Hello again, it’s been a while.
Almost 5 months since I last posted anything, a lot has happened in that time so let’s start things off simple.
What is this again?
This is a blog / journal / thing for the thoughts and works of me, bumbleborn,
aka joe, aka… actually that’s it, it’s just those 2.
But wai… it’s different
It is indeed, I was using substack before and whilst it had a whole bunch of fancy features it ultimately felt like overkill for what I wanted, tbh I also feel some distance from what social platforms have become.
Substack, twitter (I refuse to say the new “name”), facebook, tumblr, myspace, etc.
They all seem to be terrible in one way or another, either ruled by a somewhat awful person or controlled by a group of shareholders that have no real stake in the game, they just want money.
So, I’ve spent the last 2 weeks learning html, css, jekyll, ruby, etc and I’ll be honest… web dev sucks. I get why people don’t make their own websites, I have no idea how to get this web site to look good on phones! something to do with user agents or media queries but I’ll come back to it later.
The main thing is that I have this space now, I can make it whatever I want it to be, I’m sure I’ll expand and add to it over time but for now it’ll be super simple.
There will be posts, a page about me and a page about my games.
To make sure it could do everything I needed I’ve ported all my old substack posts into it and whilst I don’t think I’m gonna go back to weekly updates I will try for some consistency.
Mini Update Time
Okay, so I have this shiny new site and it’s been 5 months, what’s new?
If you’ve checked out the games page already you’ll have seen a new entry called
Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll, it’s a small 2D metroidvania that has no combat but a lot of challenging jumping puzzles, Mini Quests, NPCs, all kinds of secrets.
Since I was wrapping up the Wunderwurld demo (still a bit to do but there’s no deadline for it currently) I wanted to make something much smaller, instead of jumping back on to the 3D platformer I wanted to make a game in a month or 2, it’s probably gonna take 5 months in total but it’s been a blast to work on. It’s also a mini prequel to the 3D Echo game so it’s helped flesh out the world and I can practice narrative in a lower stakes project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmrx_JI34Ts&ab_channel=bumbleborn
It’s weirdly become one of the most complete games I’ve ever worked on, that’s because I’m actually gonna release it. I plan to release my other games of course but this is actually close to playable, you can technically play it from start to finish atm but it still needs a bunch of polish.
What does this mean for the 3D Echo?…
or Wunderwurld? I only care about that one!
Don’t worry, they are still coming!!
I just wanted to slow down a bit, plus I started working more days at work to help out until the end of the year, so with less time for personal projects it’s nice to work on something that is less demanding.
Future Plans
So atm I’m gonna be working 4 days a week, I’ll still have 1 day to commit to personal stuff but it doesn’t move the dial much, I’m committing to 2 days a week at work properly from January 2024 onwards as I want to make real progress towards a personal game launch next year, I’m gonna start really trying to market what I’m working on, this means I’ll be making some youtube videos, tiktoks and anything else I can think of really.
I’ll do a post on it at some point but Unity, the game engine I spend most of my professional time, recently made a massive mistake with how it was monetizing it’s platform in the near future. It was a really hectic 2 weeks as almost everyone I knew that worked in had a mini-meltdown (myself included).
Basically, because of this I started looking into other engines, I feel incredibly lucky that I spent the last 4 months making a mini playdate game as I can now effectively work on games outside of Unity, I’ve got a few more small games planned because of it.
One of which will be a tiny Nuclear Throne-like in an engine called Godot, it’s similar to Unity, but it’s open source so it’s completely free in every possible way, and it’s gotten very good lately, capable of more than enough to make games with.
This tiny game will be simple, it’s just like Nuclear Throne except you fire different bullets depending on the ground you’re standing on when you reload, if you’re on dirt then you shoot dirt, if you’re in a swamp then you shoot poison. There’s a lot of fun situations this could lead to, enemies with elemental resistances or maybe you can combo half a clip from one material with half from another to make a cool combo bullet type.
I’m only working on it over lunches but so far I have a player, you can shoot bullets, damage enemies and the screen shakes a bunch when you shoot.
Thanks for reading!