Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I launched this blog, so it’s time for a life update! (This an elongated version of a series of posts I made on Twitter last month)
A month ago I started work at Frontier Developments, working as a Senior Programmer on a very exciting unannounced project. After three years as a full-time Indie, scraping by financially and making everything by myself, it’s nice to be part of a team making something big again.
Obviously, with a full-time job, I now have less free time to devote to my own projects, so here’s how I’ll be splitting my time between them:
Firstly: I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a new version of Redirection for Android and iOS. At the time of writing, it’s almost complete, and I should be able to announce a release date soon. The game works really nicely with touch controls and a lot of people have requested a mobile version, so I’m hoping it does well!
Alongside Redirection, I’m also devoting more time to my next, still-untitled game. I’ve teased this a bit on twitter over the last year or so, but the only thing concrete I’m ready to say at the moment is that this is the spiritual successor to ComputerCraft you’ve all been waiting for.
As for ComputerCraft itself: with less free time, something had to go, so after five years working on the mod alone, I’ve decided to hand development over to the community. Working on ComputerCraft has been an incredible life-changing experience, but five years is a long time to devote to one thing, and it’s time to hang up the pickaxe. The complete source code will be posted on GitHub soon.
Finally: I’d like to thank everyone who supported me and my work during the 3 years I worked as an indie developer. It’s easy to look at returning to employment after being your own boss as “giving up”, but I don’t see it that way at all: I’m really proud of the projects I worked on, and that hasn’t changed just because they didn’t prove successful financially. I would still recommend to any game developer interested in making their own games to give it a try if they have the means: it teaches you so much about your craft, and there’s no feeling like seeing a game you made sitting on your Steam list and knowing players are enjoying it. If I had the chance, I’d do it again for sure, though I might not release a puzzle game into a crowded market this time!