This blog has been woefully neglected over the past couple years—rather than writing a handful of posts and back-dating them, I’ll just give a few highlights about what we’ve been up to over the past couple of years:
At the start of 2018, I left my AAA job for an unnanounced project and while that was spinning up, I spent a couple months working full-time on Nectar Vector. During that period, Rachel Sala joined the team as artist and animator. She’s been doing great work since coming on board!
In February of 2018, Minefaire came to San Mateo and featured an Indie Showcase, which Nectar Vector was a part of. After the guerilla debut at PAX West 2017, this was the game’s first official showing, and it was a blast! I met some other indies from the area and had a great time showing the game to the attendees. We set up a little area where folks could make custom pins out of a variety of felt flowers, which was a hit with the kids and the parents needing something to do while their kids roamed the booths. My favorite comment of the weekend was from a mother who was thrilled that I was getting little boys to play (enthusiastically) with butterflies and flowers.
I showed Nectar Vector at PAX East 2018 with the Figs & Co folks, sharing a booth with a collection of wonderful indies. Reception at the show was great, with lots of players coming back to play again and again. Huge thanks to Chris Maire for helping me staff the booth!
Nectar Vector was an Official Selection for the 2018 Seattle Indies Expo! This was the game’s first real accolade, which was super exciting. It was also a fantastic day of showing the game alongside loads of other cool indie projects.
Development on the game slowed down towards the end of 2018 (and through 2019) as I focused on other projects and on figuring out where to move. I ended up spending 4 weeks driving across the country in September 2019 as I moved to Brooklyn, NY.
In the middle of that 4-week drive across the country, I showed Nectar Vector at the wonderful PixelPop Festival in St. Louis. The whole weekend was fantastic (so many wonderful people and wonderful projects, plus the City Museum rules), and the cherry on top was that Nectar Vector one of the recipients of the PixelPop Select honor!
Before moving, I visited NY several times and got some fantastic playtesting and feedback from the game design community there, leading to a some major improvements for the game (primarily: it’s now best-of-three-rounds to determine the winner, and there’s some slight gravity, which introduces some interesting positioning dynamics).
I’ve spent the last few months adjusting the being in a place with real weather again, as well as preparing to teach as an adjunct at NYU’s Game Center, which I’m absolutely thrilled about. I’m much happier here, overall.
Now that I’m settled in NY, I’m turning my attention back to Nectar Vector and have resumed full-time development. I’ve got some tech debt to work through before getting back to adding features, and in the meantime, Rachel is charging ahead on a UI overhaul and starting to draw some concepts for other levels. More soon!
SIR