It's a new year, and that means the world feels alight with possibility and magic, when actually I'm the same fat lazy clod as always, but I can dream that that will change! Here's the big Hamumu plans for the year, deeply,
immensely, inevitably, absolutely subject to change, guaranteed:
- I will be finishing Broken Build Simulator of course. When exactly is a mystery to all of us. Also, I am thinking I want to try doing Early Access, so it might be soon, but it might also be lame at that time!
- I just did this one: I swept the Hamumu Halloween Home Horror Hoedown under the rug like the squirmy tentacled beast that it is! Horror movie blog entries now only show up on the Halloween page, so you can pick your poison, and it's much easier to find what you want in the blog.
- I want to continue making these Yerfbox low-res video games. Every week or two I have a new idea, but since this is a list of hopes and dreams, let me tell you what I want to release this year, but probably won't (and will likely latch onto a more exciting thought before I even get started). Because there are 3 ideas listed here, I will pre-emptively inform you that there's no chance I'll be releasing all 3 this year, but these are the ones I'm currently thinking about:
- Bag O' Monsters: An idea I've had since... 2006 or so? I'm sure it's in the Dumb Idea Repository somewhere. It's a deckbuilder of sorts (bagbuilder, actually). You have a bag full of monsters of your choice, and as they come out of the bag, you'll have to decide whether to deploy them on the battlefield, sacrifice them for a spell effect, or set them free to gain more energy. I'm obsessed with card games (currently Tower Tactics: Liberation, and Marvel Snap when watching TV, previously Monster Train and Slay the Spire, and of course physical games too), I just love to have that card in hand which changes the rules in some way and when I put it out, everything changes. That's the idea here, combined with that tactile fun of "these aren't cards, they're actually little monsters" (or little plastic toys, I'm not sure which). After all, in a PC game, there's no reason the card text has to be on the card, you can just pop it onscreen when you click the monster!
- Another Witch Game: I'm always wanting to make a witch game! This one is a side-scroller with an open world and very little combat. At its core is a factory-style game. I was inspired by the thought that all the factory type games (Shapes, Factorio, Satisfactory, etc) have the same sort of high-tech theme, logically, but what if you went with a magical theme? Instead of conveyor belts, you have mesmerized bats flying in loops. So anyway, you go out in the world to get ingredients and things, bring them back, and make potions for money. I was also inspired by wanting for many years to make an economic game, basically a lemonade stand type of thing. And lastly, I was inspired by Kena: Bridge of Spirits (outside of the rather hardcore soulsy combat) to make a game that's just friendly and cozy, not about murdering everyone you disagree with.
- A Necromancer Game For Which I Had An Awesome Title But It's Apparently Being Used By Pornography: Story of my life. This is fueled by my personal desire to avoid making another giant system, but rather a straightforward adventure that people can play through and have fun without devoting their life to it. It's a Metroidvania based on traditional necromancer abilities (so of course you can raise an army of skeletons, duh, but also shoot spirits and bone spears - remember that witch prototype I made where you'd throw your broom to use as a platform? That!). I've long had the idea of making an action-RPG type game, that delves specifically into one single traditional character class, giving you vast abilities to diversify within that class instead of having 4 or 5 different classes to choose from, and it could have a more focused narrative because the kind of story a necromancer gets involved in is likely to be very different from what a druid is up to, you know? But this isn't that game, it won't have any real diversity of builds, because it's a metroidvania! You just get your powers and use them to get places and solve puzzles. You know you're gonna make skeletons stand on pressure pads a lot.
- Of course I intend to keep the Horror podcast rolling! I don't know for how long, but it's going pretty strong and what's weird is it now seems like there are some people who listen to it (upwards of 3, which was our ceiling for many years). I really love to see discussion of that on the discord, so please do so!
So that's the upcoming plans. I wish I could share some timelines, but if I did, they'd all be lies. As with 2022, my time is chewed up pretty thoroughly with the
Rock Rose Foundation, and I also seem to have lost about 80% of the speed I used to have at making games. I don't know how I did it back then. Stay young! I'm gonna keep trying to make games because I love it, but I do get slower and slower at it.
