Keystone Updates - Season 1.4

2023-03-29 13:23:43 news

Checkout the New Trailer!

And a quick writing about the game...

It all started with my illustration project. I started drawing again around 2013 and I wanted to keep up a daily practice of drawing while I built up my portfolio and looked for freelance work. All digital of course. That seemed the way to go.

That all worked out pretty well. I have a big gallery now and quite a few projects under my belt.

But my illustration practice was getting a bit boring and I wanted to work on something bigger. And I happen to be an experience coder via my day job - so I decided to put it all together and make a game.

The idea was to keep it as simple as possible. I wanted to find a way to use my existing illustrations and somehow incorporate them into a game. This way I wouldn't have to spend years making all fresh illustrations for a new game.

A lot of ideas ran through my head. I considered point-and-click games, some type of image puzzles, or maybe even "spot the difference" - the game where 2 images are slightly different and you have to find the differences. These are all classic desktop pop games, but I wanted something a bit more interesting.

So after some more brainstorming, I managed to tie together a bunch of things I like - while maintaining the simplicity. The result was a typing challenge with and RPG framework. So instead of fighting your way through and RPG adventure, you would be typing your way through an RPG adventure.

I like this idea a lot because I spend a lot of time at the keyboard myself as a developer. I liked the idea that the game could becomes something like a "keyboard interface" and the options were limitless. I started thinking about retro terminal games like nethack. I started thinking of all the old school Flash games which were heavily keyboard dependent.

Suddenly the doors flung open and "Keystone Library" was born!

They idea is that each book in the library can be a different story, or a different theme. This way I can keep myself busy illustrating new stories, and adding more mini-games each time. The mini-games are designed in a way that's reusable (modular), so if I had a Minotaur word puzzle in the Mythology book, I can reuse that later to be a Hackers word puzzle in the Cyberpunk book too.

Hopefully the content and game variety would snowball over time. Offering something for everyone.

Now, I'm not too naive. This won't be the next hot thing in the gaming world. But I hope that my fellow geeks and retro game lovers can appreciate the core idea of my game here. The core concept is pretty basic, but also full of promise:

1 - A 2D interface with ambient illustration and music.

2 - Each book tells us a story.

3 - Lots of keyboard challenges and mini-games.

And I can do whatever I want with each chapter. I like that because it keeps the creativity open for new ideas and experimentation.

I see this as much more than just "a game I want to publish". It seems more like a new hobby I've opened. I can see myself working on this for years - there's so much that can be done, and I can imagine it getting bigger and better over time.

More content. More games. More stories. More art. More music.

That's it! A place to call home.

Keystone Library.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2183340/Keystone_Library/