Thoughts on Coffee Quest 5/6

Working on Coffee Quest FPS has really got me thinking about giving my cursed Coffee Quest 5 project another go. I suppose cursed is really not quite the right word, but I have started on CQ5 a number of times in the past only to have the project go to the wayside as other things came along to eat my time. Needless to say, paying work always takes precedence over my game development hobby. As much as I would like to be able to turn my hobby into something that will pay the bills, I lack the proper marketing skills and tend to work on a large number of smaller projects instead of one really large project. I am trying to remedy the later problem but my twelve months of doomsday project just was something I had to do so my plans were derailed (and the games took a lot longer to code than I anticipated). Still, Coffee Quest 6 is a game that could work on something like the iPad and Nexus 7 and it is large enough of a game that I could justify charging money for.

For those who are unfamiliar with my Coffee Quest series, it started out as a Java game written for browsers. I drew up a roadmap of games that would lead to the ultimate role-playing game. This was broken into 9 games with the last 5 games being broken into a large number of episodes. The first game was simply getting a 3D maze working in Java (which at the time was a new language to me). Next came monsters, then multiple-levels and proper inventory. Coffee Quest 4 was the first true RPG featuring magic and more of a story.

Coffee Quest 5 was going to be a multi-part story that added NPCs and Stores to the game. Coffee Quest 6 was going to be a huge continent spanning epic with the player in control of a party of characters. CQ7 through 9 was more  of a 3 part story arch with no planned elements other than the vague idea of taking advantage of all the cool technologies that would appear when I finally got around to creating the game. Needless to say, the browser technology kind of stagnated until recently and Java has been replaced with JavaScript. This is something I could never have imagined happening.

I still have a few months of work to do before I can even consider taking another stab at a large-scale game. Coffee Quest is still in my heart so it is a project I would like to do but I suspect as soon as I get into the project something else will come along. Hopefully a high-paying project that will occupy far too much of my time. Still, it might be worth another shot and perhaps this time the games will see the light of day. As someone who isn't that big of a FPS fan, it would be rather surprising if a FPS is the catalyst that finally resulted in CQ6.