I’ve been anxiously awaiting the October Challenge this year. I wanted to join in on the fun last year, but I was way too busy back then. But I’m hoping nothing is getting in the way this year. Also, as of today I’m a full-time indie developer.

Before I get into what my game is all about, here is some back-story: I’ve grown up with strategy and simulation games like Sim City, Caesar or The Settlers and they have been and still are my favorite game genre. What I want to create is a peaceful strategy game which is not too complex for newbies, but not too simple for veterans. I had several prototypes in mind with different gameplay mechanics and what I settled on was a scenario in where the player has to build a settlement on sky islands.

Interestingly enough, I came up with the original sky island idea for LD #20 and after playing around with the idea for a bit, I decided to create a small prototype while I was at BIGJAM in Berlin. While I was not as productive as I hoped to be, I got the basics done and decided to stick with the prototype. All in all, I worked about three weeks on this game so far. If you want to know what happened so far development-wise, click here to be redirected to the development blog.

If you liked the screenshot, I uploaded a very short gameplay video to Youtube last month if are interested in how the game looks like in motion. I also want to mention that I’m not working alone on this: Christian Storcks is doing the music (a short preview of that is in the video I linked in the last sentence) and Jesse, a friend of mine, is helping me with some coding, in particular scripting and some backend stuff.

The game is going to be released for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. I am planning on starting pre-orders by October 21st and I hope someone will buy the game.

Tags: simulation, strategy, wolkenwelt