Oh hey, I'm still alive. Neat! Just in case that changes soon, some updates:
Latecomer Games and Hedge Maze Beta Testing
You might be wondering where I've been for the past few months (Sorry @marandal)! Early last year, a close friend of mine reached out to ask for help on a passion project of his. After reading through the material he had, right away it was clear to me just how much effort he'd put into his project already and how close he was to making something amazing. I know how hard it can be to get projects like his off the ground (since I have one of those, too). I genuinely loved some of the ideas he had going on, and so decided to prioritize working together with him on illustration to help his project shine.
And well, here it is:
The Hedge Maze of the Crescent Queen is a D&D 5e module built to scale with you and your party. It's an 80+ page module filled with a creative world building and characters, complete with a loose campaign you can customize according to your party's needs. The setting and campaign focuses around a new mechanic, the Lostness, which faces players with the threat of losing their very skills and identities as they try to escape the plane of the Crescent Queen, a mysterious hedge maze between the Material Plane and the Realm of Faerie which is filled with both friend and foe. The module comes with original characters, creatures, bosses, and the setting of the hedge maze for players to explore, as well as the Lostness mechanic and how it interacts with the base of D&D 5e.
The module already has some solid feedback behind it, and if our play testers have anything to say about it, it's a ton of fun. But we still need more beta testers! If you or a friend is thinking about doing a one-shot soon, or starting a short campaign but don't want to put together an entire story from scratch, this might be a good fit for you. And I'm not just saying that because I did a lot of the illustration. :)
We're also in the process for building up hype for the Kickstarter coming up in a few months, so we'd love to work with DMs and other D&D creators to get more feedback.
He and I are still working on community stuff for it, but stay tuned for that in the next update coming shortly!
Want to be notified of the Kickstarter when it launches?
https://www.latecomergames.com/
Want to follow Latecomer Games' other stuff?
https://www.youtube.com/@LatecomerGames/shorts
We'd love to hear from you!
Project Recordkeeper
I'm still hard at work on it!
Pre-production is well under way. I have a detailed story and side-quests most of the way finished, and clear vision for what the game is going to look like from a mechanical perspective. Whenever I explain the core gameplay loop, it seems to get people excited. It's essentially a 2D top-down shooter that'll take mechanical inspiration from Borderlands (when it was good, anyway) and Pokémon. The core conceit is that your "weapons" are creatures that you can construct and breed using parts you get from killing other creatures. Constructing creatures directly means getting the weapons you want with some downsides. But you can take your creatures and breed those downsides out to make weapons that better fit your needs, and unlocks the potential for new aspects of creatures you can't get from creature parts out in the wild. Basically, it takes the looter-shooter focus on high paced combat, and mixes things up with the loot system so you will have more control over your loadout. But...because your enemies are creatures too, expect any that survive to reproduce, evolve, and adapt to their environmental pressures. i.e., You.
The story and mechanics are ambitious enough that I'm going to have to build out significant tooling in Godot (as in, like, building my own testing framework and node editor plugin for the engine). There are a few reasons for this:
- Godot lacks solid options for some of the most common needs for serious developers. Existing plugins for needs like testing coverage, end to end testing, managing save state of a story-heavy games, and a translation system are all kind of anemic. G.U.T.'s your only option for testing, but it has issues, and as the name suggests, is only for unit testing. There are plugins for managing save state, but not purpose built for a game that might have a story that's dozens of hours long with branching possibilities. Something like that would require a graph editor and graph traversal algorithm to keep track of story flags, but Godot's graph nodes are considered experimental, and follow some patterns I found problematic when using similar tooling in Unity. I don't want to base something as critical as save state integrity on parts of the engine that are subject to change dramatically, so I don't have much choice but to build a system from the ground up and test it with my own testing framework to ensure the quality I expect from myself.
- I firmly believe Godot will become the blender of game development, so I want to contribute to Godot's open source ecosystem in some way and be a good citizen. 10 years from now, I seriously think Godot could be an industry standard, and GDScript as a purpose built language has many of the advantages of javascript and python, but specific to games development. It wouldn't surprise me if GDScript and Godot in general became widely used by smaller studios in the next 5 to 10 years, and I want to be a part of that story.
- Building my own tools is a path forward for self-funding the game. If I can build solid tools that turn out to be useful to advanced developers, I can use that as a means to start up a patreon, or perhaps even earn some contracts as a support dev.
Y'all might have noticed that my discord and youtube channel for the project died...yeah...that happened. Initially I wanted to go the route of building up an audience for my game through content creation. But very quickly I found myself spending more time on those things than the actual game. Since my time is split between a growing family, helping start up Latecomer and the D&D module, Project Recordkeeper, and a full time job as a software engineer, I realized pretty quickly that YouTube probably wouldn't be a great fit, though I might still post updates and demos here and there. Right now the project is in the pre-production phase, and I don't want to be one of those game-dev tubers who spends more time making tutorials to get by than working on the thing I actually want to make for you all.
The New Year
I've got a few New Year's Resolutions!
- Sleep more (Challenge Level: Impossible)
- Spend more time with family
- Be my wife's favorite person
What are your resolutions?