If you have been following some of my development on Gunslugs, you’ll might have noticed that I started a long time ago and mentioned a “august/september” release a couple of times..
Well, it’s now end of October, and I’m still working on Gunslugs. The long delay has been caused by various reasons and some of those, hopefully , make for a nice blog post.
The main reason, for the delay, is that I’ve been shopping the game around at a couple of publishers. Gunslugs is one of my biggest games ever (in eight years) and I know it has a LOT of potential. So against all “indie game knowledge” I decided to check with some publishers. The game has been taking so long to develop, there is basically no way it will sell enough to bridge that time financially, so I was hoping to find a publisher to help reach a bigger audience.
Luckily in my, long lasting mobile-game development, career I made some “friends” in the industry. So I checked with the guys behind Chillingo and they were interested in taking a look at the game but figured it wasn’t their type of game for their type of market. Definitely no hard feelings because I kinda expected that to be the result seeing their lineup of awesome hit games and their “pick-up and play” simplicity.
My second try was with the indie-friendly and awesome guys behind Sega Alliance. The game-scouting guys loved Gunslugs in all it’s glory, but sadly the “suits”, as I like to call them, didn’t like it. It boils down to the same reason as with my friends at Chillingo: this game was not for the big audience that these publishers are trying to reach.
This process took a lot of weeks/months of extra time and not knowing what to do with Gunslugs. The great response from the game-scouts at Sega did acknowledge my gut feeling about Gunslugs: the game is really awesome and can go far.. but I can’t help but feel disappointed by the publishers saying they are there for “Indies” when really they are there for “the next big thing” and expecting it to come from an indie developer without understanding that the next big thing takes a risk, and is a different type of game as the “previous big thing”.
Anyway, I decided to stop the talks with publishers, and get my head back into the game and complete Gunslugs. I will be taking my time, cause there are a lot of things I still want to add and change, and it’s very unlikely that I’ll have it available before 2013, especially with all the holiday-season busyness that’s about to happen on all app stores and in personal lives.
I might be making a few other games in between, like I did with Meganoid2 recently (go get it! it’s just as challenging as Meganoid!), to make sure there is money coming in, but Gunslugs will be coming, and it will be awesome.. it probably won’t sell enough to cover the “life costs” used to develop it.. but that’s ok, it’s the game I wanted to make, and I guess that’s the most important thing at the end of the day.
