Hey all! I haven't been as active in the Playdate dev world lately and thought I'd catch up a little.
Things have been fairly chaotic for me the last few months. Between getting screwed on a lease, live shows with the band, holidays in retail, and yet another season of Portland Trail Blazers basketball, it's been a lot of ups and downs. There hasn't been a lot of schedule consistency with which to dedicate focus to game development.
After Initial Daydream, I wanted a quick break to celebrate and then get right back into it. Secondary Daydream right around the corner, 9 month turnaround like Final Fantasy II! But it turns out I'm not built like that, especially since game development is at best a secondary (heh) interest for me, and at worst a third job.
In an effort to make it feel like a passtime and not a job, I messed around a lot. I made prototypes, all of which I'd like to come back to at some point, with varying degrees of ambition:
- Sci Fi Sports: sports fantasy sim, got complicated fast but is fun to tool around in. I probably should make a clearer roadma and feature list/gameplay loop.
- Quest Giver: idle RPG, I'd probably start over and focus entirely on it being a daily game rather than a long session type.
- Underblood: demake of Overblood, this game fascinates me and it's nice to be creative while having an exact roadmap to follow. For all the freaks out there, yes, I got to the point where you have Pipo.
- Helpful Songbirds: random chord generator app, I want to add some more functionality for a real release but it does pretty much everything I need it to do as is.
- Farming Is Easy: idle farming game, added almost every feature I wanted in a weekend. Needs to be a little longer and perhaps have some stronger overarching goal to be worth releasing, but it's a fun little time as is.
- Missio Survivo: episodic RPG that got waaaaay out of hand. The battle system in this is leagues better than the one in Initial Daydream, and there are multiple playable characters with individual stats. I lost steam when I kept planning bigger and bigger when I should have just kept it small. If I do come back to this, I'll likely release a functioning build with one or two character stories, then slowly add new ones as I come up with them/feel like making them.
I also did the music for the upcoming orkn game Lolife, which I'm sure many of you are righfully excited about! I've played it through several times as it was being made, and I can assure you that it's quality work. I'm also quite proud of my contributions and was pleased to be pushed in new directions, both in Pulp composition and just in making music.
This also spawned a Pulp player app, complete with composition notes and crankable animations. I even made a demo version that will be a free download with source code and annotations, in case anyone wants to make their own apps to show off Pulp scores. (Now even more relevant since a Pulp game won Best Original Score in the Community Awards!)
All this to say, I'm not sure how much stability I can look forward to in 2025 so I'm not making any promises, but I have begun work on Secondary Daydream. Not much that can be shown, but a lot of notebook doodling and lore scrawling, story breaking and character imagining. Initial Daydream's story was graciously tacked onto a mostly functional game by my friend Greg Troyan, who did wonderful work and really helped get ID over the finish line despite the limitations of the setup of the game itself. This time, I want to let the story guide the process, especially since I've become more confident in my ability to make a compelling battle system. I want encounters to be more tactically compelling like the super bosses in ID/what I have going already in Missio Survivo, but also have several different kinds of encounters beyond the usual turn based fighting.
My current plan is to keep working on story stuff on my breaks at my job, and then making a no-art blocky version of the game (perhaps even without encounters to start) when I have time/energy at home. It's tough to call this an offical "Secondary Daydream is in development" announcement, but this is where I'm at.
Also, if there's any interest in the projects I mentioned above, I can make them available here too!
I hope you are all doing well! Still love popping into the various Pulp channels and seeing what everyone is up to. Thanks for reading!