A Spoooky Update!~
It's not really that much of a truly spooky update, except for the fact that I've been co-streaming/guest-starring on ElfyBean's Thursday streams for this month. We played through Mr. Bones (Saturn), D (Saturn), and played some of Spookware, Sweet Home (FC/NES), and Slay the Princess. So that's been a fun diversion.
Updates
Unfortauntely I was laid off from my full-time job; another tech industry layoff. I'm not in a terrible spot, but I have been looking for work and increasing my part-time consulting with Mangotronics, which like a lot of people working in the indie game sector have, is a revenue-share based gig, so it depends a lot on the sales of games I've contributed to. It's not bringing in much. However, I also started working with a cool dev team from Japan which I'm excited about.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous and scrambling around trying to figure out how to make ends meet as the holidays approach. I've sadly had to scale back some of my patron memberships because of this.
In total I'm working on about 5 projects currently, feeling a bit overwhelmed, but hoping that I can not burn out while also looking for a full or part-time job while I'm consulting.
There's the Japan-based game which I'm the Assistant Producer on (cool), the unnamed vertical slice SRPG which I'm collaborating with a well-known designer on (very cool- also I'm mostly handling bizdev for this effort), and then the 3 previous projects that I'm working on updates for (Employment Collection, Interview Simulator, and The Devil's Whispter).
Those 3 already released games that are getting updates are mostly getting bug fixes and QoL updates, but also it looks like we're finally able to get the localization and translations for them too which is great! Mobile and console ports are still on hold because of the loc having to be complete first.
And I will be joining the Indiepocalypse radio show (podcast thing?) tomorrow so that should be fun.
Segue to Personal Projects
The arcade machine I was working on sadly had to take a back seat to the other projects that can help pay my bills, but I'm still determined to finish that for next season.
I ended up attending a lot of showcases and events. This last season was so packed that I'm still following up with people I met around August/September. It's nice to see that people are still trying to make a bad situation into something better and keeping up on their own projects, and getting some (albeit small) amount of funding here and there.
I also started a few new projects (not surprising) aand opened up some old ones to.
One of the old platformers that I first started in Game Maker 7.0 and ported to 8.0 needs a little love, and could also stand to be ported up to GameMaker Studio 2. It's daunting but I've managed to get the code into a good spot where I think it won't be too much trouble to do so, but knowing how these things go, it'll probably require at least another month of work.
There's also a smaller Lua-based project I've been working on the side since around May which I've been calling "Meat Crank" or "Meat Grinder" on the Playdate handheld console. This one's more for learning purposes, which is sort of similar to the platformer I just mentioned since that started around 2008 as a project to help me learn both Game Maker and platformer design.
Lastly, my 3rd and final(? current maybe) project in progress is a collection of all my games sort of in the same vein as Terry's Other Games, which I found a lot of great inspiration from.
In Short
Overall it's been a heck of a year, quickly approaching the end and holiday season where things start to wind down. We're planning for January already! Looking back on when I started this blog at the beginning of the year, I can't imagine almost an entire year has passed already. It really seems like it was just a little while ago that I wrote the first post here in January. Hopefully I'll be financially stable soon and also better able to post more of these soon with extra detail.
Best of luck in your indie game dev endeavours, and have a good X-mas, holiday(s), and new year everyone!
-matt / slime
P.S. It feels kind of weird to say but I've started going by my IRL name lately because of all the different projects I've been joining and networking I've been doing, so I've started signing things as "matt or slime" interchangeably.