I haven’t published any games for a long time. That’s partly because my laptop died and took several promising projects with it. I may still be able to retrieve them, but that’s a quest for another time. The point is that, eventually, I started working on something new. This is it.

Nebulamen represents a significant step forward in terms of my dev skills. For the first time, I’ve finally got a fully-cooperative camera- meaning that the game tracks the player-characters movements properly and they don’t disappear offscreen suddenly. There’s also a really trippy bit with a fully-animated background that wouldn’t have been possible before.

The project started off as a love-letter to classic space sci-fi like Flash Gordon and Star Trek. It was also intended to serve as a response to modern sci-fi, a lot of which has been co-opted by the mainstream and lost its slightly off-kilter, risque and psychedelic aspects. Yeah, there are exceptions, but I mainly feel slightly let-down by today’s science fiction. It’s simultaneously too polished and too banal. Nebulamen isn’t a great work of genius that’s somehow better than professionally-produced sci-fi, but at least its sincere and represents a single creative vision that hasn’t been focus-tested to death.

But I’m ranting, and that’s not what I want to do here. Time for some archetypal British self-deprecation! You may notice that, even though it’s technically more advanced than my previous efforts (Victor Victorious and Static Town), Nebulamen doesn’t LOOK as polished. Nor does it have the same variety of obstacles and enemies. There’s a pretty simple reason for that. I wanted to get something made, uploaded and ready to play as quickly as possible. I haven’t contributed anything to the Game Development Community for awhile, so my goal was to create something quick and tightly focused. I kind of wish I’d had time to do more with certain planets, but I didn’t want to spend six months to a year working on this. My next couple of projects are likely to have a much larger larger scope.

And… yeah, that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about this one. It’s fun, speedy and breezy. And, as its lead character, Captain Scriber would say, it’s pretty groovy. Check it out.