Another year of full time, mostly unpaid game development accomplished!

I was really hoping that Hex Gambit: Respawned would make 2023 One Man Left’s comeback year, but we just missed the cutoff. Now eyeing a 2024 launch, HGR will be my first console game and the first time I’ve partnered with a publisher. Exciting stuff on the horizon!

I don’t really know what to expect for launch, but it will feel great to have a new game I can point to when people ask “what have you made?” Our older projects are showing their age, and there’s nothing I can do to fix them.

I spent my 2023 working on an unannounced, goofy Food Truckin’ game that’s now feature complete! It’s a less RNG, single player evolution of Space Food Truck with lots of cool new ideas, and I’m in the process of polishing it up to show off next year.

So what’s the plan for OML in 2024? Launch a game and tee up another one! It’s been four years since Alex left, and I’ve been working hard to put awesome projects in the pipeline. These games are the best work of my career, and next year you’ll finally get to play what I’ve been up to!

Happy New Year everyone, and best of luck with all of your mad adventures in 2024!

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!

In 2019 I wrote:

“I pretty much know how to make make my own games now. All that’s left is to finish one, then I can call myself an indie game designer again.”

If the meaning of the word “finished” is “to complete a shippable game”, then I’m an indie game designer again! Unfortunately… I think the meaning of the word “finished” is to get that game onto a store for you guys to play. So, still not really a game designer… and that’s honestly starting to get to me a little bit.

Patience!

This year I completed the Hex Gambit: Respawned offline experience, including a 5 hour campaign mode, local multiplayer, customizable house rules, with full controller support! I also got an Epic Megagrant to keep my head above water! A lot of that is stuff we’ve never accomplished in the history of One Man Left. I did all of that on my own, I pushed those changes on git, and… crickets.

Patience.

HGR is being ported to every major console by my publisher. Online multiplayer is in the works. Super exciting stuff is coming Summer-ish 2022.

That’s a very long time for me to sit and wonder what launch day will look like. So I’ve been prototyping for half of this year. Should I make prototypes until HGR launches, or go ahead and commit to something so I can launch a follow-up more quickly? Should I leverage our popular legacy franchises, or make my own mark with something you guys don’t know you want yet? Should I commit to strategy as a genre, or is it time try something new?

These are the questions I’m grappling with as we head into 2022. The important thing is: I’m still here somehow.

We haven’t had a decent game launch since Space Food Truck in 2016 (currently 50% off!), so THANK YOU to anybody that’s still following this feed, or our Twitter account, or checking in with our discord. It’s taking time to turn this thing around, but I’ll have something awesome for you guys to play soon.

My resolution: I’d like 2022 to be the year I can finally call myself an indie game developer again. I want to be selling a finished game for the next New Years post.

Last New Year I decided it was time to try to get something on to a store, so I could feel like a real game designer again. Now at the start of 2021, I do technically have something on a store!

After Alex left, I took a bit of gamble sticking with game development instead of reverting back to freelance art. Anything I did would’ve been a gamble, really. So I went with the thing I liked the most, and so far things are holding together slightly better than expected. I’m optimistic about where Hex Gambit: Respawned is headed, and I regret nothing.

I’m really proud of how HGR is coming along. You can poke through a whole playlist of its development progress on Youtube. It began the year as a small, local multiplayer-only project. I’ve added new tile types, a new minion class, pretty solid AI, and soon it’ll have a whole flippin’ campaign mode. Content-wise, it’s going to be the biggest thing OML has ever put out.

Being alone is tough, but I get to experiment and indulge my weird ideas and nitpicks. It’s all super daunting if I let myself think too hard, but I’m enjoying it.

It’s looking like I’m on track to get my first solo game out the door in 2021. With a little luck, I’ll get to be a game developer a while longer. Thanks for keeping up with me this year! I wish you luck with whatever adventure you tackle in 2021!

2019 is nearly through, and there’s been one man left™ around these parts for about a year now. So how’s that going?

Thanks to YouTube (especially Mathew Wadstein) I learned a skill this year that I’ve been wanting since I was a kid: I pretty much know how to make make my own games now. All that’s left is to finish one, then I can call myself an indie game designer again. It was a lot faster and cheaper than college.

