I’m proud that I completed Jet Dancer and it’s made a few sales. But I’m less interested in promoting that product and more interested in moving forward with growing as a game developer, correcting my mistakes and improving my skills.

A couple of years back, before I got serious about finishing Jet Dancer, I’d decided I was going to finish my WEAPON Combat League game. But before that, I prototyped another idea, kind of my take on a galactic ranger/bounty/treasure hunter type named Amari Rift. She came from one of my numerous RPB drawings from way back when. I decided that she was cute enough to build into a sprite rig. I used her as the subject of a tutorial when I became interested in learning how to make a grappling hook in Construct 3. With some modifications, I built a little game prototype around Amari.

At the time, I was deep in my indecision phase. I wanted to finish a game, but I didn’t know what I wanted the game to be about. I bounced around a lot, and eventually decided that I would finish Jet Dancer since that project was furthest along.

Now that Jet Dancer is over, I’m not interested in taking any time off from game development. I have no reason to. This is what I like to do, what I truly enjoy, I have the time and freedom to do it, and I just want to keep doing it.

So I was sitting at my PC, trying to decide what I would do, and I came up with a little plot for Amari. It has just enough detail to come up with a couple of stages, some cutscenes, gameplay with a win and loss condition. It won’t be a heavy commitment for now; I’m hoping to produce just enough of a vertical slice to use as a tool to build upon. Maybe I could run a Kickstarter, or attract a publisher, or just solo-dev it like before and avoid taking nearly as much time on a game that should theoretically only take a couple of years to develop, if that.

My objective is to build this demo. It’ll have a title screen, some storytelling, two stages and something to close it out. If it’s well received in demo form, I’ll work on growing it into something more. Right now I only have a snippet of a story. It’s enough to get started. Nothing deep, just a formulaic framework to create an excuse for the game to go forward.

That’s what I’m up to for now. Just moving forward!