[cableshaft]

I created a simple video game 16 years ago in about a week's worth of work that people are still playing and enjoying today, and snowballed into several fun opportunities. It's a Flash game called Proximity. Here's a review it got on Newgrounds just a few months ago:

"Now THIS is a strategy game. Though the rules are simple, and the graphics are even simpler, what matters is the gameplay. And the gameplay here is pure strategy perfection. Every single move is a shrewd calculation of carefully contrived advantage, yet your turns pass at a snappy pace. You can glean the entire board state in little more than a quick glance, yet the board presents a different tactical situation almost every single turn. The very definition of depth of gameplay over breadth of content. Extra Credits would be proud."

I built a sequel and submitted it to Microsoft's first Dream Build Play contest and it ended up being a 3rd place finalist, and was playable at their XNAFest in Seattle, where a publishing company saw it, saw that I was local, and brought me in to discuss a possible publishing deal. Halfway into the talk it morphed into a job interview, and I ended up getting a job there, and got to work on a game for Xbox Live Arcade, one Sony PSP game (the only game I worked on with a physical retail copy), and two WiiWare games, so I got to see the publishing process for all three major console manufacturers in a short period of time.

During the first year the publisher sent me to GDC (Game Developer's Conference) in San Francisco. Microsoft had recently contacted me and asked if I was interested in putting a demo copy of Proximity 2 up on their new Xbox Live Indie Games service, and I rushed to get a version ready for it, and it was one of 8 games you could try before the service launched, which cumulatively were downloaded over a million times. Because of that, they had it playable on kiosks at GDC the one year I got to attend (I got to watch people playing it on the kiosk, even), and they even included a brief video of it in their Xbox Live Indie Games trailer during their keynote address during that GDC as well, which was awesome.

I held off on the actual release though, since I was working for a publisher that was still planning to publish it at some point, after we got past a couple other projects, and because I didn't want it to be a conflict of interest. It was pretty neat gig, because I was employee #3 at the company, so I got to go to developers and be treated like an executive, even though I was anything but. The games we released had some bad luck and didn't sell very well, though, and the parent company eventually shut down our branch.

That was also right in the heart of the Great Recession, and I had previously dropped out of college and still didn't have my degree, so I figured I better go back to school. While in school I worked on getting Proximity 2 ported to iPhone, because I thought that was a better opportunity I should try to cash in on, but I didn't market it properly and it ended up not doing super well, even though it was a faithful port (just lower resolution). I then backported the additions I made to the mobile version into the Xbox 360 version, added a few more things, and released that, but by that point it was already 2 years after the demo was out there, and everyone had pretty much forgotten about the game. It did okay, but not great.

After I finished my Computer Science degree, I took a stab at working for two more small companies, one that made mobile apps and games and another that made Facebook games in Unity, and eventually decided I should get out of the game industry. I've been working in jobs I've been much less passionate about ever since, although my software is used by more people than anything I ever did while working in the game industry (supporting software for a call center of 90 people, and speech applications for major corporations that have been used for about 2.5 million calls at this point).

I also started getting into board game design during this time, and eventually got one of my games signed, and another one was just recently announced to be a finalist in what's one of the biggest board game design contests in the US, although because of the pandemic they haven't been able to do the finals so it's been in limbo for several months now on whether I'll win (it probably won't, but I'm happy to be a finalist).

I also finally decided to resurrect my Proximity 2 game and I'm trying to bring it back to desktop and eventually mobile and consoles again. Adding support for more players, cleaning up the UI, adding localization support, upscaling graphics to 1080p, mouse support, achievements, and hopefully a single player campaign and online multiplayer (might not make it into the initial release).

Doing it on my own time, which is now competing with tons of other ideas I've had since then and a wife and 2 dogs that need me to spend time with them too, so it's going a lot slower this time around. Hoping to release something by the end of this year, though.

It didn't really fit up above, but there's been a few other cool things that happened with my Proximity game. Apparently it's been used by teachers for their programming classes sometimes, especially A.I. classes, where students are tasked with coming up with an A.I. for the game. I know because on three occasions I've had students hunt me down and ask me for advice for their project.

Also, I once bought a book called Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns published by Adobe Press, and while I wasn't mentioned by name, two chapters were on how to build my Proximity game, and using that to teach the Command and Memento patterns.

I also got contacted once about making a version for OMGPop's game system, which unfortunately fell through (I wasn't sure I'd have the time since I was struggling to get my degree finished that semester anyway), only for me to discover a year later that they ended up creating Draw Something and got so big they were bought by Zynga, so I'm kind of curious what would have happened to Proximity in that situation.

I kinda feel like Proximity could have had a legacy almost on the level of Tetris if I hadn't made a bunch of missteps and had properly capitalized on the momentum I had. Oh well. Maybe there's a chance for it to come back, still.