Major Shift in Platform

Greetings, readers! It has been quite a long time since my last post. For personal reasons among other business, I have taken a break from heavy development of Ambition Online, but alas, as usual, I have returned. And since my absence, not much has changed in the industry as far as MMOs are concerned, but things in Ambition have taken a major shift. This shift comes from watching my own behavior with games, and my assumptions that there are others out there that follow my same patterns. Mostly, it's that I don't really enjoy sitting at my computer and playing games anymore. Maybe it's that I have an uncomfortable chair and only a makeshift office with no real space for my computer to go, but I really just want to sit back and relax on my couch when I play these days.

I am a huge fan of the old console games. In fact, during my break from Ambition, I starting diving into NES game development and all that entailed. I actually got pretty close to making something real, but in the end, I decided that all the effort would be lost in the end to a small group of fanatic developers and nobody else would really care, and why should they? Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about today! What I want to say is that I really like the old console experience, and I can still remember the good times I had playing on the NES and SNES with my brothers. What I'd like to do is be able to recreate that kind of feeling in people when playing my game.

I started out developing a console game, similar to my prototype game A Feeble Saga, and was really starting to enjoy the way it was turning out. I got the game running on my OUYA and felt pretty good about it. However, as I always do when making other games, I realized that I do not have the time to offer what is needed to produce a quality experience with a game like that. Things like compelling story, or lots of content, were things I don't have the manpower or even desire to accomplish. So I thought to myself, what can I do to make this a compelling experience for the users, without me having to create something I wouldn't have to go too far out of my abilities as a developer to create. My solution simply came down to making an open, player-driven world, like Ambition Online.

Now, I can still make the game I wanted, be able to play it the way I want, and also make something that makes sense for my abilities as a programmer. And with some goals in mind, I have some ideas on where to start back up in Ambition development and get something playable released in the coming months. I plan to continue updating this blog on my progress, though surely I will forget, or simply be too tired to write anything.