A rather light week this go around. We had a long weekend full of family time which meant less time to get work done. But hey, that didn’t stop me from working on Bombseeker. So let’s talk about some updates.

54 Games

The first thing we want to talk about is 54 Games. Its settling on us and we put paperwork in flight. This will be the official name that you see on the Steam Store. In fact, the creation of the steam store is in progress as we speak. As is the official DBA with the state of Arizona. Yeah we are based in Arizona.

Bombseeker

We have made an absolutely crazy decision. Well actually we have made two. These two decisions are going to be a shift away from previous plans.

The first decision that we made is that I want to open the beta sooner than expected. By sooner then expected, I mean within weeks. The plan had always been to wait until I was on paternity leave from my day job (yes I have a day job) to wrap things up and get the beta out. There has always been too much to get done; for example, we still haven’t found an artist to make assets. However, we found an alternative. Which leads us to decision two.

The second decision is that we want to sell themes for our game. The truth is that for Bombseeker, I don’t think that I really care about the visual identity of the game. Because of this, I began to wonder why I would prevent players from playing the game they want to play. Do you want to play a pastel colored pixel art game? You can download that theme. How about a hand drawn version that’s dark and gothic? Buy that theme. The cool thing about this idea is that I can sell themes as DLC and give that money to specific artists who we sponsor to build themes. Also because of this, I don’t to have a default theme finished before the beta. What I am going to do for the beta is have a theme that I have hand drawn myself. It will not be the default theme at launch, but will be a purchasable DLC theme called the “Beta Theme” . The only reason that you would purchase the beta theme would be to support us, because its going to be bad. I mean “me with a sharpie drawing things and stick figures” levels of bad.

Because of the second decision, I think that I will actually be able to expedite the beta launch, which led to decision number one. I’m excited to get the game out to people. We have some play testing happening but I want more hands on the game.

Also, we’ve paid the $100 bet to Steam. Challenge accepted. (If you know then you know)

Conclusion

Its a short post this week. We haven’t fundamentally altered the gameplay loop. We didn’t fundamentally pivot the puzzle mechanics. We didn’t even work on projects outside of Bombseeker. But our excitement to get Bombseeker out the door has shadowed every other project that we have in flight. When you have excitement for something, you have to let it carry you forward. And right now, building a game is where we are finding our happy. Down that path we will continue.

Aside: Its funny actually. This week alone, I have spoken to three different software engineers about how they “find their happy”. It seems to be a common struggle in the world right now. Maybe we all need to work on finding our happy more.

Go Forth and Be Awesome