Reduce heat to simmer
Well, due to a newly found alignment of priorities, triggered by a realization that I’ve been mildly neglecting my day job responsibilities, we will be putting Lethal Martini Games and KOHO Games on the back burner for a while.
Late last year we came to realize that the indie gaming market has become quite saturated and the bar has been raised significantly, placing it well beyond our reach in our current personal and professional situations as a viable source of secondary income without the help of a full team (or getting fired from our day jobs, which would really suck). As our schedules are both quite random and have no way to dedicate ourselves to a team in a way that it would be fair to the others involved, our little project was downgraded to hobby status. That has lightened the burden a bit, and moving forward we planned to approach things a little more casually (saying things like “sure, I’ll see if I can spit out a Blackjack game in a week – why not?”).
However, even as a hobby, our available time has diminished down to next to nothing and even semi-seriously pursuing game production isn’t in the cards, at least for a while. I haven’t written a line of code in like 2 weeks (*twitch*). Not sure how this is going to affect the #1GAM challenge – we might still pop out some super simple works just to say we didn’t give up.
Speaking of which, this is in no way a declaration of surrender or defeat. We will not brand ourselves with the tag of “failed indie game developers,” because that would imply that we are done trying. We acknowledge that as a duo we are technically well beyond the prime of the average video gaming visionaries and that our games are fair to partly mediocre. (Or “shit” as one guy said, though I would have to disagree. I’ve seen shit games, and we’re not quite there. BTW – thanks, asshole – you know who you are.) Yes, we’re going to keep going, just a little slower than before (if that’s possible), and who knows? Down the line we might just get the itch to assemble a team and change the world of gaming as we know it.
But right now I have to place a parts order and take care of some other boring grown up stuff. I’ll check back when I can.
Cheers, and thanks to everyone in the indie gaming community, especially the XNA team and the XBLIG community (without whom I never would have even bothered trying in the first place) for being an amazing part of our personal cultures over the last 4 years, and hopefully again in the future.
Paul Klimek
Founder, Designer, Programmer – Lethal Martini Games and KOHO Games
I’ll tell ya where you can go…
An FYI to all, http://www.lethalmartinigames.com now redirects to here. No point in having two sites to neglect! 🙂
-pk
The other half of the Welcome…
Hey everyone! This is Scott over at Lethal Martini (the aforementioned ‘new guy’). Lots of cool stuff going on right now. As we finish up “Hostile Hustle”, I have already begun work on our next project, currently codenamed Spelunker. Can’t talk about that one too much yet (gotta keep this stuff all ‘hush-hush’ for now), but I’m really excited about it. As for ‘Hostile’ – I’ve been doing some of the testing for it and I’ve gotta admit it’s a lot of frantic fun. Hope you guys like a challenge!
That’s all for the moment, but keep a lookout here at the blog and we’ll keep you updated on the newest info from Lethal Martini.
SJK
So, you wanna know what we’re up to, ay?
What could be more fun than following the sporadic progress of the development team at Lethal Martini Games, right? Nothing I can think of,really! So, on we go, as we document the process of making games with a minimal staff and no budget! That’s right, we’re hitting the big time now! As of recently, we’ve DOUBLED our on-staff development team! Yes, we’ve (I’ve) hired in a second person to make the LMG dream a reality! (Welcome aboard, dude!)
