Nighthawks!

 Ben! Why haven't you been posting about Gilt?! Why isn't it done?! I wanted to play it!

Well, firstly, I'm an idiot and designing a game is really easy, but designing a *good* game is hard, and then you realise your game is bad so you have to cut half the stuff you built and make it good and that's been taking ages.

But also I had to finish my work on:

(in case the picture doesn't load, this is the cover art for a game called Nighthawks and it looks amazing and you'd have been very impressed if you could actually see it. If you *can* see it I am fully confident that you're very impressed, even if it's just by the fact that you can see a picture drawn by some guy in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia through the magic of the internet, regardless of the quality or nature of that picture itself)

Loads of game developers will tell you that the last 10% of making a game takes 50% of the work or some stuff like that and this is obviously absolute nonsense, but it was still a fair chunk of work getting Nighthawks finished up and in a state where I would be okay with people looking at it. I drew some of this stuff 8 years ago, and I was absolutely way out of my comfort zone when I started working on this game. Of course, as my waterskiing mentor would tell me when I stopped falling off my skis: "If you're not falling, you're not pushing yourself hard enough".

The game took ages to make, and I wish I could do it all differently, but it's a great feeling to have the game done. It comes out in a couple of days, and it's on Steam unless it's been banned again for being flagged as a porno game. Hard to know these days.

Couldn't have done this project without the support of plenty of folks, but Ivan Ulyanov lent me his eyes and his paintovers way more times than it is reasonable to ask a man to do so. His name got snuck into the poster in the top right corner there, which makes me delighted. It deserves to be there.

If you were a backer, or wish-lister, or just a general well-wisher, thank you so much for your support and patience. This one was a long, long project. Kudos to Richard to not giving up despite all of the normal heartache of making a game come to life and then some.

Okay, I'm back to making Gilt now. Here's a really good bit I jotted down in my sketchbook this morning. I know, it's epic as Hel.

(calligraphy masters don't come at me, I wrote this lettering out extremely quickly without any reference, it's a speculative fiction game, it's fine to get lettering wrong in my sketchbook okay)