I Just Don't Think It's Fun

In the last devlog I had just stated working on adding Characters to Bronze Age: Tribes. This consisted largely of porting assets from Bronze Age 3. Skills in particular were very intensive to convert. A week or so of incredibly dull work led me to think about the project overall.

Usually I get distracted playing the games I work on instead of developing them. Reflecting upon Bronze Age: Tribes, I don't think that ever happened. Visually I liked looking at the world (especially once the sun, moon, and skybox were added) but mechanically I just didn't really enjoy it. A couple times I mentioned that adding characters would be when the game "gets fun", but I think that was the wrong attitude. If the core mechanic isn't fun then anything else would just be band-aids on top. So I decided to take a month off to experiment.

If you've looked through me older projects on itch you've seen the more action styled projects I've done before, like Colonies of the Lost Frontier or 2D Lancer. Even nowadays I can spend some time playing those and have fun, simple as they are. So I decided to combine aspects of those, with my love of submarines, and some ideas that have been kicking around in my head for over a decade, the result is Xenosea.

One thing I immediately noticed was that I was having fun both developing and playing Xenosea. Even at the earliest stage where there was just a submarine moving around shooting cannons at giant cubes I was enjoying it. For a long time there have been ideas floating around that I would "try after Bronze Age." I think it's time to actually explore those. Hopefully I will come back to Bronze Age in the future, but now it's time for something completely different.