So obligatory: it’s been a while since I’ve posted/spammed the interwebs with my random musings. Life sometimes gets a tiny bit crazy. However, I’m back now with a small update with what is new with my life.
At the end of last year, I lost my job (boo! hisss!) – and after the initial shock it suddenly occurred to me – I was in a financial position that would allow me to focus on my real passion, game development (yay!). I sat down in a dark, candle lit room and started drafting down ideas: gameplay concepts, themes, badly drawn stick figures doing things to each with weapons of mass destruction. That kind of thing.
And from those scribbles an idea started to solidify. I’ve always loved simulation games, a hobby that started many, many moons ago with SimEarth. Since then, I’ve played a lot of them: RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Prison Architect, to name a few. I dread to think how much time I’ve spent commanding virtual people to build/slaughter things [edit: I just checked my steam stats for RimWorld and Prison Architect and can confirm I’ve spent *way* too long playing both]. There is something supremely satisfying watching your people work with blue prints you create in order to build something magnificent. Seeing how they interact with each other, watching behaviours and friendships form. Poking one place in a simulated world and watching something happen. Slowly, but surely, FringePlanet started to take shape.
It has been under development for about three months now, and I’ve got to the point where it has actually started to look and feel like a game. That re-assuring feeling you get when you’ve taken an idea, written a bunch of code, and got it into a playable state and a little voice in your head actually says “wait, this is actually really fun”.
So, I then took the next big step, and formed my own company. I’m a director of a company now – it’s a bit weird thinking about the reality of that. I even had to record the official minutes of the meeting where the company was formed. Attendance of which consisted of the Director of the company (me), the shareholder of the company (me), the secretary of the company (me) and the company mascots (my cats – though they were busy playing at the time so may not have been paying that much attention).
I’ve applied for funding from various sources, and will be blogging about that process in the future – alas, my funds are not infinite and the earliest realistic release date for FringePlanet will be early next year (though I am planning to run a private alpha before that).
I’ve got into a regular schedule of development work: Mondays are “code clean up” days – refactoring code, documenting things, cleaning up any debug code, fixing any bugs that occur during the daily play through. Wednesdays are “idea” days – fleshing out game mechanics, working on specific implementations. Saturdays are “eye candy” days – making things look prettier, creating textures/models etc;. Every night after I finish work I create a daily build of the game. I’m using a raspberry pi powered GitLab for version control (it’s even got a speaker attached to it and it plays a fanfare whenever I push). Working on Fringe Planet has very much become my life.
I’ll be blogging about both the game and the journey, and of course, spamming twitter randomly about it – GreenSlimeGames.com will be my personal blog about the journey, professional type blog posts/news about the game will be on FringePlanetGame.com.
This is all a very definitely scary process – biting the bullet and making game development my full time job – but it is the most satisfied I’ve felt in my life.
