Solo Developer, Two Kids, and a Wacom Tablet: Creating The Abandoned Planet

Sure, here’s a reworked version of the content:

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Okay, so picture this: It’s me, juggling a full-time job, a couple of kids — one decided to show up right in the middle of game development, of course — while transforming a tiny corner of my Florida bedroom into ground zero for what became “The Abandoned Planet.” If you’re imagining chaos, you’re not far off. Think about trying to squeeze a Moleskine notebook on a desk smaller than a postage stamp, filled with doodles of tiny rooms and corridors. My toddler? Constantly “helping” by crawling over everything electronic. What I thought would be a quick one-year thing? Ha! Nearly three years later, here we are: solo coding marathons, sketching, animating, making music, and even dreaming up alien languages and a quirky base-7 number system. Yeah, I went there.

And every single pixel in this game — drawn on my trusty Wacom tablet. I basically lived in pixel-art land, frame-by-frame animating and creating this spine-tingling soundscape. It’s like if the 90s decided to redo itself but with a modern, sharper twist. Think retro four-way D-Pad navigation but with a snappy, smooth touch. You’re exploring an alien world, deciphering odd glyphs, picking up strange objects. It’s nostalgia – not the lame kind, the epic fun kind.

The thing is, there’s a ton to explore. We’re talking over 300 distinct locations spread across five acts. Little haunting cutscenes pop up now and then, not long enough to bore you but enough to suck you into the wild storyline. And hey, it’s fully voiced. Yep, there’s an English version and, wait for it, even a whole alien language! Talk about going all in.

In the broader picture, “The Abandoned Planet” is kind of a stand-alone within a larger journey that’s all Dexter Stardust: Adventures in Outer Space. Every quirky puzzle and cryptic scrawl? All roads lead back to that crazy bedroom setup I call an office, where predictability takes a backseat. If you’re in the mood for some lost civilization digging that doubles as a shout-out to the unpredictable ride of solo game crafting, hop on — this is for you.

Oh, and don’t get me started on when a wormhole drops an astronaut on a distant planet. But, where is everyone? How’s she getting back? The mystery unfolds in a 2D, first-person point-and-click realm, channeling the likes of Myst with a sprinkle of LucasArts’ glory days. You’ll get your fix of chunky, beautiful pixel art, fully voiced in multiple languages — seriously, there’s a bunch from English to Korean. Pretty neat, right?

So yeah, check it out if this sounds like your cup of chaos.