Wot's going on this week

Well, this Friday, 3/4/22 (or 4/3/22 for you weirdos who like the DAY first, hah), our first game, Quest for Infamy, launches on the Xbox, PS4/5 and the Nintendo Switch! What a crazy time to be alive! I've been playing it on my Switch for the past few days... it's kind of amazing to see.  The version used to port it is v2.0, as well, so it has some stuff people haven't seen unless they've played the 2.0 beta available on Steam! I'm going to be working to make sure the PC versions play bug-free and getting them to Itch, GoG and fulltime on Steam this year, too.  (The port was done by Ratalaika Games, who definitely went in and finished/fixed some things I hadn't done yet)

This is opening up an exciting world of console ports for us - Order of the Thorne: The King's Challenge is on the docket, as well as launching QFI: Roehm to Ruin on not only PC, Mac and Linux but on Consoles as well later this year!

As for Roehm to Ruin - I'm still working on recording, editing and implementing the voice files for the game.  Finding time to work on Audio has been tight, for sure, but I'm hacking away at it.  I still have to cut/edit lines for about 5 minor characters, and then I have to finish recording Mr. Roehm's parts.  Slowly but surely - if I had the budget for a full dedicated audio team, we could knock it out faster, but alas - the perils of extremely low budget indie game creation! But I will say the performances are pretty great. A lot of this stuff is making me chuckle.

Shawn has started prelim work on QFI2 , as noted before, but not much exciting going on there. Basically getting the engine set up - the controls, the systems, etc.  Though I am thinking we might try to design a dual function system - one that uses both the classic icon-bar controls we know and love, and then a simple cursor/context sensitive system.  This may make the game more accessible to inexperienced or newer players, while keeping us old folks who love our 90s interface happy.  We'll see if we can pull that off well, it remains to be seen and is mostly in the concept stages.

Order of the Thorne: Fortress of Fire remains in it's gestational state - we have many rooms in the engine, and some story and plot elements, puzzles in, but we will need to go harder at that once RtR is done.  It's mostly just placing elements we have, coding the dialogue and plot elements in, and then figuring out what art assets we still need.  It'll get there.  I still have it planned in my head as an "Ultimate Edition" where one can merely play "Fortress of Fire" or play it all as one complete game "The Order of the Thorne", comprised of both The King's Challenge and Fortress of Fire as one long game.

Hopefully new eyes and fans from the console release will spur us into a new age of activity, and we can hop on more work for these games.  But we remain working on them at a pace - slower than I'd like, but working on them nonetheless.