It’s done! You can now buy Tales of Another Galaxy! Oh and if you could stop by Steam Greenlight and vote for it that’d be great too: Tales of Another Galaxy on Steam Greenlight

I can’t believe this is my 11th game since I started in 2007. At a time where it many devs go online/social/multiplayer I’m actually going the other way. There’s no big plot here or controversial opinion. I just wanted to do that. That’s the beauty of being indie. You do what you want and not what you’re being told .

Even though working on 3 MMOs (Golemizer, Dungeon of Loot and Star Corsairs) was an amazing experience it’s also quite exhausting when you’re alone. Not the fact of having 3 MMOs active more or less at the same time but the constant energy you have to put in just to keep things running at a minimum, even if it’s just paying for the server. I wanted to have that feeling that “okay now I allow myself to think about my next project now that this one is released”.

Not that there’s no challenges working on a downloadable title. It’s just a bit different and I needed to vary my experience a bit. I’m now working on spreading the word and as usual this might be the most difficult part. I had a hard time getting my MMOs known but the difference here is players won’t get turn away because the server is empty.  You don’t need to achieve that “critical mass” to get the ball rolling. That’s where Star Corsairs badly failed. While the feedback was generally positive there was little players around so people started to quit… because of the lack of players. So I wanted that off my shoulders. At least for a while.

Downloadable but same tech

There were some difficulties yes but it’s nice that I’ve been able to use my AS3 experience to work on TAG. Even if it might seem like an odd choice it does surprisingly well. It wasn’t a blind choice as other indie titles proved that it wasn’t a crazy idea. Unless I feel a sudden need to start all over I’ll probably stick to AS3 for my next project too. Once again a downloadable title… at least that’s the plan so far.

More power to players

It was an obsession when I was working on Golemizer and I still wanted to have a way for players to amaze me even if it’s a downloadable game. All the data is kept in text files so if you’re feeling a bit adventurous you can completely change the game and make it your own. I’d suggest to start by exploring the map editor (and look at how I coded the maps shipped with the game) just to keep the learning curve manageable.

In fact here’s a beginner’s guide to using the map editor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4AZLm33960

Some things I’d like to see:

  • An urban zombies mod (yeah, more zombies but eh)
  • A Wild West mod
  • Some popular movie made with the game engine
  • A remake of an old game (you’ll notice that 1 level in the campaign is pretty much Pac-Man and another is close to Missile Command)

I might work on mods myself but there’s always something exciting when seeing what others created using your work.

What’s next

Well first I still have a lot of work to do to spread the word about the game, work my way up on Desura, keep the Steam Greenlight page active, contact people for possible bundles, etc.

A Mac and Linux versions are something I’ll start looking once the dust settle a bit. That’s new territory for me so I’ll have quite some research to do on the subject.

Then there’s this new project for which I already wrote a few lines of code. Cool concept but I’ll wait to see it in action before saying more about it.

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