One year ago I started working on this my first commercial game: A huge and scary step forward, but also one of the greatest and intellectually the most challenging, and hence also the most stimulating, thing I’ve done so far.

This first year (2016) was spent on:

• getting to know Blender (an amazingly powerful tool for 3D modelling, which is also free, so it’s great also for indies like me just starting out),
• working on the manuscript,
• coding a large part of one of the key features (a special building tool to be used in-game, which soon proved to not be the easiest thing to get working and — even if I do have a large part of it done — I cannot say for sure yet whether or not it’s going to be in the final game),
• landscaping in Unreal,
• setting up the communications platform, on which this is posted (and of which coding the auxiliary devices was a large part).

When the time comes to start building my first real models (which might be pretty soon) — to be used in the actual game (and not only as practice pieces) — I will have to reacquaint myself with Blender, because using it is heavily based on knowing all the keyboard shortcuts, which I’m already starting to forget after spending a lot of time on other things like landscaping, coding, writing etc…

One of my main goals for 2017 is to get the demo out. The demo will let you visit and explore one of the worlds, get a bit of story, and solve a few puzzles.