Hello everybody, First and foremost, Defending Lydia Collier still has 3 more major updates remaining, and as per the weekly progress logs you can see development for v.0.14 is coming along very nicely. Everything above and to do with future projects is just stuff I do late at night after working on DLC all day, on my spare PC when I really should be doing other things than rendering, but its fun (at the moment at least, I'm in a very creative phase). So anyway, as several people here pledge annually and as I'm already posting some of this stuff in Discord, I thought it is probably the time to let you know what will happen after DLC is completed (hopefully by the end of the year). Shadows over Manston's Future My original game, which nearly caused me to give up game development it is so horrific to work with. I've promised to conclude this game and once DLC is finished I will make some extra scenes for this and give it several, by SoM standard, large updates to do this. The rough SoM update size when it was in development was 50-300 renders. I wrote a very long post about why I was stopping development on this, and these problems haven't gone anywhere. This is not a project I can work on full time, it is so problematic and stressful to work on it nearly made me quit when I was working on it an hour or so a day at Uni, the thought of having to work on it full time makes me want to quit game development altogether. So that is what will happen with Shadows over Manston, it will get several updates to wrap it up and conclude it, made on a part time basis to honour the promise I made that people would get more content, that promise is the sole reason I am not just writing this off and abandoning it. I don't want people to think you'll be getting several thousand renders, multiple animation updates with sound, galleries, walkthroughs etc, then to pledge here for "the revival of SoM" and be disappointed, I want to be very truthfully about its future. You'll get a couple of big, for SoM, updates over the course of a few months which will conclude the game. Next Project
So in light of that, I'll be starting a new project on a full time basis once DLC is completed. This next project will take everything I've learnt whilst developing DLC & SoM and turn them into what I believe will be my best ever work. At the moment this is still very much in concept stage, and only a couple of things are really certain. You'll start the game with a pregnant wife named Alyssa (pictured above, the pregnant woman) and the MC will be a male protagonist. Alyssa's mother will also be a character in the game, and she is the woman with the "Alyssa" tattoo. The MC & Alyssa will live in a custom built house I'm very slowly building, which you can see the rough design of in the images, along with a female lodger renting a room. (There will of course be more characters than this eventually.) The game will be set in England, in a similar to modern day setting, and the game will be espionage/thriller themed. Some of the main influences for the story I'm thinking up at the moment would be the Jack Reacher, Jason Bourne & James Bond stories, along with inspiration from television shows like NCIS & Spooks. I want to implement some more gameplay to the next game, and I'm currently looking at QTEs similar to those used in The Quarry, Telltale Games & Detroit: Beyond Human which will replace choices during action scenes. The game will be slightly less on rails and have a little bit more exploration and adventure to it, but it will not be sandbox. If this sounds daunting or not for you, there will be a "Visual Novel" difficulty which will disable gameplay & achievements, and make the game a lot more simpler without any real mechanics for people who just want a very casual story experience. The phone/computer will be combined into a foldable phone, which will launch a full screen "tablet" interface with everything in it, there will no longer be separate phone and computer interfaces, everything will be in one place. Why post about this now if it is only in a concept/idea stage? Because there is no better time for you to give me feedback about things you like, things you don't like and things that you want to see than in the idea stage! If half of you all have the same thing you'd like to see, I might agree with you and just not of thought of it! I might have an idea you all think is crap, whilst I have some very helpful people assist me with making DLC, it is still just me alone making and designing the game, so without community interaction I'm bouncing ideas off of myself and that can limit my perspective. If I know about this before I start making the game I can consider it in my planning (although I can't guarantee to add every idea), where if it is suggested after v.0.9 it makes things a lot more tricky to add. So let me know what you think! There's a room in the Discord to discuss exactly this (along with all the rooms to discuss Defending Lydia Collier) which you can access for free here:
https://discord.gg/7DRKbJ3R6h So come along, say Hi and let me know your thoughts, even negative ones can be helpful. There's a poll running in Discord to name Alyssa's mother, so make sure you go and vote. This will not have any real work other than me making a character here and there until DLC is completed though. They won't be running alongside each other, there won't be any demos or that kind of thing, just a render here and there if I decide to spend evening working on this after doing the DLC stuff during the day, this is very much the "next" project. Thanks for all the new and continued support, the Defending Lydia Collier weekly progress update will be out Friday afternoon as usual.
WP