longer.blue

... BOO!!! got you Yes indeed, this is not the "Magicland is Over" post you may have expected. Despite the scary title I actually have an announcement I'm excited to share! Let me go back to a little over a year ago. April 1st, 2025, the worst April Fools joke of my life and last day working at Netflix after my project was suddenly cancelled due to "restructuring". For the next 9 months, I felt lost and adrift trying to find a job during a exceptionally bad economy in a notoriously bad industry to find jobs in. OOPS! But hey, there were a silver lining... This was the perfect lucky break for my little passion project baby game! During this period, I would regularly work on Magicland for 5-8 hours a day when I probably should have been polishing up my resume and finishing my portfolio. The work was a perfect combination of personally rewarding and fun, and I took the project from being a frumpy duct-taped-together little fart of a game into something that looked better, felt better, and had a vision I could start to picture completely. That vision, you ask? Well for the longest time, it has been an open-world, nonlinear adventure with 5 distinct zones to complete. But now, after finding new employment in February this year, I felt that dream flicker just a bit. The productivity I had before could no longer co-exist with the 8 hours a day I give to The Man (Tony), so I started to get worried. What if this turns into my forever project? What if I get bored and give up? My original plan was to release an open-world game with 5 full zones by 2027. Now? I don't even have close to 3, and even if I did finish them out by then the testing would take at least another year. So I started thinking, searching for the answer... until I realized it was right in front of me the whole time. Going back again, this time to 2021. I was still in college and thinking of an idea for a new game to make. There was a developer I had become sort of a fan of by the name Steven Gillmurphy. I decided to check up on him and found out that he was making a new series of games with an "Of The Killer" naming convention. If you've played any of these games, you might notice some similarities to Magicland (see also his game "Magic Wand"). These similarities aren't a coincidence. When I played Steven's games I realized something important: Games don't have to be about anything. You can just fuck around and do whatever you want!!! So from day one, that's been my goal too: To have fun making something that is uniquely me. But I still want to do something. I want Magicland to be SOMETHING. And maybe an open-world design is something it could have been, but after working on this for 4 years I realized that maybe I don't want to spend my time making an open world. I don't want to worry about "optimal" or "correct" game design. What I want is to do is tell a story. So from this point on, Magicland will be dropping OFFICIAL releases in the form of 5 separate Chapters! Just like the Killer series, breaking the game into chapters makes so much sense for me. It holds me to focus on one thing at a time. It forces me to create WORKING features and not put off testing. It removes the need for an open, nonlinear world and design that would be a nightmare to debug. It will let me enjoy the satisfaction of releasing something many times over! I'll try to release the first chapter on Game Jolt this Summer. It'll be the same Town section from the demo but with a lot of extra "juice" that finally encapsulates my complete vision of the expereince (some super cool stuff I'm really excited about!) The following chapters will come out at a regular, slow pace, so I hope you stick around and check in on me every so often. But with that, I declare this update over. Please disperse, I'll be back to posting again soon. Thanks, stay magical - Grant