Hi! Happy New Year! It’s been a little while since I’ve posted about what I’m doing since releasing Stargazing, so this seems like a good time to do it. It is, after all, a new year; and today I just turned 30! That feels so wrong to type out.
So Stargazing has been out and has been selling… some. Download split between App Store and Google Play is currently about 63% in favour of iOS, which is perhaps a little closer that I expected. I will be throwing it onto Samsung Apps soon so that will be interesting to see if anything more comes from there. I always said I didn’t expect much in terms of income from that game; and I’ve been proved more-or-less right on that. I am planning a sale period, probably to commence some time next month.
Enough on the last game, what of the next… Well, the holiday period gave me a nice period to relax and gather my thoughts. Talk to people about what I’ve been up to. The result of this deliberation has been to switch to a different project for my next game. I had been looking at an ambitious PC game that I’ve had on my mind for a long time but I think it makes sense to look at this a bit more sensibly in terms of getting something to market that may help me sustain myself a little longer. If I could pay myself somewhat-properly doing this full-time, that would be amazing. So I think I will be returning to mobile after all. But naturally I feel I need to try a different approach than I took to Stargazing…
I have been negative about the free-to-play or “freemium” model in the past, but I think this is mostly due to the fairly devious means some games choose to push a player to spend money. And energy mechanics, eww. I’ve come around to the idea that for a certain species of casual gaming it can work fine. As such my next project will itself be a free-to-play mobile title supported by IAPs. Of course, I wouldn’t choose to do this if I didn’t feel I had scope to make something that I think could actually be pretty great. So I’ll be taking the idea of a city/colony-building game into space. Build and maintain a spaceship colony and fill it with as many unique individuals as you can. I have a lot of ideas for this and really I can’t wait to make more progress with the prototype. The idea of emergent narratives coming from the inhabitants of your ship is something I really want to explore. As the screenshot suggests, I’m only just starting on this but I hope to get something playable as soon as possible and go from there. Look out for updates soon!