Update on the Future of Possession

Summary: Due to personal events I've decided to move on to working on new projects, and probably will not be releasing more content for Possession, though I will continue to fix bugs. If you want to follow what I'm doing, you can follow me on Twitter @vaughantay. I don't really post much, but any future projects I work on I will talk about there.

Full Post:

It's Possession's 1-year release anniversary, so now seems as good a time as any to say this.

For those of you who don't know, Possession is a one-person project. That one person is me, Taylor Vaughan. Someone very close to me died suddenly and unexpectedly a few months ago. This has impacted my life in a lot of ways but has also caused a serious decrease in my productivity; it's only recently I've even gotten back into working on game projects at all, and so far I've only been putting in a couple hours one day a week.
 
It may be a cliche, but something like that really does make you realize your time is finite. Making games isn't my full-time job. It's something I do because I enjoy it, a few hours a week I put in after work or on the weekends. Because of this, it takes me a long time to finish a game -- Possession took me nearly 6 years to make. I've got lots of ideas for things I want to make, so much so that even if I live to be 100 I'll never get to them all. For that reason, it just makes sense to me to move to a new project. Possession was neither a financial nor critical success, and it doesn't seem like it has a fan base who love it either (If I'm wrong and there's anyone who *is* a passionate fan, let me know!) - the consensus seems to be "fun for a while, but then time to move on." And I think it's fair for that to apply just as much to me as it does to the players. Although I previously said I wanted to work on adding new levels to the game, I just don't think it's something that really makes sense for me to do, or something I'd get much enjoyment out of at this point.

I understand if this news might be disappointing and some people might feel cheated (though I don't think there's many out there who will really care that much), but I considered Possession a finished game on release. The extra content I talked about making was only a potential bonus.
 
Now, I'm not abandoning the game entirely - I'll continue to fix bugs that are reported, and I may end up backporting some improvements I make to the engine (can't promise that, though). I'm not ready to announce what my next project is yet; I've got a couple ideas in mind I haven't fully settled on. Right now I've just been working adding features to the engine, like items, that'll be useful to any of them. So far, all the engine improvements I've been making are part of the public, open-source Roguelove project, so if you're interested in using it to make your own roguelike, or just to see what sort of things I'm adding, you can check it out at: https://github.com/vaughantay/roguelove/
 
If you want to follow what I'm doing, you can follow me on Twitter @vaughantay. I don't really post much, but any future projects I work on I will talk about there.