Setting a Course

🚊 TGW debrief

I had a great time at Toronto Games Week last month, even though I couldn't stay until the end. I hung out with Eric Zimmerman, and had an interesting chat with Droqen who also gave me a tarot reading from his own custom tarot deck!

I watched giant games projected onto the malting silos by the lake. I learned a bit about how to de-Googlify my life. I played a submarine game on a custom screen using the Pepper's Ghost illusion. I drew pictures on index cards that were directly scanned into a game to use as sprites. I met some of the Toronto Puzzled Pint folks (I run Puzzled Pint in Montreal) and did two fun escape rooms.

I also showed my two large crowd games projected on a screen in a park after dark.

Shapeshifters being projected on a screen in a park at TGW

They were very well received, and now I have a bunch of ideas of where to take them next.

Shapeshifters is already pretty fun, it just needs more levels and new interactions/effects. The demo level does sort of require a minimum of 26 players so I'd like to make it possible to complete it with fewer. The solution I'm leaning towards is to have extra non-player cells that can be pushed around, so when you figure out what shapes to make you can push the missing pieces into place.

For Friendsloop, just finding your partners and making a ring feels kinda fun but it needs more. I wasn't able to try any gyroscope mechanics once the ring is formed, so that's an obvious next step. And this game doesn't do well with players coming and going mid-game. A missing player will break the loop and a new player will not have an assigned place to be. I need to fix that.

The other quirk about this game is that when you're told to form a big loop in a certain order the game can't actually verify if the order is correct (it only knows if the buttons are being held). It relies on people following the rules, which is mostly fine but could potentially cause confusion. I'm not sure if there's an elegant way to fix this but I'm curious if there is one.

(see my previous blog post for more information about how these games work...)

The next time I'll show these games will be at Ludodrome here in Montreal on Sep 12. You should come if you're in town!

📈 The Big Pitch

A few months ago I got a call from a big company who asked me if I was interested in making a party game for them. This happened before while I was working at Epic and I had to say no, but now that I'm a free agent again I can start saying yes to the right opportunities. This is one of those opportunities (a cool one!) so I've been pitching a new game to them. I sent them a slide deck and also cobbled together a very rough interactive "demo" (mostly just a storyboard) from bits and pieces I've had lying around. I'm waiting to hear back.

I can't reveal who it is for NDA reasons, but if it goes ahead I'll try to get permission to share more. It will be a bigger project and I'll have to build some kind of team to make it work but it will be pretty fun.

🚀 Getting Spaceteam flying again

I'm finally getting the chance to do something I haven't been able to justify for years now, which is to spend some solid full-time work getting Spaceteam running with the latest hardware/OS/engine versions. The biggest challenge was always replacing the local Wifi networking code and I recently got the game connecting with the Mirror library (a replacement for Unity's built-in networking) which is a big milestone.

Now I have to spend some time testing various configurations of devices, disconnections/reconnections, full lobbies, mixed app versions, etc. I'm getting close, and this will be a big weight off my shoulders when it's done.

🧭 What's Next?

As I've said before, my next big commercial project is Blabyrinth. I'm excited for people to play it, and a lot of the work is already done. But there's also the Big Pitch and these other experiments that might be worthwhile to work on. If I'm going to be more sustainable this time around then I have to do a certain amount of "business development" where it makes sense.

For now I'm going to spend a bit of time on each of these projects until their potential becomes more clear. Some of them only need a few weeks total to produce something meaningful and I don't want that work to get sidelined indefinitely.

Practically I think this means:

🎁 Parting Gifts

I usually finish my posts with a giveaway of some free Steam codes. Here is the latest batch! (and there are still some left from last time)

If you want one just send me an email.

See you next time Spacefriends! ~ Henry (aka Captain Spaceteam)