It's been a great week for Wormhole! Not only did I finally create the itch page for the project and, sort of, almost, publicise it, but the game itself moved on quite a bit. The project has been in development for quite a while, but I didn't really want to show it until I was happy with the way it looked. As a coder, I'm content to knock up some dreadful graphics and work with those. The game itself doesn't care, but people looking at the project from the outside certainly do - despite often saying the opposite!

On the graphic front, two big things have come together recently. Firstly, I'm now working with genius pixel artist, Stoo Cambridge and Stoo has truly worked magic on the visuals. I couldn't be more thrilled with the results. It's super exciting every time he drops an updated tile graphic into the project.

The other big addition is the dynamic lighting which takes it all to another dimension. On this I'm helped by my friend, and esteemed shader whisperer, Ruslan. What I like is mixing the 1990's style pixel art with modern tech, unbound by boring restrictions imposed by palettes or cpu, and so on.

I myself have mostly been tweeking the game for general polish, pre-demo. It looks simple, but it really isn't, and there is always something that can be refined. I just play the game and find things to improve. This process of iteration is what we always did at Revolution, and it pays dividends. 

Anyway, the plan is to try and build a little interest in the project, and then release a limited number demo and harvest some feedback. Let me know if you'd like to be a part of that!

What else is happening out there? Revolution finally fired off their Reforged Kickstarter and it's looking very cool. Check out if you haven't seen it already. Also, it's utter carnage (as usual) in the wider game dev industry, with huge rounds of layoffs announced almost daily. It's a perfect storm of circumstances - PS5 era games are way too expensive to develop and yet the games are oddly bloated out (often with various forms of trickery to extract money from players) and lack focus. Add to this utterly incompetent management (like politics, the worst people end up rising to the top) and then stock markets and shareholders bleeding the whole industry for profits - a hunger that can never be sated. It was all so predictable, but that is the games industry!

Anyway, what next week? More graphics and gameplay refinement. I'll also be playing with the audio side of things - I've bought a sound library! Maybe I'll create a Steam page for the game as it seems the entire industry revolves around Wishlists these days. Also on the cards is some sort of opening intro sequence. It'll be the cheapest intro ever made - haha!

Oh, and there'll be one of these every Saturday from now on!

Tony