hpowellsmith

End of 2023 roundup

Added 2023-12-31 15:00:06 +0000 UTC

Thank you for all your support this year. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it and how much it literally supports me to enable me to carry on working full-time on making the games I love.

This year was my first year of mostly working with Choice of Games. There was some other contract work, but CoG was the main thing going on. I was nervous going in, and it's been more successful than I could have possibly hoped even in an awful year for the field of games at large. And I've written... so much. What I did on Honor Bound, the tail-end of the Royal Affairs beta back in January, and the Royal Affairs epilogue alone was over 330,000 words, and I can't easily count up what I did on Elite Status. It's been a huge year!

Creme de la Creme and Blood Money now both have hints and cheats to help you find the obscure paths you really want;
Creme de la Creme, Blood Money, and Noblesse Oblige now all have save and restore points (so do Elite Status and Royal Affairs, but they had it from launch);
Elite Status: Platinum Concierge, for which I wrote and edited additional content, came out after being dormant for many years;
King of the Castle, the brilliant medieval monarch multiplayer game I worked on last year, came out and got 4 stars in NME;
I started and wrote seven chapters of Honor Bound which has been a total treasure to work on, and I've been learning huge amounts from it and falling in love with the setting and characters;
and of course Royal Affairs, having been in progress for three years, came out into the world. I'm absolutely overwhelmed by all the love: it was such a long journey, through such tumultuous times personally and historically, but making Royal Affairs was a joy and I was so overjoyed to be able to finally share it. I've really enjoyed revisiting the characters for the expanded epilogue that's coming soon in 2024, and I hope you do too!