Is this thing on? (+ new game prototypes)

Hey everyone. It's been a minute, huh? In case you forgot you were subscribed, this is @splaffinator, the gamedev that was making the otter platformer.

I ducked out right before a very weird time for the world, and in light of that, I hope you're doing alright. I am doing good! I still have the gamedev job I started the pandemic with, and have been promoted twice in the interim, which is very nice. For the first time, I've been able to live an independent, stable, adult life with my partner (my goal long before all of this got started) and it's been great to actualize that.

The bad news: I haven't worked on ottergame since February 2020, and I have no real plans to continue working on it. I know that's probably some mix of disappointing and obvious, and I've really dreaded saying it out loud - part of why I withdrew so completely from posting. I also don't feel like I have a great explanation. The game was just no longer what I wanted to spend my spare time / energy doing.

The good news is that I've been making other stuff! Like... a lot of it! Over the past two years I've worked on a slew of new game prototypes, trying to find one that I believed in enough to reveal as my "new big project." I'm still not firm on a direction, but in the interest of at least poking my head out into the world again, I decided to collect some videos and production art from the most noteworthy prototypes to show you here. No promises, just content. Enjoy!

Untitled Roller Hockey Game Extravaganza

During the Great Texas Winterpocalypse of 2021, we absconded to a friend's house for heat and electricity, and sometime during we came across DynoBlaze (1994), a shelved 3DO prototype that has cute animated dino guys on roller skates (mostly the buff one.) Work was cancelled for a while, so I modeled a big hockey croc guy and started making a Jet Set / Tony Hawk character controller with him. I think the story was "do missions / make money to prevent rich guy from converting your local skatepark into a hotel."

Prototype videos here.  (no sound)

Untitled Adventure Game

I really love Neopets: The Darkest Faerie (2005) for PS2, which - if you've never seen - is a video game of both intense mediocrity and quiet brilliance. It is a kinda bad Zelda clone with broken combat and a weirdly compelling world and atmosphere. (It also helps that you play as a fluffy wolf knight guy, ok, I can like things for bad reasons)

I replayed N:TDF earlier this year and got a powerful urge to create a PS2-era high fantasy world of my own, with a heavier emphasis on narrative and character than I usually go for. 

You play as a squire - an orphan, raised by an order of knights in a castle built on top of a hellmouth. On the eve of his own knighthood, the vengeful downstairs neighbors attack, placing the castle and all the knights under a curse. Pick up your training sword and get ready to bildungsroman. Along the way you'd meet a genre-bending cast of demon and furry characters, including Satan's meathead son Apollo (who pro-wrestles you in Hell) and rebellious daughter Lilith (who hates her dad and sells you potions and magickal upgrades.) 

Prototype videos here.  (combat was very WIP, fair warning)

Cool Game About Moving Blocks Around

This one came out of a small game jam I did with a friend. You move and rotate Tetris-like geometry pieces to help a (placeholder) character collect trinkets and get through various puzzle stages. It was inspired a bit by Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (2014) and by block puzzlers in general. This one made it all the way to playable! (It's totally a coincidence that it's both the simplest idea here and it had a deadline)

Gameplay video here.

Cool Game About Being A Superhero But You Forgot Your Clothes

Ok, this one is kind of a fever dream even to me, but you're a superhero and your outfit got lost at the cleaner's, so you have to wear / unlock a bunch of different outfits that give you different abilities. This one barely went anywhere (too broad) but was fun to mess with. The artstyle was an attempt at bringing the look of traditional animation into 3D (especially UPA / neo-UPA, a la Foster's Home background art.)

Prototype video here.

Untitled 3D Puzzle Platformer

And last but not least, this idea is what I've been working on for the last month or so. You play as an intrepid space station janitor, tasked with cleaning up an infestation of goo creatures while armed only with your trusty fluid-backpack-gun. Spray and vacuum 3D fluids to build platforms, connect things, etc. Still very early stages on this one, and I'm exploring the world, mechanics, and level design style.

Video(s) to come.

In Conclusion

So, yeah - hi again! I don't know exactly what will happen next with any of this stuff, but I want to move back towards showing my work publicly, and as my original crew I hope you appreciate this window into what I've made over the last two years. I do all of this on the side now and am reluctant to make promises about delivering playable content in X time, so I am keeping pledges paused indefinitely (you are not being charged to subscribe to this Patreon, and you haven't been since last year.)

If you stuck around here all this time, thank you very much for your patience and for your faith in me. Looking forward to sharing more (of the space platformer, probably) in 2022.