The Long and Short of it

Greetings interwebs!

Well, we've come to it at last. I got rather shy about updating this blog, so this is probably coming completely out of left field, but it's happening all the same.

Stratagem has been released.

I'll give you a bit of background while I let this sink in. The project I was on with my most recent employer was completed a couple months ago, and my employment with it. My next goal is to get into a larger game company, there are several here in Vancouver, but the problem with larger companies is that they often have strict limits on what developers can work on in their free time while under their employ. So with my hair getting problematically long again, and not wanting to keep it for years, I figured I needed to buckle down and crank out a playable version of Stratagem before I went job hunting.

I also want to move on to working on smaller projects. Stratagem has long proven to be a development quagmire because of the sheer amount of work required to make it testable. I want to switch to faster failing projects, the sort of thin that can be testable after a week and released after a month.

With that in mind, I must confess that I've exploited a couple of loopholes in my initial specs of the game. According to the first post on this blog, the state of the game was not part of the pledge, nor the aesthetics, mode of release, or online multiplayer.  Now I didn't abandon the core of the game, but I did scope it down to just a test of the main mechanics. So instead of 6 units, there's only one, a ranged unit since that tests the most annoying cases in the engine. Instead of the original medieval look, it's now a western. Instead of having 3 alternating turns per player per round, there's only one each. There's only hot seat multiplayer and instead of a release on a major platform, it's just a web app appearing on my website. In conclusion:

Stratagem has been released... sort of.

Funny thing is, it's not even called Stratagem. This isn't really a problem since Stratagem was always a working title rather than a final one, and another low budget strategy game was released with a similar title, so I really did need to change it. The new title is Showdown, in keeping with the new western aesthetic. So...

Showdown has been released.

And that's good enough for me right now. A released playable experience is worth a hundred half finished projects, so I'm putting this one in the win column. I hope to come back to it someday and make a vastly superior version, but that will have to wait a while.

As for this blog, well, I don't want to commit to anything yet, but I hope to repurpose it again. Keep your eyes peeled for a 3.0 post. Exactly what the purpose of it will be is kind of dependent on what I'm allowed to do on my own, so I really can't say what that will be.

That's all for now,

I'm Lambwatt, this is day... the last one, and I'm going to find a hairdresser.