As editing wraps up on another project I've been working on (something that THIS MACHINE never had the benefit of, sadly), it's gotten me thinking about printing:

I, alongside some long time friends, have been working on getting a game fully published, printed, and on shelves for the public to pick up, and as we near the end of that process, and we start thinking about sending it to print, it got me thinking -- why did I never consider this for THIS MACHINE?

Part of the reason, arguably most of the reason, is because I never really had a huge amount of faith in it as a product. It was written as a cathartic release after years of working a very challenging job with very little to show for it (hooray capitalism), and I sort of...never actually thought people would vibe with it on the level that they actually wanted to own a physical copy. On top of that, in it's initial form the thing was...pretty ugly. It got away with that, because it was styled in a very corporate fashion, so you could attribute that lack of creative dynamism as a sort of stylistic choice, but it really wasn't great in its very first incarnation.

As I've worked on more and more things, and gotten accustomed to using more graphics design and publishing suites, its become a bit more polished, but ultimately there's very little visually to look at in the thing.

But I'm getting away from myself -- the point is, after a recent spike of interest (which I'll get into more later), I've sort of pulled it down from the metaphorical shelf, dusted it off, and had a look at what it might cost to print this thing. I even went so far as to have a copy done up and sent out to me. It really feels like something entirely different when you hold it in your hand. I could get into how genuinely fulfilling it was when I first opened the package up and saw it, but I'd probably end up in a sort of mushy liquid state so I'll not bother.

Would there be interest in seeing a printed version of THIS MACHINE? After the test print, I made some revisions, and actually ended up creating a whole new A5 version of it that was designed from the ground up for print (I don't plant to upload this version, as it looks a bit wonky in digital with how much I needed to account for the dip, but will if there's interest). I'm not sure how I'd go about selling it at the minute (there's an Oddments storefront in the works, but it's very early stages), but yeah...I guess I'm just gauging interest.

Back to the recent spike of interest -- any folks who've found themselves here due to that will be glad to hear that there should be an official Korean localisation of THIS MACHINE coming soon! What exactly that's going to look like, I have no idea -- I haven't seen it yet, and it's all being done by some lovely folks who somehow found the game and liked it well enough to translate it. I'll make a post about it when it's available!

Unrelated to THIS MACHINE, I'm currently working on a couple of projects which will more than likely end up released under Oddments (one of which definitely will, as it's literally listed for preorder there now), here's some visual snapshots:

Two different games, both with kind of similar aesthetic inspirations. For some reason, I'm really obsessed with kind of...60s-70s vibes at the minute? One of the games (the first image) is a reimagining of a game I tried to put out (and is still available on my store) several years ago. I never finished it, because I came to hate it, but now its being built as a sort of STALKER/Anomaly/Roadside Picnic kind of thing, set in a dark future of the UK where it never developed culturally past the 1970s.

The other game, wherein you play as ordinary people turned Interdimensional Time Travelling espionage agents working for an extremely shady and seemingly omnipresent intelligence agency. It similarly leans very heavily on 60s-70s spy aesthetics, with a healthy dose of psychedelia.

If you'd like to see more of either of them, chuck us a follow on Oddments up above.

I've rambled on enough now, so I'll call it here. Thanks for reading.

Keep 'er lit,

Dave