If you missed my tweets about it over the weekend, I released a game last Friday! And if you’ve been following this blog, it might not be exactly what you were expecting.
Gunmetal Arcadia Zero launched on May 6, 2016 as a Humble Original title, an exclusive bonus for subscribers of the Humble Monthly plan. (With their blessing, it was also made available to applicable supporters of my Patreon).
I also published the soundtrack over the weekend. You can find that on my Bandcamp page and also on YouTube.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Hey, I’d like to play Thing and I don’t subscribe to Thing. What about me?” So here’s my official statement on that:
“While we hope to bring this game to more players in the future, it is currently exclusive to Humble Monthly subscribers.”
If that’s sounds like I’m being deliberately vague, that’s only because I have to be deliberately vague.
Let’s talk about the future.
The eponymous roguelike Gunmetal Arcadia is up next. I haven’t done any work on it since my last blog. I thought I might try to get a jump start on some of the procedural content generation problems, but ultimately the need to decompress won out. It was good to take some time off. The danger in that is that I’ll lose sight of the spark. The danger is that I’ll get swept up in some other idea.
I got swept up in some other idea.
Whether I’ll pursue it, that’s still up in the air. I’ve been thinking about using evenings and weekends to tinker with this other idea, time that in the past has been spent working on GDC slides or crunching towards a specific deadline. I don’t have those obligations this time.
I’ve been investigating console development recently. By necessity, I have to be vague about that stuff as well, but I can say I’ve reached out to platform holders and and am taking some initial steps towards actual development. It’s way too early to announce any specific plans — consider how much of an ordeal it was to port my engine from Windows to Mac and Linux, and then consider that I would have to do essentially the same thing again for each additional platform I want to ship on — but it’s something I’ve been wanting to attempt for a while, and it feels like the time is right.
I have a few events lined up this year. Next month, I’ll be at the Let’s Play Gaming Expo here in Plano. In early July, I’ll be headed down to Austin for RTX, and in October, I’ll be at Retropalooza in Arlington for the third year in a row. I’ll be demoing Gunmetal Arcadia Zero at each of these, and I may have some merch sales as well. Can’t make any promises yet.