everything and all at once

We were really excited to officially announce earlier this week the newest large-scale project Worthing & Moncrieff has been working on — "HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer." You play the underappreciated Humanoid Resources Officer aboard the SpaceArmada flagship Venture— whose crew has a long history of questionable behavior. When the ship is thrust into the middle of dramatic and universe-shaking trouble, can you harness the power of the bureaucracy to rein in their worst impulses and survive to the next episode? 

When "Austen Translation" launched on Steam last May (Happy Birthday AT!) we took about four hours off and jumped right into new project development mode. So why did it took a whole year before we even got to the public announcement of this new project? It wasn’t for lack of ideas, I’ll say that. If anything we had too many options were were excited about, and a good chunk of that time went into prototyping and fleshing out concepts to a point where we could objectively evaluate them. Here’s a shot of the project dev folder with some of the exploration Eric and I did together. Most of these go back into the hopper for future development — at W&M we use everything *including* the squeal (a joke for our audio friends out there).

Plus! Plus! There were some amazing distractions along the way this year, including our amazing experience with Playcrafting and Bose creating audio-only games. Not only did our submission “OverHerd" win the Boston Bose AR Game Jam, it’s been released on the Apple store and the Android version as well as an expanded experience are slated to be released in June. And it’s free, so if you want to throw cows at distant enemies in the dark of night and you have a Bose AR-enabled device, check out “OverHerd."

But none of this answers the important question and the heart of this post. After all this conceptual exploration, why did we choose this particular project to move ahead with? And the answer (like all the best answers) is love. HRO is set to combine all our favorite things. My love of seminal 1960's science fiction and Eric’s love of classic text-based adventures. Our joint love of mashing up disparate (some would say clashing) things to see what happens — in this case branching narrative adventures and sandbox puzzle-solving. And puzzles! I forgot to mention our shared love of puzzles! So much for us to love about this project. And we’re so excited to share it with you. We hope you’ll find things to love about it, too.