Hello friends!
Happy New Year! Hope you all are having a great 2020 so far.
Today marks one year since I released Odd Realm on the Steam store. I wanted to take the time to thank you for coming with me on this journey to make this little game. Your patience, feedback, support, and friendship has kept me going.
I'm also going to talk about what I'm currently working and what's next for the game but first I thought it would be fun to share some of the game's progress and history.
At the end of 2016 I was working as a Gameplay Programmer at a game studio and I desperately wanted to make a game on my own. I had been saving up for about five years to have enough money to live off of in order to do this. Originally, I had planned on quitting my job to make a little adventure game where you played as this sword-wielding, amnesia-ridden, fella trying to solve a mystery in a strange, fantasy world.
This is the first scene of the game. You awake from a cryostasis in this cave/bedroom.
It was turning out to be a fun prototype but the art demand was WAY over my head. At this time I was also playing a bit of our much loved predecessor, Dwarf Fortress. I loved the game but I couldn't stop thinking about a version of it with cute little pixel people moving around the world. The image in my mind was very clear. What you see in the game today, is exactly what I envisioned.
One of the earliest gifs from around March, 2017. As you can see, I re-did everything... multiple times...
So, I made the decision to hand in my notice and try and take a swing at making a DF-lite game where you simply tried to keep some pixel peeps alive. I really didn't intend for the game to be 1/10000 of the depth of DF. I actually just wanted to make a small experience in about a year and a half and release the game and move on. Ha. Ha. Ha.
lol. 'Home Zone.' Another super early gif testing out zoning.
Well, the more I worked on the game, the more systems and features became necessities. This wasn't a bad thing but I only really had two years to ship the game before money ran out. Cut to two years later, Jan 10, 2019, and the game comes out in Early Access! Even after two years, the game was nowhere near what I wanted it to be. Even today, three years later it's not. And I'm ok with that. It has grown into something I really love and I plan to keep working on it until the Ardyn are done. About ten more years. Joooking, of course.
Some more modern gifs from recently.
That leads into what's next!
This has been my first week back to work full time since the holiday began. I decided to start work on adding temperature mechanics to the game. In order to do so, I need to re-write my core code to be faster to allow for the additional CPU overhead of temperature and such. Unfortunately, this means a longer wait for updates than usual. This update has a required a lot of fundamental changes, so I need to slowly go through and test everything because these changes affect a lot of things.
If all goes well with the temperature feature, I should be able to jump onto implementing the Tundra biome! :)
Thanks again for an amazing year. Here's to many more!
Your pal,
Waylon