Here’s what I’ve been up to since the Silicon Void Kickstarter failed last August:
- I did some contract work for Spry Fox, who kindly employed me part-time for six months while I looked for my next long term job.
- I found my next long term job with Tactile Entertainment, a small mobile games studio… located in Copenhagen, Denmark.
- I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark. This included traveling with a cat on an 11 hour direct flight from San Francisco. She cried the whole time.
Three months later, I am more or less settled in to my new European lifestyle and starting to feel refreshed enough to think about Silicon Void again. I played v0.2 (still available on itch!) from start to finish this past week and was pleasantly surprised at how good it felt. Certainly there are a lot of balance and pacing problems that need to be addressed, but I didn’t want to throw out huge chunks of work as I was afraid I would.
It will be a long while still before I can add the next chapter but I hope to find some time over the next few months to improve what’s there. Some of my goals:
- Two difficulty options with different enemy encounters. It’s always going to be a game mostly about combat, but with some distance I can see there’s value in being able to get through the combat with less friction and see the story.
- Support Metal instead of OpenGL on Mac, since Apple announced that OpenGL support will be deprecated eventually. (I have some shader compatibility problems with Metal right now.)
- Revamp the upgrade and research systems & UI so they don’t just list a huge number of vague things you can’t do yet.
- Camera controls while orbiting planets so you can get a better view of your surroundings.
As for this blog, I don’t have any JRPG combat system analyses in the pipeline – I was surprised to find that I had nothing interesting whatsoever to say about Bravely Default when I finally played it – but I have some ideas that branch out into other game genres, including my old hobby horse Metal Gear Solid…