Slashware 2015 Rewind

2015 is almost over, another year of awesome indie gamedev work. Here is the story… stay tuned for the 2016 plans, coming soon!

January

The year begun with heavy Ananias development, while a funding campaign was running (raised a grand total of 63 USD) the web backend for the online functionalities was being implemented and the game appearance changed greatly with a new perspective. I also briefly worked on the slashbot, an interactive storytelling app which I didn’t work in further.

February

The online features for Ananias were finished, along with enhanced tilesets for some locations by Mark Honnor. With this, the Fellowship Edition was released, marking the first time where a paid version of Ananias could be acquired; this initial Fellowship Edition allowed access to the online features.

I also started working on LUNE, but didn’t manage to work much more on it during the rest of the year.

March

I worked mostly on my entry for the 7DRL challenge, Stygian abyss, along with Exodus Destiny Dragon (a.k.a. jucarave). I was very happy with the results, although we didn’t get much attention. No further work was done on it.

The game is a 3D first person dungeon crawler with huge randomly generated levels.

April

For Ananias, the Steam greenlight campaign started. The Desktop packages for Windows, Mac and Linux were also implemented and released on itch.io, IndieGameStand and GameJolt.

I also had my first contact with hardwarish things during Ubidot’s IoT day, where we build a home automation system.

May

We had a very successful sale on IndieGameStand, as well as the news of being greenlit in Steam at the same time. The game was also approved for distribution on Desura but that was short lived since the service went down (sort of). All in all, lots of people got to know the game on May.

A big change was made to the Fellowship Edition adding 2 new classes (Slayer and Barbarian), with the online features being included into the standard edition, while the desktop edition continued evolving.

June

Ananias was rejected from GoG.com, but the road to making it more useable started with lots of work put on user experience. We also started the production of the trailer. I also did a talk a the local Comic-con discussing the game development.

July

While the efforts to continue polishing Ananias gameplay and user experience continued, and a test iOS version was created, I also worked on two smaller projects on July.

I challenged myself to create a Roguelike in a tweet, this is the game I’ve made with the smallest source code, beating the previous 1KB roguelike, LUCK.

I also updated misilleta.com to create flower arrangements from pictures.

August

I launched a more ambitious campaign for Ananias (2000 USD target with stretch goals). Also continued working on gameplay enhancements for it including new monster abilities, and toyed around a lot with technical stuff for the Android version, going back and forth between plain Cordova and CocoonJS

September

This month was pretty busy; I created the first version of the KnightsWatch, inspired by a cool real-life luxury watch. This was the first time I released a native Android app.

I also revived the Savage Empire SNES translation project, advancing greatly on the script extraction phase (that phase is almost finished).

Another thing I did was creating a short tutorial for a multiplayer real time strategy game using socket.io. That’s the foundation of the Kingdom of Elias project.

Finally, major changes to Ananias were introduced, including having monsters chase you from other rooms.

October

A whole new User Interface made specially for mobile was developed for Ananias. It was quite a bit of work.

November

After having the idea rolling in my head for long enough, I developed and published the PixelWorld watchface for Android Wear.

December

A new magic system was added to Ananias, adding lots of new strategy and tactic elements.