Omegaland is now available! I wrote this about its history:
Omegaland has been a long-term side project for me. I’ve been very lucky to get to work on some big projects like The Talos Principle, Serious Sam 4, and Phoenix Point, but sometimes I missed the strange freedom we had when making Flash games. Everything was extremely low-budget, we had severe size constraints, but somehow the whole atmosphere of games then seemed more relaxed. I got to make games that were both fun and weird, like Alphaland or Traitor, and audiences on sites like Newgrounds and Kongregate were surprisingly positive even when those games contained some unusual material here and there. I wanted to make something in that spirit again. I took inspiration from various old platform games that I enjoyed – not just the obvious console classics (like Super Mario Land 2 on the Game Boy), but also freeware games that I loved back in the day, like Happyland Adventures (also made with very few resources, but so much fun). In the end, what I really hoped to accomplish was to make the kind of game you might stumble upon at random, get because it’s really cheap, and end up enjoying more than you’d expected.
As the name implies, this has a connection to Alphaland, but you don’t need to have played Alphaland to enjoy this game.
I must admit that I have no idea how to market Omegaland, because I genuinely hate the hype that surrounds everything now – I think it creates an incredibly unpleasant atmosphere, in which the games themselves end up disappearing from the discussion, and all we end up talking about is the marketing. And it’s incredibly unhealthy from the artistic side of things too, this constant pressure to sell yourself, to make yourself and your “product” look cool. Well, Omegaland isn’t cool. It isn’t going to change your life or kill all other platformers. I think it’s pretty good, but at the same time I’d much rather see people approaching it in a relaxed sort of way than trying to convince them it’s the Next Big Thing.
And if you find interesting stuff in there, well, then let that be part of the experience, not the marketing. Enjoy!
