Hello everyone

A year ago this past week, I put Off-Peak up online with very minimal fanfare and no idea how it would be received. A year on, I’m still deeply amazed at the great response its gotten, along with the many thousands of downloads, and the Youtube ‘lets plays.’ It’s all awesome and it’s inspired me to really go all-out on my next game, the Norwood Suite.

And so an update on that… I’m currently at the point where the overall environmental design is complete and you can play through the whole core of the game segment I’ve conceived from beginning to end. What remains is fleshing out the environment of the rooms (currently the main focus now), polishing the dialogue, finessing the outside landscape, and tweaking the systems so that they’re scale-able for further additions to the game in the long-term.

In the coming weeks I will have more screenshots to share and gifs to show the game in motion. I will let you all know where and when I’ll be showing the game publicly for people to road-test / break. I am also working on the soundtrack and that’s coming along nicely as well.

As the sole designer with the occasional outside assistance from my smart programming buddies like SnowHydra, I’m deep in the weeds here. I wear a lot of different hats for this and those change from day to day. One day I’m tweaking music, the next I’m doing some sort of inventory implementation, the next I’m adding the lighting in a room, after that I’m waiting on lightbaking while writing some dialog.

The scope of the Norwood Suite is larger than Off-Peak, but not by a wide margin. My main goal here is to simply push myself into crafting an experience that builds on what I learned with Off-Peak, and leaves room for people to have a richer, more substantial experience overall. I talked about this in greater depth in a previous post.

I would still love for Off-Peak to have a place on Steam and the Steam Greenlight campaign for Off-Peak continues, so don’t hesitate to vote if you want more people to get exposed to this game. And if you want to get more real-time progress on the Norwood Suite, along with other musings and posts of dj mixes I’m into, don’t hesitate to follow me on Twitter.

-cosmoddd