Jimminy Studios was born in early 2018 when I created a game to attach to a job application. That game is Black Witch, currently available on Itch. It is a Twine interactive fiction game.
From 2018 up until 2021 or so I was testing the waters and doing some implementation work for a passion project.
The medium (visual novel) I chose for that project meant a lot of work for a below-average reward, and I canned the project.
In late 2021 I began researching my idea to create an astral trip simulation game, and on January 1st, 2022 I began working towards creating a proof of concept.
Solo Dev Phase Thoughts
I developed Astral Trip Sim as a solo developer since 1/1/2022, for two entire years, uninterruptedly.
Manning all the positions that developing a game entails gave me a knowledge of the process that I couldn’t have fathomed beforehand.
Astral Trip Sim not being by any means my first game, I thought that by using a toolkit that has most of what I needed to develop the game alone I could be able to deliver at least an alpha version after one year of constantly working on it.
That was a gross miscalculation, especially taking into account that the first three months I was very disoriented and I had to learn how to use the toolkit.
Watershed events during the two years of solo development were:
- Design, implement, test, debug iterations
- Game optimization missions
- Integral bug-crushing operations
- Enemy, spells, gear, items, skills, and dungeon design
Fast forward from the first quarter of 2022 to now, the game’s vertical slice at the design and implementation level is pretty much ready, and running stable and generally error-free.
Many things can be considered proprietary mechanics systems for the game that are yet to be designed and implemented but they’re less than half of the total count of the game’s proprietary systems.
Other original systems and features only need to be implemented, their design phase being already completed.
Jimminy Studios Studio Current Status
I’m not comfortable showing the game to the public at large yet. The reason is that it’s all built with royalty-free graphic assets.
The vertical slice and closed alpha versions of the game will be ready to be downloaded and tested (only by backers) when I get funds to pay for about 3% to 5% of the entire game in these departments:
- Story
- Music
- Cell-shaded Art
The studio continues to be a solo outfit but at the moment of this writing, I started to perform team-building tasks.
Five Years Into the Future
Jimminy Studios democratizes the video game creation process.
We do it by including backers and players of the game from day one as agents in the shaping of the final product.
I have faith that by 2027 the studio will be known as a provider of high-quality independent video games. Also, as an outfit that has perfected a service model, and gets and gives feedback from and to its community.
When the studio becomes a registered we will not discard the good practices we adopted during the time of our indy roots. The idea is to stay true to those roots.
To achieve that objective we will:
- Include Jimminy’s community members as core advisors for games
- Use crowdfunding models to fund part or whole productions
- Hire team members as independent contractors
- Keep the studio 100% digital without physical locations
- Never sell out (like Lucasarts did), or otherwise betray our crowd
- Develop service and distribution models and continue to grow as an indy video game studio
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