I remember I started writing this game after not having slept for a few days, so it feels weird to push it out now fully cognizant and very pleased with it. Afterglow was the game I think I've developed in the shortest amount of time, with the least tweaking to the fundamental rules, and was the easiest to work on both multiplayer and solitaire.
This wasn't exactly an easy game to make, but compared to Split Second or Plamo vs Plamo... yeah, it was a pretty easy game to make. I've finally released Plamo vs Plamo: Scale Model Mecha Combat on Wargame Vault. This game has been in the works for two and a half years now and is the first game design project I ever undertook with a serious effort towards releasing a finished product instead of something me and my friends could just fuck around with. I have no expectations that this will be particularly commercial successful or anything, but I think it's a very good game and I'm very pleased with it overall. However, it did take a long time, and it was a complex project. Tackling it as my "first" game probably wasn't a great idea.
I'm going to record some of my closing throughts here so I don't forget them. It's with a great deal of personal gratification and no fanfare that I can say I have finished work on Split Second: Solitaire Firefights Against The Clock. This has been by far my biggest and most ambitious undertaking as a game designer, involving tons of stuff I'd never really considered before; graphic design, art assets, presentation, and even publication. It was fraught with frustrations and lessons in all those fields. Ultimately, I think the product is extremely good and one of the best "build teams and guys and shoot bad guys" games on the market. It has comparatively advanced solitaire gameplay, varied mission structure, and a lot of content for a very modest price tag. If you're interested, you can check it out on Wargame Vault for free; if you like to see a guy stammer through a tutorial video, you can watch a small movie I've produced about it as well: Split Second started out as a game I was designing where you would play as a robot pilot who would jump into and out of the robot like Titanfall to meet various threats, and a timer would force the player to adapt to changing circumstances in the style of Space Alert. It transformed into something very different when I realized the mechanics seemed better suited to good ol' shootouts.
This was a complex undertaking and absorbed many hours of my time. It's a game made entirely by one person and in some realms, it shows. But I'm quite proud of the end product despite the faults I'm aware of. It's a full game with 208 cards, tokens, two books, and all kinds of other components; the player only needs to provide a timer and dice. However, I definitely took some lessons away from it that will transfer towards future games. I finalized I'm Going Down, a solitaire print-and-play adventure game, on Wargame Vault recently. While the game had been finished for almost a year (I originally developed it for a game jam), I wanted to go back and refine it a bit. I decided to get rid of the most obvious placeholder assets while keeping it printer-friendly, clean up the rules, do another proofreading run, include a guide for people printing it, and kind of give everything a once-over. This was meant to be a quick project and in the grand scheme of things, it certainly was (most of my projects have a 9 to 12 month turnaround before 'completion'). In the end I'm quite happy with the game and the process that went into it. It's also the first game I published on Wargame Vault, which is something of a milestone. Since I have no plans to go back to this game unless it needs some kind of correction or editing, I figured I'd so some last thoughts on it to make sure I at least try to learn something from the experience. |
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