First Half of 2022

Yep, it's been a minute, I didn't realise that half of the year had disappeared. But I guess working full time, having multiple side-projects, keeping a healthy social life and watching the world fall apart does keep one occupied.

So what has my 2022 been like? Productive for the most part! The game I am a full time tester on, F1 Manager 2022, was officially announced and is due to launch at the end of August this year. Being a tester is very different to being a producer. That statement will probably shock zero people but when I say different I mean entirely different. The approach to work, the mindset, the quantifiability of it, it's all very different. But it's been fun! When you test/play a game every day you get to see constant, tangible progress and it is incredible to see the pace at which a game can come together.

On the design side, things have been both slow and fast. Quack Island has had to take a back seat as we assess the scope, and other team members are travelling/have other work commitments that are more critical. But the good news is that this left me some time to work on Mark II. Whilst doing the 2D prototyping for Quack Island, a part of me was violently shouting "Errrrr why are you not just doing this for Mark II????", and the voice had a good point.

So I started doing regular work on Mark II and hey presto, the prototype is now almost at the same level as the last prototype I made for it. And although that feeling is slightly disheartening, it did also help me speed up a couple of things. It's always strange when you struggle to implement a feature, and then realise a past version of you already implemented it, and you then steal this forgotten knowledge and put it into your new prototype.

I'm a bit more upbeat with this attempt at making the game because I've really stripped down some of the ideas to their bare bones. You can thank Halo Infinite for that. I limited the planned abilities to four, and have been working diligently to ensure that they stay as basic as possible.

I decided to start documenting this work in a dev log that you can watch here:

So the march continues. Hopefully I can keep progress on the game consistent and release to zero fanfare, and finally move onto a different idea. Wouldn't that be something truly wonderful.