Now that I have stopped work on my previous project, I am faced with a very difficult decision to make: what should I do next? At any given time I have about 10 half-designed project ideas ready to start. I am working on prototypes for the basic game styles of each of them to get a handle on what I should do next. For now, the types aren’t important, as I won’t have a final decision on the next project until at least a week from now, but I wanted to lay out my plan for this blog, and Electric Horse Software in general.
For starters, I want to post at least one blog post each weekend. For the most part I want to focus on the programming aspects of what I do, but it may be concept art or design or anything related to making games as a small indie developer. Part of what I learned from my last project was the importance of community outreach, and having a steady stream of information out to my potential fan base seems like a really good idea. I’ve also taken to twitter, though that’s more of a personal outlet. I figure that keeping the layers separate lets people choose what they want to see, what types of information they want to subscribe to.
I want to take a different direction with the games I make as well. Obviously releasing free software with no ads or microtransactions isn’t the most effective way to run a business, so I want to make a move to pay-up-front software. I generally loathe microtransactions, and if I did them, I would want it to have a cap. Once you pay the full-game cost in microtransactions, the rest should just unlock like you bought it. These new models of monetization all seem to target a different type of game than I want to make anyway. My goal is to target PC digital distribution platforms, like Steam. There has been talk about targeting mobile platforms, but honestly the games I want to make don’t work very well on those platforms, either due to the control scheme or because I can’t imagine someone putting 20+ hours into a game on a cell phone.
So there you have it, that’s my rough plan for the future of this company: weekly blog posts about games, daily tweeting about nonsense, and PC games on the horizon. I’m looking at possibly adding some new people to the team to enable bigger and better games, and I want to have some sort of announcement regarding the next project on the docket within the next few weeks, so if any of that sounds interesting to you at all, stick around.
