I thought I would post an update letting everyone know what I have been up to over the last few weeks, since all of my posts have been either tutorials or adding to my portfolio. After enjoying a great 18 months at Substance, I decided to go full time freelance since the beginning of 2012. The adventure so far has been a success and a massive learning curve. Going freelance has made me change my attitude to work, broadened my development experience, and taught me invaluable life lessons. I owe the a lot of thanks to a lot of people over the last few months, particularly a great developer called Jonny Frodsham and everyone at magneticNorth.

Going full time freelance has given me the financial freedom to create 2 indie games as my next projects. I am really excited to work on my own titles again after releasing Cowlorful with Jimp, which has been played over 5 Million times now.

I will be creating a game with my friend Ewan Brock which I have posted previously about before called Davey Jones: Lost Souls. The game was postponed by the birth of a baby, marriage, moving house and going freelance but we are now committed to releasing the title and work has been going really well so far. I have completely rewritten the engine from ground up and the title is about 6 weeks away from release. Davey Jones: Lost Souls has a really nice feel to the artwork and experience at the minute, and I cant wait to hear what people think about it!

Another game that has got me excited is a as of yet unnamed RPG again with Jimp. I grew up addicted to Final Fantasy 7, probably the most important RPG of all time. It has influenced and tugged at my heart strings more than any title ever has. Final Fantasy 7 was the first game to make me realise that games could induce an emotional response from a person, and become more than simply a way to kill a few hours. In the same way that movies have other the years evoked countless tears or a laughter, Final Fantasy 7 proved that games could create that kind of emotional response too. As well as this, Final Fantasy 7 contained a battle system to die for. It was simple enough to learn the basics, but it required hours of dedicated refining to perfect and a lot of the bosses required custom configurations to beat.

There were many things that made Final Fantasy 7 great, and better writers than myself have tried to put their experiences playing this title into words. I completely understand that our game will be well below the quality of that masterpiece. However, I am extremely excited to work on a project that will be of a similar nature. After spending so many years being a fan of these games, it feels really good to hopefully contribute something back to a genre which has given me so much personal enjoyment.

I look forward to the next few weeks, and am really excited about working on 2 great projects. If anyone wants to become a BETA tester for either the unamed RPG or Davey jones, please get in touch, we would love to hear from you! You can contact me at craig [ at ] grindheadgames.com and we will send you versions to test during development, a big thank you and a wet soppy kiss. If anyone has a spare 5 minutes, we would be more than grateful for your help and I look forward to hearing from you.

There will also be an update for this site pushed live soon which will make it slightly nicer to use. The website also needs some general maintenance, and as there is a drop in traffic over the weekend this seems the ideal time to do it. Expect some downtime this weekend, but a much faster service by Monday. I apologise in advance for any disruption.

Thanks for reading this long post!

Craig.