The rough drafts of the eleventh and the final levels of EARL’s Warehouse: The Depot are complete. The boss level still needs some animation work, and will be an exciting two-phase boss fight against the main antagonist of the story, involving lightning bolts and lost footing.
This leaves just the bonus level needed, then the process of cleaning up and polishing each level begins, ensuring to the best of my ability that there are as few possibilities of getting stuck as possible. This is proving to be a particular challenge with using a master map, as it can be difficult to prevent the player from being able to break out of the normal flow, revisit parts of the map from previous levels, etc.
I’ve been starting to put some thought into what direction to take Smiling Cat after the Depot project. More than likely, my next project will be based on mobile technology, since mobile is shaping up to be the future. Also, I think with my successes this year with EARL’s Warehouse and Dehoarder, that it is time to re-approach the idea of making games for a living, which necessitates making games for revenue. That is currently a lot easier with mobile platforms than with PC or Web. Web portals like Kongregate are great and all, but unless working in the in-game purchase market or drawing millions of hits, the ad revenue just is not there.
Having said that, Smiling Cat’s current library of web games, including the upcoming expansion to EARL’s Warehouse, will continue to be available to play for free on Kongregate, if for no other reason than to increase my brand visibility.
I look forward to seeing what the future holds!