus, it will mean releasing another game in a reasonable span of time as opposed to a three year gap between releases like we saw with Impressions and The Future Project. That's the plan anyway, but we've all seen how statements like that come back to bite us. I'll certainly make an effort to release my next work in a decent timeframe.
And with that, that's honestly all I can really say at the moment. That makes this a pretty short dev blog, yes, but there's not much I can say while I'm in this in between space. As of this writing I'm approaching the end of a break I'm taking from game development in order to focus on raising my kiddo and generally get more used to this whole father thing, but that hasn't stopped the idea machine and of course the odd bit of patchwork for The Future Project. I am looking forward to getting some of these ideas out of my head and into a project to see what works and what doesn't, and go from there. For the moment, the timeline looks like this: first, in October, I'll reveal a bit more about what I'm doing with the post-release content update for The Future Project. The next month or so after that will likely be spent working on polishing that content update plus working on some other background stuff which will be talked about at a considerably later date. So, it sounds like the rest of my year is pretty much figured out. Hopefully something within the coming months will interest you!
Until next time!
-Lance T.