Not too long ago I would have said Next Level Games, because from Punch-Out!! and Luigi's Mansion 2 it seemed like they were living the dream: making Nintendo games with creative freedom, some helpful guidance but not stifling control coming from up above... but then, they made Federation Force. Everything about it clashes with what I thought about NLG. The idea came down from Metroid Prime's
producer? Who thought that a good idea for a
game would be to expand on
the fiction by showing it from the perspective of
space marines? It's their most recent project, but
does not appear in their list of works on their website? Hmmmmmmmmmm......
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming NLG for anything here. I didn't play MPFF and it doesn't really look like a game I'd get into. Maybe it's fine but maybe so is Sonic and Final Fantasy and other trash I don't like. Even if it were a bottle of satan's pee I don't think it's their fault that it exists. I don't think it's something they're proud of. I think it was an order handed down from Nintendo that they followed to make some money. That's fine. There is nothing wrong with participating in a job that's way beneath you to afford to stay in business for the good ones. But it's a wake-up call that you can't deify a business or imagine it's a dream job.
Realistically it's way early for me to be thinking about where making games might take me. I've only
finished one, and it IS something, but hardly. I'm back onto working on my second one regularly. Just get a little bit done every day, work on whatever code is the current agenda for an hour a day, it's like anything else and the progress will stack up, that's what I'm doing. When I've done all I can do, I'll need a soundtrack (don't offer please, I have... not "plans" but "fantasies" and I'll deal with that as it comes). After it has one of those, I'll see if it meets Steam's monumental quality control standards, and publish it myself.
