Ø1Ø A New Year
Good Morning!
It’s a new year and I hope everyone had a great holiday, Headway shuts down for the week between Christmas and New Year for a holiday refresh. It’s a nice time to just sit and spend time with family. The family and I had an exciting break with tons of family time. We were able to go sledding, cook together, and we got Super Mario 3D for the switch which we can play as a family. My wife and I also got the game Lake for us to play together, which is a nice relaxing experience. This year's break felt really important. Time to sit down and reflect and really spend time with the folks that mean the most to me. Per our COVID tradition, we played D&D with our close friends online on New Year which is always a blast.
I’m not much for setting goals around the new year. I try to set them for my birthday. Feels more personal to me. This last birthday I set out a couple of goals that I feel I can easily achieve and I’m trying my best to work at them every day. New Year acts as a check-in to see if I should make any adjustments.
I’m excited to see what the new learnings and growth this year brings. I just picked up a huge pile of books to read this year. Some are more work-focused, some self-improvement-focused, some education-focused, and some just for fun.
World Ø & PARAN
I’m continuing to work on my next game project. I’ve got a target date for this Nov to have it out to the public and progress is going and a pretty good rate. In the last few weeks, I’ve worked on the interior look and feel a bit and got a few more props together. Narratively I have a ton of ideas that I need to put together yet. I’m going to probably work on some of the story bits once I get the first area finished.
New Mechanics
The core experience is really one of exploration. I wanted to add a few movement mechanics to the game to break up the pacing of walking around and finding stuff. One of the first movement mechanics in the game is the ability to double jump. This first section will really focus on using that mechanic while exploring and finding things in the environment.
Itch.io
I finally went ahead and got the itch.io site up and running with details about the game. On my other projects, I always kind of kept things simple, but with this project, I’m really trying to make it something exciting for players and test myself to see what I can create.
Inspo Central
Again here are some amazing tweets that I stumbled across in the last month.
This is a great breakdown of the unbelievable amount of work it would take to accomplish the task of getting everything to fit across multiple engines and games using NFTs. Even in the movie Ready Player One most of the Avatars matched the style of the overall movie. Unless I’m mistaken I didn’t see any cel-shaded characters in that. Also, a character skin isn’t just a texture swap, it’s a fully new model with new rigs and animations for that specific character. It’s a pretty large undertaking. Xavier broke it down better than I ever could so make sure to read the entire thread.
Twitter Spaces
Next week the team and I at Headway will be hosting a Twitter spaces event talking about design team culture and process. This will be our first one and we’re excited to host more spaces in the future. So make sure to follow me and Headway on Twitter.
Well, I hope everyone has a great start to their new year and finds or accomplishes everything they’re looking for this year. I’m excited to see where 2022 brings our family. Until next time
👋 Cheers!