The Quest for Next Fest

Well, Chibi Ninja Shino-kun is out, and you know what that means: Time to start on a new game! That’s the nature of a gamedev business, after all. Gotta make games to sell games.

And this time I’m trying to do something different. Up until now, I’ve always managed to miss the deadlines for Steam Next Fest. Somehow, my dev cycles always started and ended at the worst time possible; either I wouldn’t have enough time to create a demo, or my game had already been released shortly before (and Steam Next Fest only accepts demos of unreleased games).

But no more.

The submission deadline for the next Next Fest after next (what) is at the end of June, giving me roughly two months. And I will spend these two months making a demo to submit. No longer shall the Fest of Next elude me.

Two months doesn’t sound like a lot of time. And it isn’t. But I’m still gonna give it my best shot. I’ve recently learned some scheduling techniques thanks to this Udemy course and it already gave me a bit more confidence that I can get it all done in time.

We’ll see whether that’s true or not, but for now I remain optimistic.

I’m already cobbling together a prototype and I’m trying to figure out a visual style. I’ll start posting updates on Twitter and Mastodon soonish, so follow me there to keep up to date. I’ll most likely also be posting Youtube Shorts once I got some gameplay going, so subscribe to my channel to catch those as well.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know what I’m up to. Now it’s back to the coding mines, because games don’t make themselves. And that’s good, because making games is awesome.