The plan was build an anthology of small digital games and toys, a sort of tasty and flavorful brain soup, starting with Numerologist. Having done some digging and thinking and building, I’m finding that Numerologist isn’t such a small thing after all. As a pitch, it sounds easy. As a real-world thing, there are loads of critically important details, all of which will take time and care if we are to have something that we will be proud of. Having learned this lesson, we have two options.
  1. Continue with development on Numerologist, and aim to create a standalone toy.
  2. Go back to the drawing board and ‘storm up some much smaller ideas, small enough that they are actually suitable for an anthology.
We’re going with Option B. One of my personal aims has always been to go for quality over quantity. An anthology makes more entrepreneurial sense, as something that would more quickly showcase our skills, and more quickly bring a financial return on our temporal investment. Despite the fact that Mollindustria has been admirably successful with the anthology model, I just don’t feel good about it. It’s not my deal. So. Numerologist it is. Having decided to go forward with a non-trivial project, why not then return to Don’t Rain On My Parade? Well, that one is an even bigger project. Numerologist is a stretch, but still within the realm of possibility at this time. It is a solid, project-management middle ground. At this mid-point of summer, I’ve invested roughly 120 hours into Numerologist. For comparison, Sprout took 250 hours of my time – for programming and publishing, not counting the time Jeff put into game design and graphic art. Matter in Space also took roughly 250 hours of my time (for game design, storyboarding, and writing; not counting the time from the software developers). At maybe 20% complete, Numerologist will be the biggest digital project yet for Mindful Mammoth. Yesterday, I took some time to re-learn some video capture and editing tools, and record a short snippet of gameplay. Then I started having second thoughts. I think I’m not quite ready to make it public. I did, however, share the current super-early build as a behind-the-scenes for $2+ Patrons. So, I’m going to leave things here. Numerologist is happening, but behind-the-scenes for now. If you’re particularly curious, ping me, and I’ll share a little more, on the DL. As an extra special thanks to those of you who supported us at the $10/month level and above, I’ll be sending you a printed page from the Numerologist design doc, cleverly folded into an origami animal. Slightly-secret ideas, in animal form, seems appropriate for a mathematical creature creator, right? Thank you all for your help, support, and partnership on this rocky and quixotic quest to build a better world through play. It’s a road with no end, and a fair number of hardships, but absolutely worthwhile, and much better with company. Thank you, Tim