So, obviously, I haven’t done any work on The Understory in some time. I think I’ve sort of lost sight of why it was cool and fun. I don’t even know what the next actionable item would be. And that sucks, because I really want to be involved in a hobby project right now. I just sort of have development paralysis; I find myself repeatedly opening the project, looking through the code, compiling and running the game, and then never making any changes. I was working on an epic engine-level refactoring change that I ultimately reverted, and that really killed my momentum. (Fortunately, I kept a local backup of the changes before I reverted them in case I ever get the urge to go down that road again.)

But in the meantime, I’ve been thinking about other projects I could work on. I have a backlog of works-in-progress that I could theoretically go back to (Arc Aether Anathema, Antikythera, Club Providence, etc.), but most of these were stalled because they were overscoped or had some bottleneck that I couldn’t overcome (typically art), so there wouldn’t be much point in going back to them. So I’ve been mostly thinking about simple games that would avoid my usual pitfalls.

I could go full indie and do a platformer. I haven’t done that yet, and I’m not sure why not. I have some concerns I’d end up overscoping any platformer I tried to make, but it would be a good test run of a component-based entity system, and I could potentially reuse my CRT sim tech for this. I think an early 80s arcade-style one-screen platformer could be fun, but I don’t have any specific ideas. Mostly I’m wary of falling into the trap of wanting to build a full-fledged editor from scratch and stuff like that.

I could do a shmup. I already did a small joke-game shmup for the AGBIC compo last year, but I’ve had another idea for something I’m calling “Bullet Hellion” that I think could be pretty fun and at least a little bit original. It would be part shmup, part resource management strategy game. Again, an editor would likely be a bottleneck here, as well as AI.

I could do a goalless space exploration game. That’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, since before Arc 1 even. There would be plenty of room for shiny shader effects, and most of the art could be procedurally generated, but I’m just not sure there’s enough meat to this idea to make it anything more than a nifty little tech demo.

I’ve also started to realize that I’ve been thinking a little too much about the indie scene and about what other developers are doing, and it’s getting in the way of just having fun with programming. I need to get back into that Guildhall mentality of isolating myself from everything and blitzing through one interesting problem after another until I have something to show for it.

In that vein, I could even put games away entirely for a little while and just work on some funky tech demos or something, since that’s usually what I enjoy the most. Maybe work on Gaia v2.0 or something.

We’ll see.