End of an Era

I empathize with him. I always wanted to make indy games, going back to modding and being part of modding teams for doom, qwake, and half-life... In 2007 when the first iPhone came out, I immediately snagged one and dove into the jailbreaking and app building, eventually releasing 2 games into the app store, One did better financially, one was objectively a better game. Either way, I quit a stable job to focus on that and after 14 months I was unemployed again.

I explored tabletop games after that, modding, expanding, and even building prototypes using 3DP.

When AI exploded 2 years ago I was curious how much of a game it could build and I had recently learned about the existence of Pygame. Ended up building a zero-player 2D space sim. It's stupid, but I appreciate it and there is some art in it.

https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft

Then recently, a coworker asked if I had tried Codex yet. I hadn't, and while riding in a car had the idea of using Codex on my phone to make a game that I could then deploy on my phone and play. Wanted to explore something meta, so I made an AI dungeon master in the style of Zork. It got out of hand and you cant deploy it on a phone- but I did deploy it remotely on my home workstation and then played over ssh from my phone ;P

https://github.com/derekburgess/dungen

I appreciate games for their randomness and have always leaned into games that incorporate generative sandbox experiences.