It’s been five and a half years, almost to the day. I haven’t forgotten about the game or this site, but game development has definitely taken a backseat to a lot of things going on in my life. Not shuttered, just… given a heavy dose of tranquilizers and tucked away.
In the last five and a half years I still haven’t completed any just-for-me projects, but I’ve started and stalled a few different iterations of the game; each time the story changes and evolves, and I feel like it’s finally where it needs to be, story-wise and conceptually. I turned it into a tabletop RPG campaign that I’ve played (and also stalled on) with a group, and that helped to give the story more shape and substance than any amount of daydreaming and storyboarding I’ve done in the past.
I’ve experimented with a bunch of different game engines, and a bunch of different styles. I keep falling back towards something simple, though- I don’t want to spend years trying to develop just a basic structure to try and build everything around. Isn’t that the entire point of using a pre-built game engine? I went full-3D for a while, but after the amount of effort it took just to build what would only end up being the first few seconds of gameplay, I think I’m going to de-volve towards a classic point-and-click adventure game, with a couple gimmicks to give it some flavor outside of the old Sierra or JRPG styles.
And so, having finally finished the last of my schoolwork (just waiting on the degree conferral process, now) I think it’s time to dive back into development in a more serious way. Way back in the day, I used Construct 2 to build the beginning of my game, and I was pleased with the results. I think that’s what I’ll head back to- Construct 3 has been out for a while now, and looks to be the next best thing. Maybe I’ll take a little bit of time and see how much work it is to build the first level in Construct; if it’s not too bad, I can stop searching for something new and finally commit to making this work. Again.
