A brief history since Saturday, May 28, 2016

Wow..

I had totally forgotten that my last post here had been Saturday, May 28, 2016.

This reminded me of why I stopped updating, and made me realize my last post left a lot of things out.

So a brief history to catch this blog up.


My kickstarter for Rise of Dagon failed and  I continued for a short time to try and complete ROD by myself.  I eventually came to the estimate that I would both have to cut the features fairly dramatically (due to lack of funding) AND it would take a minimum of 2 more years.  But as I thought about it - in all honestly - it would probably longer because we are all natively bad at estimating how long things will take

Eventually with that sobering realization I had to admit to myself I would almost certainly have to give up- I just couldn't see how I was going to finish the game.

So I decided to take the architecture of Rise of Dagon and make another game.

ROD was an  Eye of the Beholder / Legend of Grimrock style game. Which is to say turn based, grid movement, party based , first person RPG.

So if I took those ingredients and mixed them up - such as take out a party based, first person, RPG and made it a Rogue-like instead I would much closer to finishing a game (I thought).

In fact a big win is I would not need to finish my level editor nor hand craft a dozen levels or so.

Instead I needed to write a procedural dungeon algorithm using my level format.

So that's the first thing I did in my new spin-off project "Chocolate Pants the Unicorn", CP for short.

The procedural dungeon generation first pass took a fairly short time and I spent the next year getting the project to a fairly decent state.

The first 3 levels were in place and I had it up on early access on itch.io but then two things happened.

Firstly my father died, and secondly I changed jobs.

Both of those events are what we call 'life events' and cause a lot of stress and change and both of them require time to settle down and re-adjust.

I was not overly close to my father, but his passing was upsetting. It did effect my motivation and drive - but perhaps not to the level of depression. 

It was just enough that I had to focus on my job - instead of gamedev to keep myself on track.

So I struggled for 3 or 4 months of no updates on my CP project before I gave up on that too.

And now we are almost caught up!

About 18 months after that the only project I have finished is a co-project with a friend called Make America Glow Again on iOS and Android.

I have tried to start MANY very small projects - hoping to find something VERY small that I could finish myself but nothing was motivating enough to return to.

So here I am , rebooting Chocolate Pants the Unicorn!