A busy but stressful yesterday with monthly backups, then an enjoyable time putting up a 2M window blind.
In the afternoon, some initial work on Taskforce. I've had 7 sales of the game in the past year, not much, yet this was a surprise 7. At times I think that these type of games of mine are somewhat cursed.
Amiga Taskforce was fun, though very crude, and was distributed to thousands of people via a cover-disk on CU Amiga magazine; the staff there were always kind to me. I made many friends, my first, really, via that cover-disk. It looked poor, but had its charms as a game, though of course, I made no money from it. One such friend, Andrew Cashmore, helped me with Hilt then Hilt II, on Amiga. Hilt II was a critical, but not commercial hit; it didn't sell a single copy back then, but remains a popular Amiga download to this day.
I quit the Amiga and entered a low period of struggle working on my first PC game, Arcangel. This took 18-months of hard work. It was essentially a 3D isometric remake of Hilt II (even some of the levels were re-used). This was a dispiriting time, the lowest period of my life. I had no income or friends during the development of Arcangel, the game itself became a strange passion, my only comrade, my friendly rock to roll in my Sisyphean way. The publishers that were lined up ripped me off, and an incomplete, publisher-exclusive, version of the game was distributed across 'pound-shops' without my knowledge or consent, so those years were lost. After some reflection, and a final decision to self-publish, I made lots of small games, then eventually the much more popular Flatspace series.
After Flatspace II I spent another 18-full-months, a longer period than any game to date, working on PC Taskforce. It was my most complex and feature-driven game of this type, but upon launch, it barely sold. Less than 20 copies in the first 5 years. Flatspace, by comparison sold 20 copies in the first two weeks. It was the failure of Taskforce that made me realise that, after 30+ years of trying, games were a dead end.
Yet, I've always liked Taskforce as a game. This, my biggest game, gradually became old and unable to work on modern computers. I thought it needed at least to be 'out there' as part of my artistic canon. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I spent a couple of months updating the game substantially. Again, the sales were similar to the first time; it seems that my hopes always outpace the results.
Still, I'm now updating the game again, spurned on by the 7 sales of the past 12-months. Perhaps I can learn something about Steam Stats and Achievements coding, and it shouldn't take long to update.
It's been a difficult and hard day of programming, but I have hopes that the update will be ready by the end of the week. My psyche, or body, can't cope with programming now. It drives me insane and hyper-anxious on many levels. After this, my body tells me, I must avoid computer work of this sort.
