Wake up Mr Freeman, wake up and smell the ashes. It feels a little bit like that. Honestly, I’m hoping its anywhere in the vicinity of that. I mentioned in the last post that I’d like to get something small out the door, to work on a project roughly the size of Hoplite. Well, its been a good eight months since then and I’ve not got a lot to show for it. We’re going through the first six months of daycareitis (that actually lasts 18-360 months) again and my ability to stay conscious is absolutely thrashed. On a good day I might get four to five hours work time, but more often than not I’m daycare-away-from-daycare. ...

I’ve updated the website again! The previous iteration sucked. The one before that was impossible to maintain. At least this one is somewhat popular. Since the last update, I’ve been mostly going through the motions, taking on contract jobs and more or less just existing. I’ve worked on a few prototypes here and there. Maybe.. just maybe this year I’ll get back into production.

Exoloper launched in Febuary to… basically zero sales. Not zero, and thank you to anyone who paid for the DLC in the game, but nowhere near enough sales to have made it worth my time. I’ve covered this before, so I won’t go into too much detail. A month after that my youngest was born. So goodbye any level of creativity or sleep for what has now been eight months. Also goodbye home office. Goodbye reasonable thinking and pretty much any decent cognitive load. ...

Exoloper has been out for a month and a bit now and the overall reception has been great! It’s currently sitting at 4.0 stars out of five globally on the Appstore with ~100 ratings. The reviews are generally really nice and supportive, and the feedback I’ve been getting is great. Theres’ bugs, but they’re being caught and sorted at a dececnt rate. Theres balance issues but none of them break the game in a way thats unfair to players. Overall it’s in excellent shape. ...

Exoloper will launch on the 10th of Feburary 2025. Preorder is available today. I’m so, so tired. It’s been two and a bit months since my last post, so here’s a quick rundown on what i’ve been doing. I spent a vast majority of the remainder of October, and half of December just fixing the game. Cleaning up bugs, clearing up balance issues, making sure it works and plays as nicely as possible. Overall this is the most polished game I’ve ever released, and likely, it’ll feel a little rough at launch haha. I’m extremely proud of where the game’s at, but I cannot stress how complex the game is for a single developer to have built, there’s just no way I can be across all the potential issues. ...

Exoloper is in open beta, and if you’re seeing this, that means I’m exhausted. It’s been a good couple months since I last posted here. August and September had me in cleanup mode, leaving little to write about and October has just been dedicated to getting the game’s marketing and public presence in shape and ready to go online, and its hard (at least for me) to write about my progress on building marketing material.. at least.. while I’m building it. I also lost the last two weeks of work to sickness and non-anchorite work stuff. ...

This past month has been devoted to pretty much just tidying up the game. I’m super happy with where its at right now, and just want to get it to the point where I’d be happy to hand it over to some fresh faces. The biggest addition was adding in a new tutorial system. This new system is more like what most people would expect from a mobile game, hiding all elements that aren’t required until they’re needed, highlighting the important parts, etc. ...

This past two weeks has had me working on cleaning up the game, tracking down bugs, fixing issues and generally just polishing the heck out of it. Progressing nicely There’s something really satisfying about actually finishing up UI elements that’ve been in the game since nearly day one. I cleaned up the intro sequence, added some transitions and boom, it now feels like a more professionally made game. ...

The past few weeks have been a mix of school holidays (again) personal time off, and being heads down fixing bugs left right and centre in Exo. Interloper was more or less at this stage when I decided to launch it, all the pieces were in place, but it could’ve used a lot more love. None of the remaining bugs are totally game breaking, and none of the rough edges would turn away a dedicated fan of the genre, but they’ll add up for prospective new fans, so I’m determined to make sure this release is as polished and clean as possible, even if it takes me another couple months to launch the game. ...

This week’s been again a grab bag of little fixes and improvements to the game. I’ve hidden away the debug menu, added to and improved the campaign over ui, fixed a bunnnch of issues with iCloud and added a handful of iOS specific stuff, including performance profiles for devices based on RAM quantity, all bitsy, but stuff that needs to be done. However the big one is reworking the way the game’s missions handle. ...