After development and offering new patches for Fine Sweeper is drawing to a close (which I am really happy about!), I am toying with a couple of new ideas and concepts. Here’s what’s currently on my mind for future games.
The Artist™ (working title).
What’s life like when you’re a budding painter who just moved to the big city to fulfill their life’s dream? To my knowledge, there are no games out there which let you see the world as an artist. The game is played indirectly a bit like The Sims and Cart Life and is inspired by what I’ve read of MewGenics. I want players to experience what it means for different types of people to be creative. In each playthrough, the artist’s traits, shortcomings and goals are different. I want players to experience the life of someone who has a hard time considering something to be finished, an artist who doubts themselves and their abilities, an artist more driven by their popularity than their art, an artist who is looking for that perfect spark of inspiration while they get burned out by a crappy part time job that drains their very inspiration but they have to keep it in order to pay the rent. I want a game that’s about the everyday struggles of creatives, the precarious state they have to lives their lives in. It can work out really well, but it could also come crashing down on you. Life is hard.
Bandana™ (working title).
A 2D shooter in the tradition of Megaman and Contra. I really like the rather fast paced action of Contra where skill and reactions are a key role. Once you’ve mastered it, there’s a great aspect of flow while at the same time the levels are long, varied and the enemies are a-plenty and one hit means to start over. I want a little bit of story in this, hand-crafted levels apart from the current trend of procedural stuff, and different player characters to select from, each with different abilities. And they all wear different Bandanas™, hence the name. Maybe there’s even some RPG-like skill tree to unlock whose current manifests itself in the design of the player’s bandana™, so you can instantly see what a player has chosen, etc. The abilities there might also be present in the enemy design, so just by looking at one, you know what to look out for, say, red triangle shapes represent strong flame damage, etc. I’m just spitballing here, so nothing’s set in stone. Or even clay.
