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<a href="/" class="undecorated">Colin McMillen</a>
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<h1 id="a-new-year-a-sneaky-new-project">A new year &amp; a sneaky new project</h1>
<p><em>Posted 2020-02-09.</em></p>
<p>I can&rsquo;t believe it&rsquo;s here so quickly, but: today marks a year since my last day at Google. That seemed like a good occasion to dust off this newsletter &amp; let you know what I&rsquo;ve been up to: making a videogame!</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m working on a stealth-based 2D platformer where you don&rsquo;t have to kill anyone unless you want to. It&rsquo;ll be possible to get through every level by sneaking and misdirection, but it&rsquo;ll require you to be careful and tactical to do so&hellip; and of course if that doesn&rsquo;t work out, you can always draw your swords and go in fighting! So far I&rsquo;ve given it &ldquo;Sneak&rdquo; as a codename, but that&rsquo;s definitely a placeholder until I can flesh out more of the world.</p>
<p>So far Sneak runs on PC &amp; Xbox, but I hope to add Switch and PS4 support within the next couple months. I&rsquo;m using a C# framework called MonoGame, which provides low-level graphics &amp; audio support across all these platforms. In order to write games for Switch or PS4, you need to apply to Nintendo &amp; Sony to get access to their platform-specific SDKs. So my first real milestone will be coming up with a compelling Game Design Doc &amp; gameplay videos so that they can (hopefully) be convinced that I&rsquo;m worth taking seriously. Wish me luck!</p>
<p>Sony won&rsquo;t even talk to anyone unless they&rsquo;re a Real Business (&amp; Nintendo kinda wants you to be too), so as of&hellip; yesterday, I&rsquo;m officially the founder of SemiColin Games LLC (and, for now at least, the only member&hellip;)</p>
<p>If you want to follow along, I have an extremely-placeholder website up at <a href="https://semicolin.games">semicolin.games</a> where you can sign up for Yet Another Newsletter if you like, and a Twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/SemiColinGames">@SemiColinGames</a> that would appreciate a follow. I&rsquo;ll probably set up a devblog with an RSS feed too eventually, but that&rsquo;s not quite ready yet. When it is, I&rsquo;ll send a quick update here.</p>
<p>I only got started in December &amp; a lot of my work so far has been on building infrastructure (and learning how to start a business), so I don&rsquo;t have any Extremely Compelling Gameplay Videos yet. Here&rsquo;s a short animated GIF for now. The <a href="https://twitter.com/mcmillen/status/1205164954728509440">bloopers on Twitter</a> might be more fun though. :)</p>
<p><img alt="Animation of a pixel-art character swinging a sword" src="/media/20200209-sneak.gif"><br>
(Art definitely not final!)</p>
<p>Thanks for following along with me on this adventure! Hopefully my next update will come more quickly, and be less wordy! I&rsquo;ve wanted to make videogames since I was Literally A Kid, so I&rsquo;m quite excited to finally be doing that full-time, and to hopefully share something good with all of you. When I&rsquo;m at a stage where I want alpha testers, I&rsquo;ll definitely be asking here first.</p>
<p>Thanks for your support!<br>
~ Colin (&amp; <a href="https://semicolin.games">SemiColin Games</a>)</p>
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