tower fantasy; or can we release a game, an album, and a zine in a month?

tower fantasy is being released on january 20 2020, as a game, album, and lil booklet

i first started working on it in the winter of 2018, which is almost two years ago.

i started it while following youtube tutorials about multiplayer first person shooters and procedurally generated landscapes while visiting cat in chicago.  

here she is frolicking glitchily:

i put the game down: i was too busy with freelance contracts, and we had recently started gigco: escape the gig economy, which was foremost in my mind. 

tower fantasy really reminds me of that time in my life, riding the all night bus between chicago and toronto, working on my laptop, the orange michigan highway floodlights pulsing by my window.

opening up old projects  is opening up an old version of yourself. 

coping with code i wrote when i was in my prehistoric period as a programmer is all deciding what's worth fixing and what improvements you sacrifice because untangling the spaghetti code would take too much time.

i'd say im in the late neolithic age of coding now.

and i'm trying to do this fast, it seems like the only way to get noticed on these cursed platforms is to go for quantity. 

impale thyself upon the barricades of content

so for the first foray onto itch.io i'm resuscitating an old game that hopefully gets some mileage from the design, by cat, and the procedurally infinite content.

for music in the game, i've used some tracks that were generated by a markov chain in max/msp, a node based coding interface. with the gracious help of ben, i will be releasing those tracks on itch and bandcamp.

finally the game has an element to it that is essayistic and wordy, if i mix that with some images i can release a zine, right?

real question is, if we release a dynamic variety of content, will people pay us for our labour?

we're releasing this in one month but i would love to send you a copy of the game to try !

- jonathan