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The Cluster is finally released and available for free on Itch. It's a 2.5D exploration platformer set in an open world that's carefully procedurally planned and generated, and does a few interesting things I haven't yet seen in other games (check out the links for more info).

Here's a trailer:

My last blog post about The Cluster was in 2016 and titled "Development of The Cluster put on hold", and by that I meant put on hold indefinitely.

At that time I had reached the conclusion that I had to give up my ambition of releasing The Cluster in the form I had envisioned. That would have required way more variety and features to be implemented, and due to a variety of burdens detailed in the post, that was not really viable after all, due to various details of the game's design and implementation.

The context for this decision was that I had envisioned The Cluster to be a commercial title, and it was my primary game development project at the time. (Back then I was a game developer only in my spare time.) I wanted to switch my focus to different projects that were more viable to be able to be released as commercial games, specifically Eye of the Temple, which has since been completed and released to decent success, and The Big Forest (working title), which I'm working on these days.

Still, I had put an incredible amount of work into The Cluster over many many years (going back to an initial prototype in Game Maker in 2003!), so I never managed to get reconciled with the idea of it never being available for others to see and play. Especially since, like I mentined, it does some things I haven't seen elsewhere. So at some point I decided I wanted to release it for free sooner or later, as I also mentioned in this 2022 blog post. Not in the ambitious form originally envisioned, but in the limited but fully playable state it had already reached, plus a bit of polish to smooth out rough edges - for example adding robust gamepad support.

And so, between 2016 and now I returned now and then to work on The Cluster for a little while, polishing it, fixing bugs, adding gamepad support, adding a settings menu, adding interaction prompts for how the controls work, and lastly, getting a round of playtesting by volunteers and addressing feedback from them. At the beginning of 2024 I said I wanted to get it out this year, and well, now it's finally out.

The graphics are nothing special and the gameplay can get a bit repetitive over time, but still, for people who are content exploring a big world in search of artefacts, where there is a clear structure and purpose to the world layout, the game can be fun for a few hours, and provide an experience different from other games out there.

It's also a showcase game for my open-source framework for layer-based infinite procedural generation, LayerProcGen. Oh yeah, I released that a few months ago, which I guess I never blogged about!

Anyway, the game is free, so give it a try. And if you do, let me know what you think! :)