Pet Projects

As some people have expressed an interest, here’s some info on a few of my current pet projects.

Morning is Broken (WIP)

This game was started on the Splash Jam game jam down the coast of Norway. I’ve gone into it in this blog post, and am working on finishing it, seeing as we have most of the parts done.

Upstage (WIP)

Whilst I’m Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the British Library, I’ve been taking the opportunity to engage with their excellent Off The Map initiative. The annual competition challenges students to make games of any genre based around a theme and particular Library assets. Some of the winners include the widely publicised reconstruction of London before the Great Fire, an unusual underwater reconstruction of a lost gothic abbey for VR, and last year’s lovely Alice in Wonderland platformer.

I’m not able to enter, not being in education any more, but I was inspired to make something all the same.

I was also inspired by my lack of artistic ability, which sounds odd but fits in with my new motto of ‘It’s not a bug, it’s a feature’. A natural collision of my recent work with open archive collections and theatre, I’ve decided to use artworks from free archive collections to create 2D assets and put them in a 3D environment like theatre scenery, effectively creating large, navigable dioramas of Shakespeare plays.

I wanted to see how the visual worked before committing to the rest of this game, so I’m now working on the narrative and mechanics for the scenes. It may even end up in VR.

Dark Waters (WIP)

This is the idea that has seen me called ‘evil’ and the game that ‘sounds amazing’ but nobody wants to play.

VR often makes people feel sick, and a lot of people are working hard to counter this. I’m doing the opposite, making a game set at sea where the main obstacle to winning is your own physical tolerance of nausea. For bonus awfulness, I’ve devised a chair to sit in as your play that rocks you in all directions.

This is the most complete of my projects at the moment, and is mainly being held up by my lack of a functioning VR headset. I’ll fix that soon, though. Very soon.