Sh*t just got real!

Well it looks like this game is actually going to happen now. I’m still new to game development but with the help of the ever-so-lovely point and click and indie game dev communities I’m going to have a stab at making a proper game.

Proper game? What are you on about?

Oh man, where are my manners? Sorry, let’s backtrack a bit.

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Hi, my name is Tom Hardwidge, by day I run a digital design and marketing agency Considered Creative with my wife Emma. I am the Creative Director, but what that means on a day-to-day basis is that I do all of the design work, and recently I’ve been doing a fair bit of dev too.

I love the old Lucas-Arts style point and click adventure games, and have ever since first playing The Secret of Monkey Island on a friend’s Amiga 500 circa 1991.

In 2019, one of our clients asked for a game to help promote a campaign they were running, so I wrote, designed and built a browser-based, retro-styled point and click adventure game for them.

I programmed the game engine from scratch myself in HTML, JS and CSS, and it works pretty well even if it’s not as slick as professional game engines.

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In 2020, I had a couple of quiet weeks when COVID hit the UK and decided to build a new game using the same engine.

Both games currently take new players between 2-5 hours to complete on average. But this is with no “filler” like cut-scenes, animations and waiting for the character to walk across the screen to pick up/use objects.

They have both been well received among fans of point and click adventure games (although it’s a really nice, collaborative community, so I hope they weren’t just being nice about the games to avoid upsetting me).

Anyway, I’ve had another game idea in the back of my mind and I feel that I finally have the confidence to move forward with it and build it in a “proper” game engine which will mean that it can be run on a variety of different devices and platforms, and distributed more widely.

That idea was “Lucy Dreaming”.

I’ll go into more detail about the game concept in later posts, this is just an intro so you know what the hell is going on.

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So, the next steps as I see them are these.

• Get the game concept, characters structure and narrative nailed down.
• Get some initial characters drawn up.
• Get a playable demo built for the first section of the game.
• Get Eddie Van Halen.
• Create a triumphant video.
• Get on Kickstarter.
• Raise a duck-load of cash.
• Fuck it all off and move to the Bahamas.
• Finish creating the game.
• Share it with the world!

I know, I know, there’s a whoooooole bunch of important stuff missing from this like testing, and voice-overs, and licensing, and…snacks, but I’m learning as I go, and I fully intend to enjoy this process as much as possible!

If you want to ride this train with me, follow the game on Facebook and Twitter!

I love you all.
Tom x