Happy New Year!
For December I had two full weeks of vacation from my work and was able to reach the goal of completing the smaller side-side project as well as start working on a newer smaller scale Steam game. With the mobile game project completed, as I mentioned in the previous posts, I'm going to spend my free time working on a new Steam game and get back to working on Bright Red Skies!
So with the mobile game, I can finally put it on my portfolio as a project that I started and actually saw to completion. In the gamedev community, there's a common trend where developers will start projects, get bored when the going gets tough, and will eventually abandon the project. To be honest, after working on Bright Red Skies for so long, I was starting to feel like I would just end up being like one of these gamedevs that would eventually abandon their projects. No matter how small the game, knowing that I can see a game to completion and release it, is really reassuring. Bright Red Skies is definitely a much larger scoped game, but I'll take all the small wins I can haha.
I've mentioned a couple of times about starting a smaller-scoped Steam game and I've taken some of my vacation time to begin doing research and prototyping. What I've decided to make is a first-person shooter RPG with anime aesthetics. FPS RPGs already exist and there are some pretty popular ones out there, but there is only a handful that have an anime-inspired look. Also thinking about making this new game a prequel to BRS that happens before the Bright Red Skies, so I can explain some parts of the lore like the technology and power system. But still debating on whether or not to just make it a standalone game without any relation to BRS. It's still in a prototype stage right now, but here's a look at an early concept of it.
Going to be trying to divide my spare development time between this new FPS game and Bright Red Skies. Since I want to try and release the new project within 12-18 months I'm going to go with a 70/30 time split (70% on the new project). The time that I do spend on Bright Red Skies will first be in setting the layout and framework of the start of the story and fleshing out some characters so that it'll be a lot smoother when I implement it and it'll prevent having to redo sections of the game. In terms of the gameplay, a lot of the systems have already been implemented, so a lot of the work is in the content (story & game balancing).
As a final note, if any of you are following me on social media, I pretty much fell off the face of the planet. I really wanted to finish making the mobile game before the end of the year, so focused a lot of time to make it actually happen. I'm going to try and start posting progress updates regularly on Twitter again so be on the lookout for those!
I'm really excited to see where Bright Red Skies and this new FPS project will go in 2021! After spending my childhood playing FPS games like Call of Duty/Halo, and JRPGs like Kingdom Hearts/Final Fantasy, I believe creating a merge of the two genres will make for a really interesting game. But anyway, for anyone reading this, thanks a lot for following this gamedev journey, I really do appreciate it! :D