Hey y'all,

Hamilton dev here, uh... that three year old 10 minute indie horror walking sim (that's gonna do nothing to narrow it down, I know) that you probably don't remember. This is just gonna be an update on what's been happening and what my focuses currently are, no real important information or significant/concrete announcements.

So I've been relatively silent since I released Hamilton nearly 3 years ago, and unfortunately in that period I haven't really been able to dedicate much of that time to game development. I did have some plans going into 2021, if you followed me on Twitter (account is now deleted) you might have seen me make an announcement about a game called "Redbird: Prologue". This was to be set in the same universe as Hamilton and was going to be a PSX style Survival Horror FPS.

I did start work on it, but I very quickly learned that I wasn't capable of the things I would need to be able to do to bring the idea to life... or rather, bring the idea to life while meeting the standards I desired for it. Solo development is in fact as hard as people say it is, and I can't afford to support a team of people who can do what I can't. For those of you who played Hamilton and still remember it, you'd probably be able to tell (even if you aren't a dev) that the game was extremely simple -- essentially just a haunted house ride. The simple truth of the matter though, is that at the time that was the near limit of my abilities. To make an analogy; I learned how to crawl and then immediately attempted to run a marathon.

So after continuously running into roadblocks work on the project waned, and eventually came to a stop. To list every single one would turn this blog post into a novel. Redbird never left my head though, and it is still something I'd like to make one day, even though I know that day will probably still be years away. It may even never come. For now though, it'll remain shelved while I begin to work on smaller more manageable projects again to try to dust off and improve my skills. There are a lot of ideas I've had over the years, but to start with I've been toying with the idea of remaking Hamilton.

A Hamilton remake would be different to the 2020 release in many ways. A small list would include:

• Gameplay - Literally anything aside from only walking forward with a flashlight.
• Implementing HPSXRP - To increase authenticity of the PSX style, I have no intention of being 100% accurate though.
• New level creation method - Ideally would like to implement PSX shaders on the environments as well as props and characters. This means lots and lots of subdivision, and most likely level creation in Blender instead of Unity. This is going to be this game's "challenge" for me personally.
• Altered Setting - I want the game to be longer, but also for the levels to make more sense narratively. A big reason Hamilton starts the way it did (outside in the snow, on like a 200m path) is simply because I made that scene first while screwing around with textures and terrain, before I even knew what the game was going to be. I still intend on retaining the atmosphere as much as possible, especially once you go indoors.

To be absolutely clear, this isn't an announcement or a promise. If you do hear from me again in the near future however, this will most likely be the project I'm going with.

If you have read this far, thank you for your time, and I'm sorry I don't have anything of substance to show for my absence.

Stay safe,

November