Hex Gambit: Respawned is in the process of being certified by PlayStation, X Box, and Nintendo right now. I think I’m supposed to be staying all mysterious about it until the big announcement. Did I make a game?! Or was it all a dream?!

The new Food Truck project gives me something controllable to focus on while we wait. I recently started plugging some shippable art and animations in, so I can envision how cool the finished product will be. It’s great motivation.

I’m focused right now on making cooking more satisfying than it was in Space Food Truck. No more randomized recipes that don’t really make sense. I’ve got lots of real recipes, and they’re all illustrated so you can see what the meal you just cooked actually looks like.

Normally I’d announce a title and start posting art and videos for the Food Truck game. But HGR hasn’t launched yet, so it’s not time for that. Things are kind of wishy washy at the moment. But at the end of this weird stretch, I’ll have a game out this year and be positioned to follow it up with something equally cool next year.

I’ve seen lists of marketing activities and even a proposed release date for Hex Gambit: Respawned! But I’m not allowed to talk about any of it yet, so we’ll have to be patient a bit longer. Stay tuned.

A little family vacation time made my February even shorter than usual, but I’ve just about got all of the Food Truck prototype’s card animation sorted out. Adding animation broke basically everything, but it’s almost stable enough to play again, and it’s much prettier.

I also did a bunch of playtesting for the release candidate for Hex Gambit: Respawned! Found a pretty amazing bug, too. Crowned, golden minions are like the boss fights in HGR’s campaign, and Lolli’s ult is to steal enemy minions. He could totally trade a Runner for a boss character. We fixed it.

I get genuinely nervous when I know it’s been worked on for months by the publishing team and I crack it open for the first time in a while. But HGR is working great! And it has online multiplayer now! And I’m talking to marketing people about launching later this year.

This iteration of Hex Gambit started production in 2020. The original started in 2017. It’s about freakin’ time guys. This is the year.

First on the Hex Gambit: Respawned front – no news from the publisher this month. Submission to the stores is the next big milestone, and that is supposed to happen very soon. So I will continue pretending like that game is old news and totally finished, so I can focus on this new project and not go crazy.

When I do hear something, I’ll post here and send an update to the Kickstarter backers. A moment of silence for those backers who have died of old age and will not see the mountaintop.

… … …

Now to the alternate reality of Food Truck Returns (working title)! I spent this month getting all of the cart art in, and animating transitions for cards drawing/discarding/charging. Card animation is tedious work, so I took a break from that last week to design and model the truck in glorious 3D.

Some stumbling this month as I transitioned the project to Unreal Engine 5 and explored what a Lumen and a Nanite is. The new light and reflection system is FANTASTIC, and “forget your triangle count” is pretty cool, but it seems like these are not toys for Switch or Steam Deck (and I want porting to not be a headache if it happens). So unfortunately I think I’ll be doing things the old way for now. Excited for the day I can stop baking lighting.

Before I write these New Years Posts, I like to peek back at the previous year to see I where my head was at. Man, oh man.

This time last year, I thought Hex Gambit: Respawned was coming Summer 2022, and I thought THAT was going to be an awful long wait. I was half right, because it HGR is now coming in 2023 and it has been. A. Long. Wait.

I don’t mean that porting HGR and adding the multiplayer is taking too long. That’s a complicated process, and it’s taking as long as you’d reasonably expect. But launching games and knowing that people are playing them is important for a game developer’s self esteem, and I haven’t had that since Space Food Truck launched in 2016. That’s six years of drought.

That aside, I’d say I had a productive year.

• I designed and implemented a bunch of multiplayer stat tracking and UI stuff for HGR.
• I finished a Pirate Tactics prototype with tons of complicated RPG elements.
• I have a about a six month head start on a solid Food Truck follow-up game.

So it looks like next year will be “the year I become a real game developer again” – one with a big game made recently for sale on a store. No matter how that launch goes, it’s gonna feel really good to have something out and finished.

I think that going forward, it would be nice to launch something every 2-3 years, so you and I don’t have to endure another long dry spell like this.

Thanks for checking in, and best of luck chasing your dreams in 2023!

Call it the holiday funk, but time got away from me this month! Apologies for the late post, and for the late post’s very lazy title.

First, a quick Hex Gambit: Respawned update. I’ve gotten word from my publisher that the project will be pushed into early 2023, which is not totally unexpected. Progress is steadily marching toward submission, so it looks like OML will finally launch a new game Q1 of next year. It’s probably our biggest game with lots to do though, so worth the wait!

