I first prototyped this little light-cycle game almost thirteen years ago. Originally written in C# with XNA for Xbox 360, and later ported to Windows Phone, it was one of the first 'from scratch' games prototypes that I really enjoyed making. I showed the game running on my Windows Phone at an interview with a local games studio, and a couple of months later, I was working in the Games Industry, as a programmer at TickTock Games. Since then, my family has grown (I have five children), and I've worked on [url=https://martincaine.com/games/]dozens of games[/url] professionally. My enthusiasm and motivation for working on my own spare-time projects lessened, with only short bursts where I'd fire up the game to make changes. I made the decision to step away from XNA and rewrote the game from scratch in C++, transitioning it in to my own 'engine'. This engine has been used as a testbed to enhance my own skills and learn new platforms, porting it to run on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and Mobile devices. Much of the core game remained untouched while I worked on enhancing and optimising the underlying engine code. Throughout 2024 I've made a conscious effort to work on the game weekly, usually getting a few hours work done each weekend, usually, in our local Wetherspoons (British Pub), on a quiet Sunday morning. These dev sessions have renewed my enthusiasm and given me motivation to get the game out there for people to play. I also decided Early Access was the best fit for the game, as there's so much more I want to do with it, as well as ultimately bring the game to consoles and mobile, and plan to keep the community engaged and involved throughout development. I knew I would be demoing the game at GaMaYo in Wakefield on November 21st, so I set this date as my Early Access release date. No matter what, the game was coming out. So with a few days to go, I was working late in to the evenings to add a menu system in to the game, ensure all mazes were available to play, testing leaderboards, and ensuring the game flowed correctly. There are currently some small issues with Snake and Arena game modes (mainly to do with the local multiplayer for these modes), so I have removed them from the release build, but intend to work on these as a priority to get them live on Steam as quickly as possible (before the two week launch discount expires). So, yesterday, just before 12pm, after an all morning coding session, I finally packaged a new build. Uploaded it to steam, then hit the button in the back-end to set the game live. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//9696602/be335b4e8487030df3f6758ab784766198c37b6a.jpg[/img] That's it. Positron is now available to buy, here in Steam Early Access. We headed straight out to Wakefield after I set the game live, and set up our demo at GaMaYo. We had a great time, as it's always a good event for catching up with people, and for people to experience the game for the first time too. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//9696602/60fabb3ea2e5f54158279991e31bf6eee86b007d.jpg[/img] Updates to the game will be coming this weekend, and I plan to update frequently, as well as post a roadmap and todo list for development and game changes or enhancements. If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it either here on our Steam forums, or on our Discord channel: https://discord.com/invite/9AKEqcrbY3 Thanks for taking an interest in Positron, and I look forward to working with the community to develop it further :-) Martin Caine Retroburn