Some have wondered what the fate of this project was, as post-pandemic I went rather radio-silent on all updates and news. The short is I took a break away from game dev, as I have been doing it essentially daily for about 15 years at that point. I don't have the biggest footprint online, so most don't know the extent of how far back I've been coding and making games generally. I'll put it this way: the coding language I learned to code with is more dead than Latin.

So I took some time off, moved forward in other areas of my life I put on hold for too long, and just dabbled in a coding side-project that will see public availability in the future, no pressure or deadlines. I always enjoy sharpening my skills and this project was complex and rich in math.

That said however I have felt the desire return again some time ago, and so I doubled down on improving my gamedev skills, doing some experiments. I have a particular vision for this game that I haven't achieved and want to be able to bring together. Not perfectionism, but a clear vision of what I want as an end product. So this time I started from a clean codebase, using the latest version of Godot to leverage all the amazing updates they have made, and am upgrading the art too. Not replacing the art per se, upscaling and adding more detail.

I am also assembling a team of amazing people to help bring my idea to life. Even if I had the skills to do it all I don't want this to be a 10 year project. Besides that I have some peers and friends that specialize in areas I have yet to master, and they would only elevate my project even higher than I could achieve solo.

With this though comes a budget, and since I must utilize external funding anyway (like a publisher) I am looking into filling out other tangential yet equally important roles too, such as marketing, community management, localization, writing, etc. PONGslaught is coming together as a better, more fleshed out version of this game prototype I had a blast with. PONGslaught will always be fun to play for me, and so I have chosen this project to expand upon.

This will be a fun journey, and this old itch page will always be a part of that journey. I will keep people up to date on this platform in the meanwhile, during this time I am working on the new demo and working hard on the business side of things in order to get my ducks in a row and find funding.

I will also provide shortly some follow-up articles here on the timeline moving forward, as well as some more technical articles on how I'm making the game. The game will be using a custom engine of sorts built atop Godot (or rather it's a library heavily extending Godot), and I will be using this new system for all my games from here on. This system is designed to streamline making complex objects for my game in a heavily modular format, and can even create these complex objects using no coding read-in from a text file (YAML format similar to openRA). Not only will this engine make my job as a developer creating new features and content for the game much easier and quicker, but also works as a modding system that can overhaul, replace, or add anything to the game. I wanted a modding system that people could make completely different games if they so desired. I am quite pleased with the progress so far on this new codebase, and once this phase is done making the game itself will be much much quicker.

Cheers,

Leo LeBlanc
Ivory Lion Studio