(welcome to part two of my announcement of my new side project, tentatively codenamed either ‘BiblioTech’ or ‘PortFolio’. If you haven’t read part one year, you can do that here. In this post I’ll write a little bit more about the plan for development, and I’ll explain why exactly I’m announcing this game right now.)

The Plan for Development, and Why I’m Announcing This Now:

Development on this side project isn’t going to start until at least April. Even then, it’ll be a very slow, very-very part-time thing, as I focus on The Red Market.

So why am I going to be working on this at all? And why am I announcing it now?

Well, The Red Market is great, but at the moment I’m primarily working on it as a piece of text-only interactive fiction. The goal is to eventually remake it as a fully graphical game, but I’ll need to improve my programming/Unity skills a lot before that’s possible.

So in the meantime, I’ll be working on this side project as a way of learning, and improving those necessary skills. I don’t just want to sit there and work my way through tutorial videos (though I’m sure there’ll be some of that too) – I want to learn by doing. As such, there’s absolutely no predicted release date for this project. It’s 100% ‘see how it goes’.

But why announce it now if there’s not going to be anything to show for such a long time? Well, uh, to be honest I’ve been thinking about and planning this game for about six or seven months, and then a couple of weeks ago the amazing Weather Factory devs semi-announced a follow-up to their game Cultist Simulator where you play as a librarian, and ‘books arrive in your occult library and you just examine, catalogue and arrange them, then provide them to visitors’.

When I saw Alexis Kennedy writing about this game I thought “Ah, bollocks”. It actually doesn’t seem all that similar to my idea, apart from the basic concept of ‘you deal with rare books and give them to people’, but considering (a) I’ve always been very influenced by Kennedy’s games, and (b) I internshipped and then worked at Failbetter for a very brief period when Kennedy was still CEO there, I started to worry.

So, while I’m still going to work on this game, I figured it would make sense to announce it sooner rather than later, so that when people inevitably say ‘oh, you just copied Weather Factor’s idea’ I can point them to this blog and say ‘Actually, Ithinkyou’llfindIhadtheideamonthsbeforetheyannouncedanything’ and that’ll shield me from all negative comments and interior feelings, obviously.

Anyway, that’s all from me today. There won’t be a regular dev blog for this game – at least not for a long while. But I hope it sounds interesting to you, intrepid reader. If you want to follow updates on The Red Market you can hit ‘Follow’ at the bottom right of this blog. And if you want to follow me in general, you can find me on Twitter here.