endings

feeling an era of my life is coming to an end.

releasing 868-hack on steam on tuesday. i thought that once i released it on ios i would move straight on to the pc release but instead i found myself prioritising fixing bugs in what i'd released, and then i was sick of working on it and needed to do other things for a while. now somehow this has ended up hanging over me for well over a year. but it's all ready. i just need to borrow a windows computer tomorrow to compile the release build - mine has broken down irreparably after several years of faithful service - something else that's ended. (yeah i'm cutting things fine, tomorrow night might be pretty busy but hey.)

helix too, i finally got out a few months ago; just did an update fixing minor bugs and i think that's it, i don't need to touch it again. not financially worth it to port anywhere. (of course an ios update will break it pretty soon but NOT THINKING ABOUT THAT NOW.)

smesport has been essentially done for over a year so i should just put it out, i can release it any time really. had been thinking of doing a little more on it but i guess not. hasn't been a high priority because it's a local 4-player game and i hardly ever make an opportunity to play it myself, i know almost no-one else will. it's a good game when other people are good at it though.

the other project i'm working on i haven't talked about much. it's an idea i've been grappling with for a couple of years, making several prototypes and throwing them away, last august i finally figured out how to make it work so i've been building it slowly since then. i don't want to put a time estimate on it but it's getting there.

that's all the things i'm working on. they're all long projects and i'm finishing them off one by one and i haven't been starting new things. i haven't been getting into jams lately, not feeling it. so i don't know where i'm going after this. for a while there i thought i would keep producing games at the same rate forever. but now i've done a lot of what i'd set out to do, maybe i am running out of ambition. i haven't had a reason to make another puzzle game after corrypt, it does what i wanted to do with puzzles. helix, glitch tank, 868-hack, these have kind of fulfilled my design goals for their respective genres. probably i will find myself making something new before i know it, certainly there are plenty more games i can think of making, just right now there doesn't seem to be much reason to. maybe i will make something other than a game. i wrote before about how the weight of supporting released games was hurting me, and that's part of it too, but really not all.

parallel to that, i'm leaving scotland in march. kind of a big deal. don't know where we'll be living next. going to travel a little bit, then maybe back to new zealand for good? that'll be strange. not bad, i miss new zealand, but i'm going to miss europe too. or maybe we won't settle there, maybe we'll end up somewhere else, just don't know. we knew we wouldn't be here forever and it has been very unstable, but it is hard not to feel settled after a while. i'm looking forward to travelling and adventure but then