So it's been well over a year since my Return of the Dragonslayer hiatus began. Lots has happened since then! For starters I finally figured out WHY I was having so much trouble with the story. And of course the solution was severly overhaul the first three chapters, so it's going to be a while since I return to it. A few months ago I started a secret writing project that's sort of stuck in the editing phase right now, but I'm pretty excited about it. I'll talk more about those later on~
The biggest thing to happen is my daughter was born a few months ago. Though it has been a reduction in my creativity time I wouldn't trade it for anything. She's so amazing! Also related to that we recently upgraded from our 1 bedroom apartment to a house, so we've been doubly extra busy with that. But I get the basement~ Soon it shall be my Otaku gaming/writing/hiding from girls Dungeon! So excited!
So if I haven't been writing either of those stories what HAVE I been working on? A collaboration with one of my friends. We have an idea for a Smartphone game, and if you know me at all you'd know I've always wanted to design a game. So now I am.
And it sucks. Enjoyable, but it's terrible. All you do is write everything about the game in explicit detail, and codifying what you can to make it easier for the programmer to do their job. But it's a necessary evil! And I'm feeling so hot blooded about this project that it's worth it. So gather 'round and I'll tell you about it!
Demongate: Lord of Heroes
So this idea was a bit of a take on my old boardgame idea, focussing on the player being a commander of troops and sending them on missions against the demon invasion, and leading them into battle.
Of course it's heavily simplified. It's no longer like some sort of combination of a heaviky strategic deck building/Risk
game. As opposed to heroes/demons clashing in battles for territory it's now more tactically selecting heroes and sending them on quests to gradually reclaim the world.
At it's core the game is you can form up to X parties of heroes, send them on various quests and check back after Y time elapses and they finish their quests to send them out again. How will this differ from other Smartphone 'time wasters'? Well this is where my writing comes in...
I want to give the game not only a really solid overall storyline, but also a large number of side quests/stories that follow the exploits of big name heroes, like Deflorin, Rathus and Tristessa, as they fight against the demons. With this I can essentially tap into the massive number of characters and stories for Demongate that I've created/written/thought of over the years and deliver them in a bitesize format. Keeping the game simple is the main thing though. I'm hoping that by combining the generic time-waster formula with hero/card collecting and turning it more or less into a visual movel of sorts I stumble on some kind of super winning formula that'll make me a gorillion dollars because of in app purchases.
Who knows.
More as the game developpes. And yes, I'm going to be TRYING to update this somewhat regularly. Who knows how that'll go though.
