I can’t believe how long it’s been since I wrote for the blog! My time has been fully-committed to an ambitious project to get funding to launch a new game studio.

Spoiler alert: 2024 was a bad year to try and start a studio. 😩

What follows is a post-mortem – including receipts – to pull back the curtain on this shadowy part of game development, as a service to enthusiasts and other indie developers. I also recorded a short video essay version if you just want the headlines and not all the nitty-gritty details.

Here I’ll discuss:

• How game funding works
• Our experience seeking funding
• The state of the games industry
• The future for my game, Nightshift Galaxy (TL;DR – Wishlist on Steam!)

Hey everyone, sorry for the posting delay, but I’ve been focussed on my game for the last two months, and now I have a demo build, which I made for Glitch City LA x GUMBO NYC!

I’m still working on Part 3 of the Locomotion Series, and hope to resume regular posting soon, as well as reveal other exciting project updates!

I’ve planned for three playable pilots since my earliest prototype.

The design goal is straightforward: approaching the same mission with different pilots who handle differently increases replay variety. It also acts as a difficulty handicap for casual or hardcore players to opt-into by choosing particular easy or challenging pilots for particular maps.

This week I was feeling ambitious and decided to flex my illustration muscles, and made a nice set of pilot-portrait key-art, as well as sketch concepts for their fighter craft. I really want to push the 80s mecha-anime space-opera creative direction.

I juggle a dozen little side-projects which I dust off from time to time.

Tiny Starpilot was a minigame I conceived of years ago when I was freelancing between jobs, and considering the possibility of becoming a one-man-band mobile game developer.

The design was simple: hold the phone sideways and slide your thumbs along the side to act as tank-tread controls. Your ship would autofire on a regular beat.