Esperanto

[DrMike2000]

Hey people!

I'm ready to announce that, (surprise surprise), I'm making a superhero game!

Some of you helped test our Adventureverse, which was a joint commercial venture between me and some rather wonderful business partners. That project wound down due to lack of funding a few years ago.

Esperanto is just me, in pure punk rock/modder mode!
I'm making the best superhero game I can in my own sweet time, in my three day weekends while I work on commercial projects as Tech Director of a AAA games studio during the week.

It's a little bit Freedom Force, with comic style cutscenes.
It's a little bit City of Heroes/Champions Online in the build system, XP grinding and interlocking story arc system. I'll have LAN style multiplayer so you can team up with friends and play together
It's intended to be VERY custom character friendly. You make a character, they get woven into the story more than FF ever allowed me to do.

It will eventually be a commercial indie product on Steam, maybe releasing late 2027?

Find out more at gamesfromthelifestar.com, where I'll be journaling the game's development.

If anyone fancies a play, shoot me a friends request on Discord at @drmike2000 and I'll add you to my server where I'm putting up links to the build before I get my act together with Steam.
I'm not quite ready to show the world yet, but have gathered a few friends from my local game dev community to gather feedback. And I think that should include anyone from here too, which is where the journey that lead to this project all started.

And I've posted this in Mods because it's my ancestral home.
(Feel free to move it if you wish, admins.)

[BentonGrey]

Dr. Mike!  This sounds really cool!  I'm sorry that your last project didn't take off, but this sounds like a great new idea.  I hope I can check it out!

[DrMike2000]

Thanks, Benton!

You know what? I'll drop the links here for anyone who doesn't want to mess around with Discord. It's not really my preferred platform but it works well for what I'm doing here.

So the latest build (#5) is here: Just unzip it and run the .exe.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ajrpDKWzpBrlNQOqWsYrwH6ypAYbm-I5/view?usp=drive_link

And the state of the game currently is covered in this document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bde_psgMCUIYP-kPzh1oc12E3vdIL3OIqCtnWMe9ryc/edit?usp=drive_link


And no worries that the old project didn't take off - it lead to this one, and I learned a lot of things and made some friends along the way.

That's life as a creator really. Your published body of work is always the tip of a much bigger iceberg full of prototypes, ideas, sketches and things that never quite took off for one reason or another. I explained all this to a couple of student groups the other week at the game dev college where I used to teach, and still drop by for a guest lecture every year. And talked about the Freedom Force mods as part of me extended body of work besides all the commercial games, and how important they were to me.