September was an intense month at work and personal life. I made steady progress on personal studies, working through The Great ScrumMaster and Nexus books, but other than that there were few milestones to mention. The most relevant ones are related to my most recent portfolio project, Sway The People! (for which I recently wrote a blog post). Here is a brief summary.
Achievements
Sway The People! v1.1.0
After the initial release of the project on August, in September I released version 1.1.0 of Sway The People!. This version introduced improvements to the Nation element of the game, allowing for saving created Nations during a playthrough and also loading Nations from files when starting a new one. With this, now it is possible to replay scenarios beyond the default nations, included in the initial release of the project. These changes also enabled the handcrafting of custom Nations, although that requires editing a JSON file... I have it on the backlog for this game to make crafting of custom Nations available within the game so that the experience is more user-friendly, but I have not yet decided if this is something I will get to implementing, or if I will move on to other projects before that.
Published Sway The People! on itch.io
As I mentioned in my previous monthly recap post, I intended to experiment publishing Sway The People! beyond the usual place. For my previous portfolio projects, the default has always been to have them on the "Releases" section of the GitHub repository page for the project itself: this is cheap (in fact, free), simple and keeps the end result near the source code... but the downside is that it is not very discoverable, and other than developers most people are not very familiar with GitHub to start with.
So I went ahead and published Sway The People! on itch.io, one of the most popular platforms for this type of indie game project. While it is possible to monetize projects on itch.io, for the moment I am making the game available for free there. This gives me a more non-dev friendly experience to share with friends, and it also comes with a lot of nice analytics features built in. So far, I am enjoying what the platform offers, and I am inclined to continue publishing future games there.
I also decided to create an umbrella project under which Sway The People! is positioned. I named it "Augmented Universe Games" (AUG), and its purpose is to bundle together all experimental games I develop with the focus on trying out new technologies and incorporating their capabilities into new types of interactions and gameplay mechanics. I see generative AI as a major gamechanger for games, not only in optimizing cost and speed of production, but as things that unlock incredibly cool new possibilities, and I have not seen many efforts by the industry at large (both major studios and indie devs) in applying them creatively for that, so I hope AUG can make an honest contribution on that front. I already have ideas for at least 3 more games under this banner, one of which should start the planning phase soon.
