Well I released my summer project yesterday. Here’s a link to play it!

It hasn’t gotten very good reviews on Kongregate, and Newgrounds seemed to give it less than a halfhearted interest. I’m surprised, definitely, but probably not as much as I would have been a month or two ago. The game had little to no interest from sponsors, so I was certainly prepared for it to flop. I’m still going to be stubborn and call it a great game, though, in terms of design. I really did work harder on the design than I ever have before and I’m definitely proud of it.

No, I think the real problem is I committed a series of unforgivable sins and overlooked them in my design frenzy. The first was that the game has a slow start. I made an in-depth tutorial for it hoping to cater more to a casual audience and I think I just insulted the fans of the original Ether games who probably have a more hardcore streak. The problem was that the original Ether games hardly went anywhere, and I didn’t want to repeat that with this game. That leads to the second sin: I changed the game-play completely. If this wasn’t labeled as an “Ether” game I doubt it would have garnered as much bad press. The problem, here, is that I’ve pretty much given up on space shooters as a bad job. I was hoping this could have revived the series so I could keep it going but, more likely, it just added the last nail in its coffin.

I won’t say that I’ll never make another Ether game, but I honestly doubt it. William and Sly did exponentially better than any of my games in the past have done, and I think the simple reason why is that it played to all my strengths. Also, it was simple and fun to just play around with. There were no need for instructions or tutorials, you could just play it…

In any case, I think I’m going to stop making larger games for a while and focus on simple little games. It’s not very smart to spend months working on something that could flop as hard as my latest game seems to have. It’s too unpredictable.