I’ll add some art from my Action RPG training project below. The gameplay was pretty fun and I learned a lot, but the amount of time I would need to do all of the boss fights and levels you need for a game like this is a bit much for my first solo project.

So I landed on resurrecting Hex Gambit as a local multiplayer game. I have a bunch of finished art, I own all the music and SFX, and the game design is already solid. That’s not a bad head start. Two months in, I can play with 2-4 players, free-for-all, using a mouse or a controller.

Now it’s time to put my money where my mouth is and get something onto a store! Happy New Year to you all, and best of luck in whatever crazy idea you’re pursuing in 2020.

From the Desk of Alex Okafor

Hi OML fans!

Just wanted to start off this post with a huge thanks to our entire community of fans, players, and supporters! We wouldn’t have made it this far without you guys. It’s been a minute since our last update, and I wish this was more of an uplifting “bringing in the new year” post. Unfortunately, the last few years haven’t been the kindest to our studio, and to the indie game development scene at large. The combination of difficult market realities, and having burned the midnight oil for years on end is finally catching up with me (oh, to be young).

Going forward, OML is no longer a full-time endeavor for me. I’m currently happily in a new full-time position at another company.  When I think back on the years of development, the thing that sticks with me is the encouragement and excitement from our fans on what we were working on. You guys made it worth all the effort. I’m still in awe at the fan art, tools, community led tournaments, and support our fan base had shown over the years.

• So what does this mean for our online games? Our current game servers will continue to operate. If the situation changes with any of them, we’ll notify players on appropriate channels (this blog included).
• What does this mean for the Hex Gambit Switch port? It’s still in development, but at a much slower pace after hours. As such, I can’t really give an estimate on when it’ll be ready.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough how great these last 9+ years have been, and can’t thank you all you enough for that awesome opportunity.

What About Adam?

First of all, I’m grateful to Alex for taking me on this adventure in the first place, and I wish him the best.

We’d both like to offer a sincere apology to our Switch backers for all of the delays you guys have endured. After a rougher-than-expected Steam launch, we just found ourselves without any options to continue HG development full time. We over-promised, and we’re doing everything we can to make it right. Thank you all for your support and your patience.

While (as an artist) I can’t help Alex finish Hex Gambit any faster, I’m exploring my options for working on another game (don’t worry, there won’t be another Kickstarter) while taking on some contract work. If you’d like to see whatever might come next from me, make sure you subscribe to our mailing list and follow me on Twitter @oneadamleft. I have literally no idea what will happen!

If you’d like to contract me to help out with your project, I do all kinds of art with a specialty in UE4, and you can check out my portfolio right here.

So our goal of delivering a complete Hex Gambit on Steam by the end of 2017 didn’t quite pan out, but a lot changed over the course of the year! A version for the Nintendo Switch™ was added to the docket, along with a single player mode and a pretty meaty league metagame. None of that stuff was even conceived of this time last year.

We are proud to look back on a successful Kickstarter campaign (no small feat) with all our rewards dished out on time so far. Our backers-only alpha feedback has been super helpful for cataloging bugs and adjusting the game balance. We’re spinning a lot of plates over here, fixing old stuff while implementing new stuff, but keep that feedback coming, playtesters! We’re listening, and it’s all being prioritized in our task list.

So what’s ahead for 2018? Hex Gambit: Early Access! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. 2v2 play, an influx of fresh meat, and the heart of our multiplayer experience: the Apex Cup league comes online. Should be ready to go in Q1 of next year.

As for the final launch, our Kickstarter estimate was April 2018. It’s looking to me like sometime in the summer is more likely, but that’s really up to our Early Access performance. If the game finds an audience and we can fund a few more months of improvements, we’ll definitely take that opportunity. It’s our first console release, after all, so we want to bring our A-game. For next year’s New Years post, I hope to be writing about the awesome Hex Gambit DLC we have in the works!

Best of luck with all your projects, plans, and aspirations this year. Thanks for keeping up with us!

The consensus around the internet seems to be that 2016 was bit of a turd. But every turd has a silver lining, depending on your diet.

