Dead Man's News #01: A Lonesome Dev in the West
Howdy fellow gunslingers!
The release of Colt Canyon is around the corner – I will reveal the date soon! With this update I want to show you who is actually working on the game: Surprise! It’s just me. So, who is ‘me’? My name is Jonathan Mannshoven, born in 1996 in Hamm, Germany.
I first started making 'games' while still in school and fell in love with the GameMaker Engine from YoYo Games. And so, I spent a lot of time creating crappy little games that nobody played except for myself and close classmates. But at some point, I had the crazy idea that maybe other people might enjoy my stupid games too.
I was never a huge fan of narrative or story-driven games. In particular games that force the player to sit passively through endless cut scenes, scripted events or dialogs with only little action going on. I love simple but well executed games with focus on gameplay and game feel and with sandbox elements or at least a lot of freedom and options. I am trying to make games that don't need much explaining but explain themselves after playing a couple of times. Games that don't constantly take you out of the action to explain things, show dialogs or cutscenes or make you do grind for something and don't allow you to enjoy things just because you didn't spend enough time in the game yet.
It's all about the gameplay over here.
So in 2013 I created the alias Retrific to start sharing some of my games online. Over time I developed a bunch of prototypes but there weren’t many people who enjoyed playing my games as much as I enjoyed making them… Anyway, when I reached the age of 18, with Steam Greenlight still around I felt confident enough to publish my first small commercial game or at least put it in on Greenlight and see where it's going.
To my surprise, my No-Combat Roguelike Platformer “Just Get Through” was greenlit rather quickly and released 2015 on Steam with positive reviews. A couple of smaller commercial and non-commercial games followed before I decided to pursue a career in Game Development. I started studying Game Programming at the Cologne Game Lab in 2016.
In the first semester at the Cologne Game Lab, in game design class everyone got two random keywords to develop a game concept from. For me it was ‘Help’ and ‘Cowboy’. I created a small game prototype called “Help”, that I then released for free on itch.io and which later became the game you now know as Colt Canyon. At first, I had no plans to make a full game from the prototype, especially because I didn’t have much time anyway. But...
A couple of semesters and a fair share of interest in the prototype later, it became clear that I wanted to make a full game based on it. I always wanted to make a full and polished roguelike shooter anyway, just never felt confident enough. Now in the final semester and probably thousands of home office hours later Colt Canyon is getting bigger and more polished every day. Much bigger than I planned; which is why it also took longer than I expected, but it will be worth the invested time. I promise! It really is my pride and joy.
Halfway through the development I met my publisher Headup, which allowed me to think bigger, get some help from freelancers and even get a fellow student on board. And Headup also gave me the opportunity to make this the first game of mine that will also be released on consoles. (Which is a really cool thing!)
Okay, that's it for now! Keep your eyes peeled for the Colt Canyon launch date! Make sure to join the discord to discuss Colt Canyon even before release and to be one of the first to know the launch date!
Fun Fact: Yes, most if not all of the stuff you see on screenshots is designed, drawn and implemented by a single person, namely myself.
All the best and stay healthy!
Jonathan
https://store.steampowered.com/app/940710