I know this is belated, but thank you guys so much for your kind words and support. You’ve really made this easier.

First, I’d like to talk about Derek Yu. Derek’s a cool and froody dude in the world of independent game development, having designed and done artwork for both Aquaria and Spelunky (which will soon get an Xbox Live incarnation).

Well, Derek’s written a rather excellent article about how to finish making a game.

His advice is excellent.

Here’s why I’m not going to take (most) of it.

It’s because I have…a strategy.

THE STRATEGY (TM) (R) (C) (PG-13) is to finally, finally, finally listen to that voice that’s been telling me “go indie!” for years.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m not looking for a full-time job. I certainly am, and once I find one I will devote all my working energy to doing it as well as I possibly can.

But if you’ll recall, I originally purchased this web space to sell the awesome games I was going to create in my spare time…back in the year 2000.

This web space will finally be put to its original purpose. Now, don’t worry, I’m not going to finish Planitia and charge for it. I said it’d be free, and it will be. But I’m also going to be working on a new game.

And in complete contrariness to Derek’s advice, I’ll be using my own engine (unless one of you knows of a 2D/3D codebase that is absolutely free and cross-compatible between PC, Mac and iPhone/iPad). I won’t be completely rewriting the engine, but these changes will take a good bit of time. (And again, if anyone out there knows a good “convert your Direct3D renderer to OpenGL” tutorial, I’d be grateful.)

I’ll also be scaling up rather than down.

But I don’t want to reveal what my first commercial project is going to be just yet 🙂 Hopefully I’ll have some screenshots for you very soon!

Welcome to Viridian Games.

The games are about to begin.