Making games and documenting the development process.

Hi! I'm J. Kyle Pittman, independent game developer and one half of Minor Key Games along with my twin brother David (Eldritch, NEON STRUCT). I've been working in games for a little over eight years, both as a AAA developer of titles like Borderlands 2 and more recently as a solo-hobbyist-turned-full-time-indie. I've been making indie PC games since 2008, and last October, I released Super Win the Game, a retro-themed platformer and the sequel to my freeware hit You Have to Win the Game.

I'm currently working on a pair of games called Gunmetal Arcadia and Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. These are companion pieces, developed concurrently, utilizing shared code and content and set within the same fiction, but emphasizing different avenues of play. Gunmetal Arcadia is a game I've dreamed of making for years; a marriage of classic action-adventure platforming and short-form structure that respects the player's time and encourages limitless replayability. Gunmetal Arcadia Zero is smaller in scope, designed in the style of classic action games, and will serve as a narrative prequel and a more realistic step forward in terms of my production process relative to previous games. You can find out more details about the design and motivation for Zero at the Gunmetal Arcadia development blog.

One of my primary goals with this project is to be as transparent and immediate as possible during its development. To this end, I have been maintaining a weekly development blog since Gunmetal Arcadia's inception, and in June, I began recording weekly progress update videos to complement these. With your help, I'd like to make live development streams a part of my regular schedule as well, and I intend to publish more in-development builds of both games for my patrons on the road to release.

I love having the freedom and flexibility to document my entire development process this way, and I hope my output will be inspiring and illuminating to players and fellow devs alike. But this content comes at a cost: it takes time to make, and that's time taken away from my development schedule. That's time I'm not spending actively getting these games closer to shipping. So to help mitigate those recurring costs of producing supplemental content on a regular basis, I'm turning to crowdfunding. And if this is successful, it's easy to imagine I would continue this process into the future, to document the development of whatever is next after these games. (And likewise, after Gunmetal Arcadia and Zero have both launched, all reward tiers would be updated to reflect comparable rewards for a future project.)

I'd encourage you to check out gunmetalarcadia.com — read through the archives, watch some episodes of Let's Make Gunmetal Arcadia, take one of my early test builds for a spin. If you like what you see and you'd like to help me continuing producing this sort of content, please consider supporting my Patreon campaign!