First Day of Patreon!

This is exciting!

Since 2012, Thomas and I have had to live with our twin big projects, New California and NEM Gate. These were our freshmen projects. Super large scale, a real step up both in scope and quality from our earlier projects, and destined to make 0$. ;p 

It was our education, basically. We learned the fundamentals before, then we needed to put them to the test on a big scale, learn the ropes, make mistakes in a safe environment insulated from debt consequences, then after they were done we could springboard to a new for-profit project. 

We never expected they'd take 6 years, or that we'd be alone just, the 3 of us. Me and Rick on FNC, Thomas largely by himself on NEM Gate. 

As time wore on, I felt the pressure to get out from under the mod banner where we couldn't make money, we couldn't fund raise, we couldn't hire anyone except sketchy volunteers -- so I tried to build another team for Shadow Star.

Shadow Star had an investor target and a really cool concept. You'd be captain of a starship from the bridge. One part MechWarrior in Space, big ship-to-ship battles you direct like a Mech game managing turrets and missiles and heat, and one part Mass Effeft or Fallout, where you have a 1st Person Shooter RPG where you can talk to NPCs face to face or over a hologram room for quests and gunplay in the interiors of your ships.   

That proved too big to make with a small team. we made some kickass art, but to do it, people wanted New California finished and released first. 

So, I went back to FNC. By the time it was done, Shadow Star's investor was no longer interested. He funded a different space game and raised over a million, then it flopped. That left me looking for a new game. 

I wrote a pitch document for another friend with a large cryptocurrency that's waaaay more legit than that sounds. His dad own a major rocket company in my home town that broke off from Space-X. He had another investor interested more in a casino type game, a kinda Grand Theft Auto sorta world where currency was cryptographic. I got his message and wrote JINN, which would take that idea and push it into the realm of real game development territory. 

JINN would be a hard hitting Scifi 3rd Person Brawler RPG set in a sprawling underground city. Exploring themes of injustice, post-humanism, cryptocurrency, and corrupt authority, JINN marks the player as an outcast fighting to survive – while trying not to become a monster themselves. It's a hand to hand melee fighting game where guns are rare and you upgrade your body parts the same way some folks change their clothes.

The looks are a little bit Bladerunner & Repo Men, a little bit The 5th Element, a lot Ghost in the Shell. Heavily inspired by Bungie's ONI from 2001.

That was going on as we did the last touches on New California. But after awhile it became obvious the money wasn't there for the development, and after getting the costs estimated, even on the lowest end, it was still too costly to make for a small indie team.

So we tried one last pitch, we entered the Unity Universal GameDev Challenge, made a killer pitch video with finished levels and awesome art and music -- and we got passed over for inarguably less interesting and less ambitious (and ultimately less realistic) contestants. 

We released New California in October 2018.

It was a year of very productive striving to make things work out. 7 Years of build up...

And I didn't have anything to show the public when it released except that the mod was done. 

It really felt like I had wasted a lot of time. That all the struggles getting FNC finished were not helping me get Radian-Helix established and ready to support a major for-profit venture. It really felt like, as FNC launched to really great reviews in journals but mixed reviews in public, that maybe we'd wasted all our time the last 7 years. 

That hurt, obviously. I'm a poor boy from a low income area in Arizona where no one believes you can make it here. That small-town mentality is a crusher. You either get "a real job" and stay poor and don't complain, or you're looked down on like a moron for not being a wealthy company man.

But despite that extreme fatigue, and a few doctor's office visits to check out my heart after he stress of release, I dusted myself off, end in January I started design documentation and some early experimentation in Unreal Engine.

Project Morningstar has been in the idea phase for over a year. After Shadow Star was judged as being too big to create and JINN was judged as being too expensive by the group it was pitched too, I decided to scale way way back and create something smaller and more agile.

Morningstar is several things I've always wanted in a game. Ancient Historical Cultures based on archeological evidence. A giant Alien Megastructure full of Sci-Fi technology mixed with a Medieval setting, kinda like Stargate. And it's got at its heart a melee fighting game wrapped up in a procedural narrative generator, which I've dabbled in, but never had a chance to really dive into coding and writing before.

I was really inspired by playing RimWorld and seeing hoe those emergent characters were so simple but they had so much personality and unique flavor. I did not enjoy the drudgery and chore of micromanaging all the mental breaks and too fine of a detail layers of base management and survival, though. 

If fact the most fun I had playing RimWorld was when my base was fully sustainable by itself and I could caravan across the globe with a band of travelers raiding other towns and camps! That was the most fun, making my way across the globe, setting camps and hunting on local maps, encountering traders, visiting friendly towns to  see what they made, and then attacking enemies and bandits. 

That is not the official game mode of RimWorld though. In fact the scarcity of food and weight make it almost impossible to sustain. 

But it reminded me a lot of the game StarSector. 

In StarSector, you have a big global map of the Sector with stars to visit in hyperspace, traveling between solar systems and between planets. When you encounter and enemy, you drop into a little square level that's auto-generated and fight with a twin stick shooter, top down. 

I really enjoyed that mechanic. 

It lets you explore vast open worlds and still get a fine level of detail on your characters.

So I'm planning to do the same thing. I'll post more about this on our websites new blog this month as I get a public presentation ready!

If you enjoyed New California, Morningstar  is a radical departure from that, but it will have our level of quality in attention to detail and a rich lore based universe unlike anything else.  If you are a fan of historic medieval cultures being given a genuine portrayal with intense research into their languages and cultures, you'll love this. Especially if you love open world games with quests and rich characters you can get attached to (and if you love screwing around looting/raiding npc towns across the game world!)

JINN will probably be more your speed as a Fallout fan, but that will require some motion capture technology we'd need way too much money to work with, even on a mid-range indie budget. We have to do something small, like Morningstar, first.

Stepping stones. :)

Gotta get funded first.