2019 and forward...
I haven't made a post on the blog in a long time. So many things have changed since then especially in the last year.
To explain where things are at and where I am heading next I have to go back to the beginning for a moment. So this all really started back in 2014 and at the time I had just became interested in trying to make a game. Back then all I wanted to do was make a simple fan game focused around an existing IP and I never would have considered making a career of this down the road. But down the road is where we are today. Before I get into what I have going on today I want to fill in some more of the timeline though.
Way back in 2014 I was struggling just to find a game engine that worked for me. I tried many many engines. To name a few I started with game maker studio but couldn't even start to make progress with it. I moved to multimedia fusion which I think is now called clickteam fusion or something like that. I had better luck but I ran into issues that just flat out put a halt to me being able to use it. After those I gave construct classic a shot. Now this was actually a capable engine and I might even have been able to use this one for a project. At that time construct 2 was already well established and while they did support classic and it was free where construct 2 was not and could have worked for the project I just couldn't see investing the time in learning the software at that time. I did consider just buying a copy of construct 2 which was pretty affordable but things changed around that time.
It was around that time that bigger more powerful engines were becoming free to use. Up until this point I considered engines like unity or unreal engine to be overkill and unnecessary but also much to complicated to use for a simple 2D project. Yes I was wrong on those points I know. I had taken a bit of a break from making a game. I had been through several engines at this point and wasn't sure where I wanted to go with all this. It wasn't until I came across some interesting posts and videos showing people working on 2D stuff in unity and unreal. After I came across those things I decided maybe I should start looking more seriously at these bigger engines.
Alright so at this point it is 2016 and I am ready to do something again. I had done some homework on unity and unreal engine and I decided I was going to use unreal for my project. I finally had an engine I was going to stick with this time and things started to heat up a bit. I made an awful lot of progress during the first year that I used unreal. I was loving the engine and having a blast working on my project. I didn't just have one project anymore either I had like 3 maybe 4 of them planned. At the time I had been trying to figure out a good starting point and I ended up with like 3 or 4 great concepts and I liked all of them so much that I decided to keep all of them on the table. I initially wanted to start with one and then I changed my mind a bit and finally settled on the one I was going to finish first. After the first year I finally ran into a real snag. Most of it had to do with waiting on some critical updates to the engine and the plugins I was using for my project. This isn't a big deal and it worked it's self out after a couple of months. But during the down time I started to think about some things and everything was starting change again.
Now we are getting to today. I took the last year or so off from working on my projects. It started with the initial down time waiting on updates and I just never got back to the project I was working on. During the first year I was already pretty sure I wanted to make a career of this. The engine was working out great for me and I was definitely having a lot of fun. I was basically going to make the fan game a learning project and maybe put together the other planned projects either on the side or in between titles I planned to build and launch commercially. The down time though caused me to reconsider my direction. I already learned enough at this point to build a game. The communities I had been building the fan game for were changing and some of the members were leaving etc. I was basically losing all motivation and reason for continuing with the fan games.
It took me a while to work through everything and finally decide where to go next. I decided fan games were going to become a liability in the long term since they relied heavily on copyrighted materials which I obviously do not own. I was already wanting to make an original title but I hadn't put much thought into that at the time given I was still learning the engine and working on a fan project. But now that I had more time to think about this I was starting to come up with a lot more ideas on what I wanted to do for a launch title.
So this is where I am now. I am currently trying to find an artist. I have the ability to do the artwork for my game but if I want to get this finished in any reasonable amount of time I need someone who can deal with art assets full time while I focus on putting it all together in the engine. I find it far more enjoyable to work in unreal engine than I do photoshop. I spent around 14 years working with graphics and at this point I just want to work on something else. I lost my passion for spending hours upon hours in photoshop long ago :/
If I can't find an artist soon enough I will probably end up doing the art myself. While I search for someone to help with art I am still working on whatever else I can to keep the project moving forward.
So from where I am now I doubt I will have a whole lot to talk about for a while. If I find an artist that might change but otherwise I am probably going to be fairly silent here on the blog for a bit. When things start to pick up though I will be posting here regularly again.
