Announcing: Lasting Legacy

Today I can finally announce the game Miguel and I have been working on for a while: Lasting Legacy.

You can read more about Lasting Legacy in the official web site. There isn’t a lot of information yet, but we wanted to announce it now so we can talk openly about it until release. We’ll definitely be revealing more information here over the upcoming weeks.

Platforms

The first thing that might surprise some people is that we’re going to release Lasting Legacy for Windows and Mac first (hopefully through Steam). This is a departure from all of my games as an independent developer, but I feel that PC is a better fit than mobile for Lasting Legacy. Also, I know Steam is flooded with new game releases, but it’s not quite the mad house that mobile is these days, especially for a game that follows the old “pay-once play-forever” approach.

It won’t be difficult to make a tablet/phone version later, so assuming it’s moderately successful, we’re likely to make an iOS version afterwards (Android is such a horrible development environment for native C games, that it probably won’t be worth our time). And I suppose there’s always the possibility of a console version if the opportunity presents itself.

Goals

Why are we making Lasting Legacy? There are several high-level goals I had for my next project.

1. Shorter development. When I look back at the development times of the games I released over the years, I see a disturbing trend.
   

   I really didn’t want my next project to take nearly as long as Subterfuge did. Part of it meant tackling a game with a smaller scope, and part of it meant making it single player. My hope is that Lasting Legacy takes us less than 18 months from start to launch. Let’s see if we can make it.

2. Potential for wide appeal. The nature of Subterfuge meant that it was always a very niche product. We went into it knowing that and we successfully created a game that a very small percentage of people really love. This time I wanted to change things and wanted to create a game that had potential for wide appeal. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a clone of existing games or that we’re going to dumb down anything. It just means that more people might like it, and some will hopefully love it as much as the devoted Subterfuge fans.

   So far, in the extremely tiny, non-statistically meaningful sample of our close families, my wife, who is definitely not a video gamer, really likes the idea of the game and is interested to hear more about it (which is more than I can say for any of my projects since Flower Garden).

3. Low money investment. Maybe it’s not quite the Indipocalypse but there’s no doubt it’s a lot harder to make money from selling independent, original games than it was 5 years ago. Because of that, I don’t feel comfortable investing a large amount of money into a project that might or might not end up being financially successful. That means picking a game that we can do almost completely between the two of us, minimizing the amount of contracting we have to do, and the scope of Lasting Legacy is perfect for that.

Roadmap

We still have a lot of work to do ahead of us.

• Steam Greenlight. Once we have a lot more content in the game, we’ll be able to create a video for the game and get it on Steam through the Greenlight process.
• Early access. Once we’re on Steam, we’ll have a period of Early Access. Because the Lasting Legacy is highly replayable, it’s going to be a good candidate for Early Access. That time is also really going to help us fine tune the balance of the game and take player feedback into account for the final release.
• Release. When will this be? Once the game is done (but it better be this year!!).

Want to help us make Lasting Legacy a success? Make sure you sign up for the mailing list and/or join the Facebook page. Apart from progress updates, we’ll announce when the game is on Greenlight so you can help vote us through it. Once we hit Early Access, we’d love it if you can play the game and send us your feedback.