Good and Bad News

Hope the holidays are going well for everyone!

Things are going ok over here, but alas, I have some good and bad news.

I'll start with the good. I have several large projects lining up with several other small time indy devs. What this could mean is the formation of a studio in the far future... What it definitely means is far larger scale games. One project is an art orientated project that I'm keenly interested in and another is a more tech orientated project that I've been asked to join. Both are far larger than On Call but both are likely to be about as small in terms of success. I honestly love the idea of working on my art and improving, but at the same time the large scale and technology I would need to make for the other project intrigues me greatly. In all honesty though, the more arty idea will likely see a full game being released, where as the more tech idea I can foresee everyone else leaving me to work alone on it in my spear time as soon as they realize how hard it will be. Hopefully both can come together well. One of them is in concept while the other is only gearing up to start concept next year, so anything could happen.

The other good news is that I'm gearing up for the reveal of a new project. I've been working insanely hard on the art for this one, as I feel my art is whats lacking in order for me to land a job at a studio. I cant wait to show it off.

Lastly we come to the bad news. It looks like I cannot finish working on On Call unless I turn it into a sequel. This is a two part reason. Firstly and most importantly, I cannot change the age rating to include human enemies... Apparently that is set in stone, which means I cannot add any of the new levels I've been making... Which means that the only way to release it would be to make an outright sequel... That is not in all a bad thing, as my second reason is that the new levels would make On Call around 5 times longer and larger than it is now, which in truth does seem more like a sequel than a simple update...

Because of these things I have decided to release all the game play changes and new weapons for On Call, as they do not need to be re-rated. I will also work on anything else people do not like, like the fact that the creeps just disappear when they die as well as adding in the great art supplied by Matthew Sibler, while adding the new names to the credits for their help. Then we shall see if there is enough interest and support for me to make a sequel in my spare time. I'm extremely upset by this, as I've done a lot of work and preparation for On Call's new levels, story and enemy types.

The last think I need to talk about is how I really really want to make a multiplayer test game for PSM. It would be free, but small so that we can all test it to see if it works. I would add 2 modes, one on the ground as normal people in a small map, and one in space... I'd love to do that just to see how viable it is performance wise and how the networking code would need to work...

So there you have it... As you can see, my future is extremely uncertain at this point... I'll let you know how things progress.