I attended an Indie games conference last week and one of the things that really resonated with me was the value of working with others. Whilst I’ve always tried to avoid this, partly because I enjoy being in control, and partly because I enjoy the variety in the various disciplines, most of the people I spoke to had only positive things to say about working in a team.
This past week I’ve spent time thinking about this and looking at what I’ve achieved with Bytesize Adventures, as a single person operation. When I look at my ambitions for this year and beyond, its clear to me that I’ve hit a ceiling in what I can personally achieve alone. Game development is still very much my hobby (although I’d like it to be more) and splitting my spare time between development, graphics, sound, marketing, etc means that game production is very slow.
One Eyed Cafe
I’m fortunate that I know an excellent illustrator/designer, who I’ve worked with before, who was more than willing to share in the success and failures of a new venture.
We put our collective brains together and forged an independent game studio the likes of which has never been seen before… One Eyed Cafe.
One Eyed Cafe is our joint spare-time venture. A 50/50 partnership with a shared workload where we can pool together our talents. We’ll initially be focussing on iPhone and iPad but this may well expand in the future.
We’re currently in the process of setting a few things up (branding, website and the likes) and then we’ll be moving onto brainstorming ideas for our first game.
All of our new games will be launched under the One Eyed Cafe label. If you’d like to keep up with our progress, we’ll be blogging at the One Eyed Cafe blog. It would also be great if you’d follow us on twitter @OneEyedCafe.
What does this mean for Bytesize Adventures?
I’ll continue to blog at Bytesize Adventures but mostly focussed around a few projects. I’ll still be supporting and updating Astro Noughts under my own name and I’ll still be working on my Coffee App. So my blog will consist of posts about those along with BrainWave and some of the processes we use at One Eyed Cafe.
So its not the end of this site, its just taking a different path (focussing on my individual projects and experiences). All of the really cool new games will be happening at One Eyed Cafe so be sure to keep up with that blog too.
In other news
The first free Astro Noughts update is complete and i’ll be submitting it to Apple shortly. I took the decision to cut some things from it and save them for future releases. This ultimately means that there will be more updates, more often (which is a good thing I think).
With the update complete I can now move on to my new Coffee App. I’ve spent some time this week reading up on various aspects of App design and development. I’ll hopefully be able to share some posts related to this project beginning next week. It promises to be very interesting.