We were extremely nervous about the launch of our first PC game, but the results we’ve seen from Space Food Truck have been super encouraging. We owe a huge thank you to everyone who supported us this year by picking up a copy. You’re the reason that our sixth game is coming in 2017! It took a bit longer than we wanted to get SFT’s tablet port out the door, but we made good use of that down time learning Unreal Engine and Blender to make our next game in 3d.

What’s Ahead?

If all goes according to plan, you’ll be playing Hex Gambit, the spiritual successor to Outwitters, by the end of 2017! This new turn-based strategy game takes everything we learned making Outwitters and improves on it. It’s fast-paced and easy to learn, with loads of depth and tons of tactics to try out. Also, it’s really pretty.

A Kickstarter is coming around the middle of the year with some cool pre-order-style goodies, and you can keep appraised of that situation by joining our mailing list. If you want to support the development of Hex Gambit right now, you can do that by buying any game or soundtrack we sell! All the money coming in from our other games goes straight into music, sound effects, and mortgage payments for the next one.

We wish you all the best of luck with your own hopes and dreams for 2017, and thanks for sticking with us for our SIXTH year as full-time game designers. We wouldn’t still be here making new games without your continued support. Happy New Year from One Man Left!

It’s just about time to start writing the wrong year on everything again. 2015 was definitely a busy year (I don’t think we know any other kind): We made an abundance of working game prototypes. Outwitters came to Android. We were included in our first Humble Bundle, we created our first Kickstarter campaign, and we’ve got our first Early Access PC release. That’s a lot of firsts!

PC development and Early Access have been particularly exciting. On PC we’re worrying less about short user sessions and our moms being able to figure the game out, which is liberating. We’re also getting great feedback for Space Food Truck from our EA users (keep it coming) that’s already helped us identify some changes we’d have overlooked.

Space Food Truck Update

Speaking of Space Food Truck, it’s still 10% off a while longer and we’ve just pushed a quick fix to help with the difficulty. The door repair cost has been reduced back to 1, which sounds like a small change but it has ripple effects all over the place. Keeping the doors operational helps resolve damaging crises and keeps people from being locked out of their rooms, pretty painful stuff if it gets out of hand. Alex and I will be discussing difficulty more in-depth first thing in the new year.

What’s ahead for 2016?

Space Food Truck’s official big boy PC release is first on our docket. Then we have an idea for an additional gametype we might explore, or we may go right for a tablet port. Or maybe we’ll jump straight into Game 6. We have a few turn-based, Outwitters-esque prototypes that are showing a lot of promise. Nothing is decided until it’s decided!

Thanks for keeping up with us on the blog, we’re nothing without support from fans like you! We wish you all the best in 2016. May your dreams come true and your resolutions be unbroken. Unless you made an unrealistic resolution, in which case we  support your decision to give up. We’re not here to judge.

It’s been a pretty productive year for One Man Left. The early months saw the Brimstone Pinball DLC come together for Tilt to Live 2, followed shortly by the evolution of Gauntlet’s Revenge from DLC to full game. We almost even squeezed in an Android port of Outwitters before New Years caught up with us. We’ve typically only managed about one game a year, so that’s not a bad collection of completed projects.

We really cannot thank you guys enough for supporting us year to year, if you managed a purchase. We’ve been chugging along full time at this for almost 5 years now, and that is 100% thanks to you.

Looking forward to 2015, I’m really itching to dive into some fresh material. While Alex has been putting together our Android ports, I’ve been brainstorming and sketching game ideas for about 2 months now. Alex will join me in January for what we have dubbed “prototype month”. I don’t think we’ve ever had this many different game ideas to choose from. Come February 1st, we will be ready to make the living crap out of something.

So what can you expect out of One Man Left next year? We’re leaning toward smaller projects, which means a faster turn-around for you guys. With any luck, we’ll have Game 5 ready around summer time. It’d be great to have two games done in 2015, but that’s just a flimsy New Year’s resolution at this point. A lot can happen between now and next December 31st. Naturally, we’ll be blogging it all right here as it develops.

And holy crap I’m getting married next year.