plans, plots, and schemes
what i’m thinking about next
You know what rules? Hot chocolate. And with a recent cold snap, that’s exactly what has been keeping warmth in my beslippered toes when I shuffle through to work at 8:00am on the weekdays. My freelance game optimization work has been chugging along nicely, and I’m currently working with a really lovely client based in mainland Europe - so I’ve been keeping an earlier schedule than I usually do this time of year. It’s been nice seeing the frost on the grass outside, as I warm up my brain and body for the day. But, as I’m prone to do, I’ve been planning for the year ahead. Here are my schemes laid bare for all to see:
Development Streams
I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but I really want to stream the development of my forthcoming personal projects. I think it’s a fantastic way of accomplishing a few things; one, it’ll stop me from procrastinating. It’s hard to goof off and watch an hour of YouTube when you have an audience. Two, by setting a streaming schedule, it’ll give me a nice production schedule which is otherwise something I struggle with when it’s my own self-directed work. If someone asks me to do something, I can get on it right away - but when it’s me asking me, I’m more likely to let things slip. Three, it’s a better way for me to receive feedback about my independent work than to simply work in silence and hope that things are good.
As for the streams themselves, I want to set up a minimal vtuber-style rig. Well, something more akin to a pngtuber rig; I can use my melon avatar and do some mouth flapping with audio, simple enough, but I also want to rig up a pair of basic Rayman-style hands that I can use to point at things on the screen or follow my typing/gamepad movements for fun. This is definitely not a necessary thing for dev streams of course, but I think it’d be fun, and fun is the point of the whole thing!
But what, exactly, will I be working on? Well…
ShotFun
This is a working title for a game I’ve been building slowly. It’s kind of a love-letter to rocket-jumping in games like Quake and TF2 - it’s a first-person acrobatic traversal game, where one of your primary movement tools is being blasted backwards by the massive double-barreled shotgun you carry. The gist of the whole thing is that mysterious crystalline entities have been invading various worlds and strip-mining them of their uniqueness, turning them into a homogenous crystal slop (boy, I wonder what recent phenomena have inspired this idea) and the Universe, in some kind of immune response, has created You to take them out. The game is therefore about leaping through various 3D worlds and blasting crystal dudes into shards. It’s in an extremely early form at present, but here’s a sneak preview of what I have so far…
Naturally, I want to have things like timed speedrunning modes, ghosts and replays, that sort of thing. It’s pretty ambitious, in terms of the scope I have planned, but I think it’s manageable.
Bean to Me Patch and News
Bean to Me was always a smaller-scoped project for me, particularly because it was something I was doing while resting and recovering from quitting my old job at Unity. However, there are a couple of things about it in its released state that I want to change. First, I feel that there isn’t enough to do for players who have beaten all the characters that are in the game so far. I worried about making them too difficult to beat, but it seems that there are plenty of players who have had no trouble doing so. For them, I want to introduce a more complex and forward-thinking opponent to really challenge them! Second, there are a few quality-of-life things that I just didn’t have the time or energy to get around to, that would just make the general gameplay experience a little smoother for everyone. Overall, I’m very happy with how the game has been received; for something written in a custom engine, with custom netcode, it has been behaving itself incredibly well (thanks to Emmy’s hard work on Lutra!) and I couldn’t be more pleased with that.
In terms of sales, it’s about what I expected (double-digit sales) since it has a marketing budget of exactly £0, but Steam Next Fest did very well at increasing the number of wishlists it has. I’m hoping that a winter-time sale might shift the needle a little there, and the patch itself should generate a little additional interest.
Bean to Me was very fortunate to get a lovely write-up at GamingOnLinux.com, and all the reviews it’s had on Steam so far have been positive and thoughtful too!
So, these are the main things I’m thinking about in terms of my personal projects and non-main-job-work! As for right now, I’m going to end this post the way I started it - with some hot chocolate. Bye for now!
