Thanks once more to everybody who has spent some time with The Salt Keep! The feedback I've received has been overwhelmingly positive, and there really isn't much to do at this point other than keep trying to spread the word and get it in front of more eyes. While I am of course continuing to support The Salt Keep, I don't currently have any updates planned unless I get some bug reports, and so far I haven't had any, so that (hopefully) means it's been a smooth experience for the vast majority of players. 

With that in mind, I've spent most of my time since release getting started on some new-ish projects, plus making plans for more, so I thought I'd share a bit of what's coming up, both short and long term. 

The Idle Class

Years before I released The Salt Keep, I put out a free, browser-based idle game calledThe Idle Class. It's a relatively old school clicker, the kind you're meant to check in on and play in fits over long periods of time, and is full of stupid jokes and wildly pessimistic anti-capitalist perspectives. For the first couple of years, I updated it regularly, but it's been a bit neglected since I was in the depths of writing The Salt Keep. As a result, I thought my first project post-Salt should be to give it some love and a new major update.

That update (version 0.8.0) is largely complete now. I'm currently working on testing and balance, which is a pretty long process for this kind of game, so it'll still be a bit before release, but it's coming very soon.

A New Text Adventure & RPG

At the same time, I've started outlining the characters and story for a new game. When I first started developing The Salt Keep, I intended for the skeleton of the game to be fairly reusable, and while the game ended up being much more substantial than I initially intended (novel-length, rather than a short and sweet novella sort of thing), those bones are still there. I'm planning to use the existing gameplay structure and everything I learned while writing The Salt Keep to create a new game -- completely new characters and story -- set in the same world and dealing with similar themes and genres.  

I don't want to go into detail on the story yet, as I imagine a lot will change in this early period, but I expect that development will move much more quickly than it did with The Salt Keep, given that there won't be nearly as much trial and error. Famous last words, of course.

Once there's something of more substance to show, I'll create a new page for it here.

A Mystery RPG Project

If you thought my description of that last game was cagey, get ready for this one: I've got the loose beginnings of another game in mind, this one also set elsewhere in the same world as The Salt Keep. It's significantly more ambitious than The Salt Keep or the Currently Untitled Next Text Adventure & RPG, but I'm not yet totally sure that the concept will work or that it'll be practical on the scale that I'm hoping for. With that in mind, the plan is:

1. Create a self-contained prototype that tells a complete story, but is brief and feature-limited. The idea will mostly just be to demonstrate the core pieces of the concept and see if it's viable. I imagine I'd just release that for free on here and see if people like it.
2. If the prototype is well-received, uh, spend a bunch of years making a big game, I guess.

It's just that easy!

That's Everything

Those are the future plans, for the time being. There'll probably be a second, smaller Idle Class update mixed in there somewhere, but for the rest, just keep an eye on this devlog for an update. More games are coming!