the great circle of development

Worthing & Moncrieff, like every other indie developer, lives and dies creatively by maintaining a pipeline of projects. Now that "Austen Translation" is in it’s final stretch (the early 2018 release date is coming! We’re so excited!), we really should be blue-skying and dreaming about our next project. Yes, already. We should already be knee-deep in sifting and planning and sketching and pitching, all those fun, frightening, open-ending idea-generating activities we depend on to grow as game professionals and as a studio. 

With two other projects out in the world (or almost), this third project will have things to say about who we think we are as company, what we value, and where we’re going. When we go back to square one with a new project we’ll also have to revisit all the big-picture decisions we’ve already made for our first two games. What are the best ways to foster player connections? What is the best vehicle to tell the story we want to tell? What makes a gameplay mechanic engaging and fresh? And a hundred others. Heady, engaging big-picture stuff that deserves our time and attention. 

​
​And that’s the rub, of course. We’re too small a studio to have staff dedicated to new project development exclusively, so we’ll need to carve out brain space and hours to do the development work we need to do on the next game *while* we’re buttoning up and launching this game and supporting our original title, “A Matter of Murder." We’ll have to manage the intellectual dissonance of getting the “Austen” details right while simultaneously dreaming of our next great adventure. A challenge, for sure. But it’s a challenge which brings with it the promise of growth and renewal.