State of The Layabouts: 2013
Hello there everyone. It's been a while, hasn't it?
The last several months have been a wild, strange, and emotionally tumultuous ride for the Layabouts. There's a lot to discuss, so let's just get straight to it. We've decided to change our focus as an entity. The Layabouts has been, until now, a loose collective of like-minded friends, interested in making things, but ultimately lacking direction. The site was more of a platform for us all to share our work together; a would-be dumping ground for whatever it is that we were in the mood to make. Even so, we always held game projects to some higher standard, given their more involved development time, and have talked often about how they would one day be our platform towards something greater.
Over the past few months, the question of 'when' turned into the question of 'why not now'? And so, we have started taking the steps necessary to focus our efforts exclusively on game projects. This means a number of things. Firstly, and unfortunately, it means that several people who have been part of our team for a very long time no longer fit in with this change of focus, and are in fact handicapped by it. If you're at all familiar with The Deadbeats (ha ha), a YouTube channel some of the current and former Layabouts established, its point was to give an outlet for people formerly on the team interested in gameplay video production a better outlet to pursue their interests. You can keep up with what most former Layabouts are up to by checking the links on our new friends page, but you won't be seeing those updates promoted as Layabouts content in any of our official channels. You might see some shout-outs, though!
Secondly, we've moved the vast majority of content not related to our game projects from the past few years. You can find a good amount of it in the Archives section of the site. Some of what isn't there will be linked to offsite in the near future (Neural Psychosis, in particular). If there's something specific you're looking for and can't seem to find, send us an email and we'll point you in its direction - assuming, of course, that it's not one of the few things we completely erased with a heavy dose of fire and bleach. Ultimately, the site itself is not our product, and until now it has been. We really want to keep the site as streamlined as possible, and reinforce this change of focus. The games are our product; the site is just a hub, a portfolio.
Now, how about our game projects themselves?
Here Comes Launchman's still not dead. Unfortunately, we had to make the tough decision to cut out a lot of the old code and restart the fundamentals of the engine. While you may not have noticed anything wrong with last spring's Alpha Demo, the truth is just that our development inexperience ended up creating a lot of artificial roadblocks, and the code got increasingly difficult to work with until last September, when we finally decided enough was enough. We like to call the new framework Zach's building the "Sanford Engine", and it'll go on to power some of our future endeavors as well. However, we're also pleased to announce that this will be bringing new, heretofore unplanned features into Launchman from the get-go - two we can mention today are an in-game level editor, and sloped surfaces.
If you go to the games page, in addition to the new and improved layout, you might notice an unfamiliar face - Power Tower! This is the secret project Nate and I have been sinking our teeth into for the past few months while Zach has been building the Sanford Engine. It initially spawned from an idea I had early last year, and it's, well... I'd best describe it as a randomly-generated-dungeon-crawler-typing-adventure-turn-based-rpg-math-nightmare. Check out the video and the screenshots on the games page for a more coherent idea of what the game is about. We've had a blast working on it and will be releasing weekly blog updates teasing features in both Power Tower and Launchman, starting now. We want to be transparent about our development and get others in on the process.
All of this has been quite a lot for us to wrap our heads around, and the recent holiday family business certainly hasn't helped us keep our heads clear, but we're looking at 2013 with an open mind. To kick off the New Year, and as a little something to say sorry for the wait, we've released the original prototype for It's Mr. Platform!!, the first game we ever attempted to make as The Layabouts. I won't say that it's not going to be weird and different for us, having so few people again, but I also can't say I'm not excited by what this means for us either. These changes really are for the best, and I hope you'll all come to agree with that sentiment in due time. For now though, take a look around the site, and keep your eyes on the blog. We'll see you next week for more Power Tower.
Stay gold, everyone! It's good to be back.
(Also Game Night is probably happening at some point I dunno don't talk to me.)
