Hello! I decided to write this post as a way to introduce my new venture to my website that has somehow managed to become way more active than I expected! With 500 visitors in the last 30 days, without me adding anything new, bit wild even if half of that are bots/crawlers.

So, I’ve decided to leave the regular work force and first of all take a break, a real break, and second of all to work on my game Mushboom, with ocasional interesting freelancing gigs here and there. My reasons are plenty but in a few words: the games industry is falling apart, I’m running on fumes, I can’t be a part of a capitalism fuelled machine while remaining sane, I crave sweet freedom of not feeling the pressure of being productive 40 hours a week. This is not a specific company problem, this is an industry problem that would need a whole thesis (plenty of those already out there!) to explain properly. Also I personally haven’t been interested in working at AAA companies for a very long time, it’s just where the money is and what needed to happen for me to get my Canadian permanent residence. I got it this year, after investing so much money, time, and effort, I’m finally able to live here without depending on an employer sponsoring me. I’m finally free.

For my current (for the next 10 days) job I had to create a company to get paid since it was overseas and they didn’t have a Canadian entity this seemed to be the best way for both parties. So I created Grounded Raven Studio and have been functioning through it for a few months now. The business is set up, I got an accountant (that I still need to send some stuff… too much work to do!), I got a bank account (I totally recommend VanCity folks! I’m still stupefied that such an amazing institution exists!), I got a domain, and I hooked it up to a bluesky account for now with a website set up in the works: groundedraven.com

I started working on Mushboom early July, so this video above is about 4 months of “casual” work. That’s from a week ago, since then I’ve started implementing CPU players, they work now but too useless. It’s basically classic bomberman with a mushroom theme that will be focused on accessibility. Now this word can mean a lot of things and it takes a lot of work to make it happen so bear with me:

• First of all it’ll be a web and android game, later released to Steam
• Fully free to play with both free and paid unlockable cosmetics
• Local and online multiplayer, allowing for multiple players in one same client even when playing online and mobile. I’ve added already shared touch screen buttons so two people can play on one phone.
• What about the other type of accessibility? Yes, that one too! First I need to focus on making this game playable and fun, but soon I’ll add some color blindness settings (gotta get a proper regular color palette first though), eventually, later on, I’ll add another mode to this game that I’m hoping would allow visually impaired people to play. Third person bomberman with intentional sound queues that help the player orient themselves as if they were in a maze – this is a theoretical idea at this point, will need a lot of testing and I cannot promise it’ll work for everyone but I hope that it allows at least some extra people the ability to play it to a competitive extent.
• Quick and easy to drop and play, quick and customizable matches. Lobbies are created through sharing a lobby code but players will have a friend’s list as well. An account is needed to save any data of course but anyone can play as a guest without registering.

I decided to go with this project because I wanted to play classic bomberman with a friend online but couldn’t find any game that didn’t have extra mechanics that annoyed me, or supported online play, or had a decent price (official Bomberman games are above $60 CAD, it’s insane and ridiculous). It also seems to be the first project I feel excited and hopeful to finish in a very long time.

I’ve uploaded some older videos of the states the game has been through in these last 4 months to that Vimeo account, and although one can clearly see progress, I have to say that most of the progress I’ve done has been on the systems behind this. Learning how to implement multiplayer has been the hardest part even though Godot makes it relatively super easy, but I’m glad to say I’ve got that down! I’ve been focusing on building it optimized and flexible from the very foundation so it’s easy to build on it over time plus ensuring it’ll run smoothly on web and older mobile phones.

Here’s the second video I ever took, first one with any kind of art:

(For some reason the embedding doesn’t seem to work even though it works in the editor… here’s the video in case you’re curious)

To be honest, seeing the progress I’ve made on this game while being incredibly burnt out and working a full time game dev job makes me really excited to see what I can achieve once I have rested and make this be my job™ !