“What have you been up to – it’s been 2 years!!!”

Well, I’ve been working – a lot.  I’m a high school band director, which means I basically live at my school.  I don’t get a lot of time to devote to working on projects.  I come home, spend some time with my wife, eat, and go to my studio to work.

I’ve been sharpening my skills with Unity and C#, learning to draw, learning 3D modeling…basically, developing my toolset so that I’m equipped to take on any task that comes with being an indie game developer.

Sellsword VR’s demise hit me hard.  I relied on 3rd party code and it cost me dearly.  I was determined not to make the same mistake again, so I came up with a unique set of coding “exercises” to help me end my dependence on Asset Store code AND sharpen my C# skills: I would create my own systems that do the same tasks as the most popular 3rd party assets: dialogue, database management, time control, AI, inventory…you name it, I’ve written it.  My experience in VR led me to write heavily optimized, specialized code that ran fast and was lightweight.

As I created each system, I quickly realized I had inadvertently coded all of the systems needed for what we’d always said would be our next game (after SVR).  I took those systems, wrapped them together into one system I named “Core.”  With Core fully functional, we decided that it was time to officially leave SVR for the time being and focus our efforts on the game we HAD, not the one we needed to rebuild from scratch.

For the last 6 months, I’ve been working on our second title.  A good friend has signed on as Art Director, and we’re hard at work building a new world.  This one’s not VR – so more of you will be able to enjoy this title.

“So you gave up on VR?”

Nope – I love it and admit to a slight addiction to Beat Saber.  My nephews play it all the time.  I still enjoy taking my Vive to events and demoing great VR titles for others.  To me, VR is the future of gaming; we just have to wait on hardware to become lighter and more affordable before we’ll see mass adoption.

“You’re going to go back and finish SVR, right?”

Definitely.  I think we had something unique and special with SVR.  Like most “first” projects, we simply bit off more than we could chew from a code standpoint.  I think it would be a lot of fun to go back and rewrite the game’s systems knowing what I know now.  The time will come.