I just got an email from Randy Glover. I’ve got potentially GREAT news!
Randy Glover is the guy who owns the rights to Jumpman, which I licensed (for free) for Jumpman: 2049. He was also looking at doing Jumpman II: 3D at the same time. Well, as time went on, he worked on Jumpman II less and less, and finally somewhat dropped the project for multiple reasons.
Well the other night I was listening to Motley Crew’s Kick Start My Heart and I had a visit from The Muse. I suddenly envisioned what 3D games *SHOULD* be like instead of the pitifully shallow things they are now. There’s nothing wrong with shallow gameplay really – it’s not that big of a deal in some ways. There are good for many things.
I always said I really didn’t want to do 3D games because they tend to be so shallow and ‘Me To’ in development and gameplay. Anyway, my attack of the muse showed me a different way. I have seen the light 😉 Originally, the promise behind 3D games was immersion – the ability to be totally immersed into a 3D world where you ARE the hero, but have the action and adventure levels of most movies.
But lets face it – if movies were produced like games, there would be no Hollywood. It’s rare that there’s a game that you can set back and watch and actually be interested while someone else is playing. I have a design for a multi-million dollar budget game called Titans that would fix that – but it’s entirely multi-player, and you could call the focus more like a sporting match, not like a movie. Jumpman II, in my vision, would finally break that.
Anyway, so I told Randy that I had an idea. Well, we haven’t made a deal on it yet, but, he’s willing to license Jumpman to me again, and have me take over the whole Jumpman II concept.
I’ve got a while before I start anything really important with Jumpman II – it’s all idea work for now. Probably sometime in January 2003 I’ll begin development of Jumpman II. I’m guestimating right now that development is going to be 12 months if I’m still at CEI. 8 Months if I ain’t and the game company can support me. I’ll have to figure out a way to shave a month and a half off of it, so it is released Nov 15, 2003 (that way it’s around for Christmas. Jesus – I’m even thinking of market target dates these days…) If it happens the way I would like it to, Midnight Ryder Technologies will go from being a small time game developer to a company people watch for the next release and a small industry voice. (Still takes multiple successes to become a strong voice. And it takes becoming a real publisher to become a Voice with a capitol V 😉
This is definitely a good day 😉