My game and life in general.

Technology is improving all around me and I finally feel as though it has reached a point where I can actually take advantage of it. The Unreal 4 engine has improved enough now where it appears to be possible for me to design games with it almost completely on my own.

You might be thinking that this was always technically possible before but I am not a programmer or a skilled artist. The engine has a really amazing visual scripting language which has given me a lot more power than I have ever had before. The current trend towards Voxel art lowers the bar quite a bit for the level skill I need to be an effective artist.

This means that I now have the ability to accomplish what I have not been able to do before. I can program game logic. I can make things happen how I want them to and I have the ability to make the art all at the same time. I have about 17 years of game industry experience as a designer specializing in single and multiplayer first person shooters.

Crypto currency has also improved a lot in the last year as well. Its just now starting to reach a point where I can potentially make money from posting here on Steemit. There is also the vague possibility that I can invest in some kind of margin trading system on places like Bittrex where I earn money by simply investing it. I have not really toyed around with this enough to say how it works but I see people talking about it fairly often.

So not only do I potentially have the chance to support myself with crypto currency its possible that I can make ends meet as a solo indie games developer. Odds are that I will fail regardless. But, a lot of things have lined up now that have not before. My main problem right now is that I spend so much time working on my game I rarely have anything to talk about other than the game so my blogging suffers a lot.

So last night I think I got the demo for my game pretty much ready to show off. But, nearly at the same time I came to this conclusion something occurred to me that I can probably get working as soon as tonight. I am going to hold back the release of my demo one more day.

If I implement a new game + style system to my game tonight it will potentially close the game play loop enough where I can fully consider Project Stray to be a full but very low on content game. My goal is to get project Stray to a point where the core systems are all in place and the game design aspects of the project are fairly solid. Something like the ability to start the game over in a harder difficulty ad infinitum potentially adds a huge amount of game play to the experience.

I have already designed the core systems of the game so that it supports the ability to level up to fairly insanely high values without having to worry about balancing issues. Its already setup that way!

The only thing left to do will be to continue to add content to the game at this point. I am very close to a point where I have all of the core elements I will need to accomplish this goal. This would mean that an automap for navigation and some relatively simple changes to the way medkits, armor kits and ammo kits function and it will be all level design and boss fights from here on out.

Time is ticking but I think its worth taking a chance right now. I have a feeling that if I can blog and dev for a bit longer I might be able to make ends meet on some level. That would be insane I think. I might be the worlds first Steemit based indie game developer.

I am going to live stream today At (4:00 PM EST)
https://gaming.youtube.com/c/CastleDoes/live

You can support this project by simply following me and upvoting me on Steemit!
My Blog page is here:
https://steemit.com/@thecastle

All project Stray related posts are located here:
https://steemit.com/created/projectstray