Hello everyone.

Second post of the blog. Exciting times.

I’m not going to lie to you, I could be procrastinating and using this as an excuse to make it feel like productive procrastination but hey - here we are. Today, I’m going to talk about what’s been going on right now at Mid AF.

I’ve been torn mentally about how much and what specifically to share here in terms of what we’re working on - as many of you know with games, there’s a lot of secrecy and red tape; certain publishers want discretion and all that jazz. But I also want to do things differently.

Sadly, I can’t be an open book and reveal ALL. Part of me wishes I could but in reality, whilst Mid AF exists to break moulds, there are certain rules we still have to play by.

But at the same time, I’m happy to talk about what I can - as long as you promise not to get too attached to the things discussed here and you promise you won’t share the information around. Treat this as our secret wink-wink at each other. If info doesn’t leak from this blog, I’ll be able to share more .etc.

I assume the fact you’re still reading, you’re agree to those terms. Excellent.

So at the moment, there are two projects in-flight over here. I don’t want to call them a minor project and a major project but one is definately different in size and scope to the other.

I’m not sure if you’ve had the chance to check out the main Mid AF website yet. If you have and you’ve read the goodies on there, you’ll know that we do things a little differently (for better or worse) over here at Mid AF HQ.

We don’t plan to add value to the business in the conventional sense. Basically, to sum it up into a few crude words, we’re not interested in growing Mid AF as a business. We’re not looking for shareholders, or to make the company itself valuable. No, Mid AF exists to put its earned value into the games it makes.

The reason we’ve taken this approach is because we’re here to make games, not make a company worth millions that we can sell to some big banker somewhere. We’re here to make games and our value is not in the business but in the games we make.

But that makes our job a little harder. If we’re not actively seeking funding rounds, investment .etc. then how the heck are we going to fund our games? It’s not like they’re planned to be small indie games, we’re talking about real, premium games. How do get those funds if the business has no value?

Our approach to the answer is to dogfood our success. The intention is to make a smaller game, test some things out, and the income of that will help the ‘major’ project and give it the much needed funding it requires.

Ballsy approach? Possibly. But it’s something everyone over here feels really passionately about. We don’t want to grow a business, we want to make cool things. And this is a potential avenue to explore to allow us to do that with all our freedoms intact.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we won’t talk to publishers or anything like that - far from it. It would be near impossible to put a major game together without assistance. What it DOES mean is that we can better prepare for those talks and the potential publishers we hope to one day speak to will be investing in the game itself, not Mid AF as a business.

Who knows if it’ll pan out. I guess there is only one way to find out - by doing.

That was a lot of words and confusing plans, so thank-you for sticking with me. The TL;DR is we are making a smaller game to help inject some finances and tests into the much larger project.

That’s the gist of the current M.O. Now, that doesn’t mean the smaller game has to be bad - not at all. But it does have to be significantly small.

The parameters for the game is that it has to be small, cheap to make but it has to have the Mid AF DNA in it - something that only we can make.

We’ve been spitballing for ages what that small game should be. There have been endless prototypes and tests. We’re talking a whole year of on-again off-again experiments to see if we could find that secret sauce of a condensed Mid AF experience that we’re happy with.

The smaller project also has the unfortunate role of being the first one to introduce Mid AF to the world so that little small game has a lot of pressure on it to succeed.

“So what is the small game?” I hear you ask.

In time, we’ll go deeper into it. That’s kind of what this blog is for. To talk about stuff like that. But I can’t give ALL in a single blog post - that’s how you play the blogging meta, right?

Just kidding. For now, the idea is still coming together but code is in-engine and we have a direction we’re heading in.

It originally started as a toolset for another small game idea but then we thought; “Why don’t we just gamify the tool itself?” rather than let the scope-creep consume us?

So that’s what we’ve ended up doing; gamifying the toolset we built for the small project which kept ballooning in size.

I hope to share some more details in the upcoming blog posts, maybe a cheeky video or images. Who knows. Let me know what you’d rather see. But that’s what we’re currently doing.

I think it’s safe to say at the moment that the “small” (or rather “smaller”) game is in production right now. Code is in engine, builds have been made. We’re past the prototype phase and into actually making it. Pretty exciting.

The bigger project, the one the small game exists for is in pre-production. It’s been in the oven for quite a while now and it has changed form many, many times. But in recent months, it has calmed down a lot and started to take a shape I’m really happy with.

I’ve been putting together a design direction pitch to take to the others to see if they are happy with the new direction and I have been putting together a small vertical slice of what it can be. But for now, the smaller title takes priority as it directly benefits the larger game.

I’m really, really excited about the bigger game and I hope in the future, we can look back and read these blog posts together and laugh at how impossibly far away it feels right now. But we here over at Mid AF have spent a long time on it and have a long journey ahead with it and we’re all super excited. I’ll keep you posted as development deepens on it.

In other news, I’ve spent the past couple days getting this blog and the Mid AF website setup. They’re nothing fancy but the hopefully get the job done. If people want to look for us, they’ll hopefully have a place to go.

I didn’t want to overdo the websites; especially seeing as I’m not a web developer. But they serve their purpose for the time being and I’m happy enough with them. I think as the company matures and people start taking it more seriously, the websites will get facelifts and dedicated people attached to them to improve and maintain them.

For now, they are two simple sites I’ve duct-taped together just to have something here. It was a fun distraction but that’s exactly what it was in reality - a distraction.

I need to get back into the small game and start putting more of the pieces into place. Hopefully in the next blog posts I can provide actual details about it and guage interest in its direction .etc. It’s a neat little idea I think y’all will love.

Until then, as always, thanks for reading and good morning, evening, noon or night, or whatever it is where you are and I’ll see you in the next post.

Cheers, Midafir.

Updated: