Returning to the office

Well, I am back in the office again. Probably going to be disappearing again at some point in the near future either if things go well or horribly wrong. I need to move, I have been saving for months and am nearly there now. It may be a couple more months or just one... sooner would be better as I now have to live without hot water.

Soon, though, I should be moving somewhere. Preferably a large town or city where I can easily get to the things I need. In the meantime I need to work on something. I have a few things queued up but... I am not sure what I will be working on first as yet.

I can't have my server here in the office online and I shut down all but one server out there in Internetland which means I am not really able to work on Gerucrash. I can't run the server so development is halted for now.

This means I am limited to single player games or games whose back-ends I can write in some other language efficiently. Given I have lost 4 months of the year to catastrophe after cataclysm I have to make something rather simple. I have two game projects I can do that should be simple. One slightly more complex... well more than slightly.

Starting with the familiar and least complex, though certainly in new territory; A mobile pet sim game. It's not the most original thing in the world but it would be fairly simple and allow me to learn more about mobile development (though I never play mobile games, myself.).

Then the more complex project would be a turn-based RPG which is one of the projects I wanted to work on earlier in the year but a bit cut down. Quite a bit cut down. I am not sure I can complete it by the end of the year, however. It'd be a hard one... but it's within the realm of possibility.

If I were really damn good I could do both. But I am starting with one.

I think I should start out with an RPG for my first released game, really. With maybe a pet sim subsystem similar to the prototype of Alchemist's menagerie I made quite a while ago. Kinda combining Tamagotchi with Dragon Quest/Mother with an 8-bit era Final Fantasy Job system. Keeping the art to 16x16 and basing it in the late 90's.

It's probably going to be tough and I will have to cut some stuff as I go in order to create something that feels complete by the end of the year but I believe it's the best choice for me as a developer. I can design some simple systems that interact with eachother and put some effort into the world and character design which would hopefully carry the simple systems and give the player a real adventure.

After all, adventure is what I am all about.

I might even have to cut the combat system and drop in a simple Zelda style one, which is fine too. Equipment would have to be simple, stuff that doesn't really need to be changed often. No paper-doll armor or any of that stuff unless there's only one character and a handful of armors to use.

Anyway, I am pretty exhausted today. The past week was really stressful, the plan for today was to get something written down here and to build a bookstack and outline my projects for the year. Something I should have done in January but for some reason everything just went crazy around me and further damaged my mental health. Another reason I want to move to a big town or city is so I can get some professional help with all of this.

Anyway, I'll either be back tomorrow or Monday to get started. If I am not back tomorrow it means I am researching the games that inspire this project. This one has to be finished. I can't keep on shelving projects, I need to break the cycle and release a finished game for once, damn it. I'm sure once I move I will be working on a schedule and have far less stress, thus be far more efficient and productive. So let's hope that gets done sooner rather than later.

So here we go. Project Start!