I made the leap and partnered up full time with a friend & former coworker on his indie game "Clone Drone in the Danger Zone", a third-person laser-sword-fighter where any part of your body can be sliced off.
We released on Steam[1] Early Access in March, which was a special moment to be a part of (I grew up as a kid playing games on Steam, the process behind game creation used to be a mysterious fascination!)
In 2017 we built and released a ton of fun updates -- a Steam Workshop integration, Twitch Mode & Twitch Extension (where chatters can spawn enemies), and a super ambitious chapter 3 that added AI allies and a multi-part tower-assault adventure with fun scripted/animated moments.
Coming up next we tackle multiplayer. To do that, we first spent a month "burning a pancake" by making a small free multiplayer game called "Long Live Santa!" [2]. Within 3 days, more players had installed that game than the game we'd spent over a year on... it just hit over 100,000 players, just over a couple weeks after its initial release. We were surprised to see the momentum that releasing something for free generates.
It's been a lot of challenging, varied work, with more autonomy and skin in the game than any previous role and I absolutely love it.
Going in to next year we are going full force on adding multiplayer to Clone Drone, using the lessons learned from Long Live Santa to guide us. (& if you've made a multiplayer game before, would love to chat some time and swap notes!)
We released on Steam[1] Early Access in March, which was a special moment to be a part of (I grew up as a kid playing games on Steam, the process behind game creation used to be a mysterious fascination!)
In 2017 we built and released a ton of fun updates -- a Steam Workshop integration, Twitch Mode & Twitch Extension (where chatters can spawn enemies), and a super ambitious chapter 3 that added AI allies and a multi-part tower-assault adventure with fun scripted/animated moments.
Coming up next we tackle multiplayer. To do that, we first spent a month "burning a pancake" by making a small free multiplayer game called "Long Live Santa!" [2]. Within 3 days, more players had installed that game than the game we'd spent over a year on... it just hit over 100,000 players, just over a couple weeks after its initial release. We were surprised to see the momentum that releasing something for free generates.
It's been a lot of challenging, varied work, with more autonomy and skin in the game than any previous role and I absolutely love it.
Going in to next year we are going full force on adding multiplayer to Clone Drone, using the lessons learned from Long Live Santa to guide us. (& if you've made a multiplayer game before, would love to chat some time and swap notes!)
[1]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/597170/
[2]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/763410/Long_Live_Santa/