And a Food Truck Redux update: The game now has 4 scenarios that steadily introduce the new crew, with the final scenario being this game’s version of Space Food Truck. It’s super fun, with better replay value thanks to a new scoring system. It’s also easy for me to add more scenarios later, which I plan to.

I’m switching gears a bit this month from implementing mechanics and features to getting things looking pretty, so I have something decent to show.

After months of procrastinating by adding more features and content, at last I have actually played the Food Truck prototype… and it is really good!

The character abilities are no longer specific cards, so playing a Job card now opens a menu with lots of things that you can do. Each session is a work day, and you craft and deliver as many recipes as possible for a score. Deliver a meal in one town, and a craving for it will pop up again somewhere else on the map. There’s a lot more cooking in this one.

It’s interesting how this is being built vs. Hex Gambit: Respawned (release date still TBA, but it’s closing in!).

HGR was a definite, green lit project. I had all of the character artwork from the start, and I wasn’t positive how much runway I had or what I was even capable of. So I’d work with a very limited scope and polish it up to shippable. First it was a one map, local multiplayer game. Then something good would happen like the MegaGrant or the publisher, so I’d scope up a little and finish it again. I added more maps, then AI, then campaign, then menus for online. But it was a shippable-looking game very early on.

This Food Truck prototype on the other hand, I want to be able to play as much as possible before committing, and I have no pre-existing artwork. I’ve been leaning HEAVY on the programming side so far, and there’s a few more features I still want to fill in before I start making things look good. I have some concept art, but the game itself is mostly grey boxes and spheres and text at the moment.

So Dev Phase 1 feels like the “get all the ideas in and working” phase. That’s almost finished, and Phase 2 will be “make it pretty.” Hopefully I’m not kicking myself later for implementing so much content before dressing anything up. Phase 3 will be pitch it to publishers and get a roadmap to launch.

So is Food Truck 2 my next project? I think so, it’s definitely fun and worth finishing. My only hesitation is if Hex Gambit finds a large enough audience, I might have to recalculate.

I think this was something like month three or four of the Food Truck prototype? I feel pretty committed to finishing this one, but I’m having a hard time officially calling it my next project before seeing what Hex Gambit does.

Anywho! A tutorial scenario with just the Captain and Chef characters is playable. Events, Arrivals, new Revisit cards, even hints are all in the game and working. The reimagined Scientist and Engineer classes are working as of today, too.

One cool new feature for those of you that played Space Food Truck: the map hints have types now instead of giving you the event name. Good thing, bad thing, mega bad thing, ingredient. Your map will tell you how many of each are out there at any given time. So the arrival memorization that helped you in SFT isn’t needed anymore.

Lots of quality of life improvements like that are being implemented, as well as making it easy for myself to add new cards and scenarios.

I’m a little nervous to playtest this in earnest, since I’ve put so much time into it. I’ve been putting that off to add more features, which is a silly thing I do.

Hex Gambit: Respawned is complete on my end, being translated and certified for console/PC/Mac release. The release date will be announced here as soon as we have it!

That process can take a while, so it was with zero closure or certainty that I went back to work on my Food Truck prototype this month. It’s extremely weird to finish a two year project and be sitting here with no idea how it went over, starting another one.

This new Food Truck game is looking like a strong candidate for the next project, though!

The base gameplay is similar to SFT, but built for one player this time around, meaning just one deck to manage. I’m also excited about the idea of “scenarios”, like multiple levels to play with different menu types and arrival/shop decks. The replacement I have in mind for the old SFT crisis system is also very cool, excited to show that off later.

It’s been a somewhat momentous month in the lengthy saga of Hex Gambit: Respawned.

If you don’t recall, last April I turned in the original “final version” of HGR to my publisher. They spent the last year or so reshaping that into an online game, and in the process a whole lot of stuff broke (because the game wasn’t built with online in mind).

Since May I’ve been cataloging and fixing everything that wasn’t working like it used to, adding some menus, and now finally the game is back in that shipping candidate state, but with online multiplayer!

Pencils are now up, and we’re starting the certification processes for all the consoles. I imagine it will be months before we have a release date, and I’d guess the game will launch sometime in the first half of next year.

That puts me back into “kinda sorta finished, but the game isn’t out” limbo. I’ll be getting reacquainted with the food truck prototype next.