Approaching Infinity is one year old today!
Of course, it was brewing in my head and on various scraps of paper for a few weeks before I started knocking out the first lines of code. It wasn’t even the first space rogue-like I had designed (even if that other game was never seen by anyone else…)
So here’s a picture dated 9/22/13 (after one month of development):
I can actually go back and play at this stage in the game, and it’s still quite fun. I really like the Oryx graphics too 😉
Here’s a random pic from today:
Looking good, A.I. !
In between, there’s been kickstarter, itch.io, steam greenlight, and Shrapnel Games. The current beta testers are coming up with some great ideas (as well as way more bugs than I ever expected!)
I never could afford to take an extra day off from work as I had originally planned, so development has still been happening early mornings, late nights, and weekends. But this is the final push. The crunch time to end all crunch times. I can’t see it lasting longer than another month.
And then it’s release. Real, final release. Of course there will be updates, fixes, patches, whatever needs to be done, but the core development process will be over. That’s the future; we’ll see… Hope it’s done by the time Borderlands the pre-sequel comes out!
Then it’s on to something else. The two big ideas I have right now are for a comedic platformer, and a sci-fi text adventure (which these days is called “Interactive Fiction”). I also have a notebook full of smaller ideas. I want to make game development my full time occupation. Career. Life. It’s been a dream for 10 years. And I only really took it seriously with Approaching Infinity.
My wife is getting a tooth pulled today, so I don’t know how much work I’ll be getting done this weekend. My own experience with such things is that it can be pretty rough for a day or two. But I’ll be here when I can, knocking it out.
Here’s an underground mercenary base, and the recently-added achievements screen:
I have never worked harder on any game project in my life. The two that come the closest are Astrum Erus (a space 4x game from 2004-2005) and Random Realms (a fantasy roguelike, 2006-2010). It’s been great, and it’s not over yet. I don’t quite know how to end this, so I just will…
Ibology #Gamedev 