I'm releasing Verily next week on Stingy Hat
I look forward to playing with it.
Is Our Boy Jack permanently on hold?
Unfortunately, it does look like
Our Boy Jack is indeed permanently on hold. I lost the majority of my work on it in one fell, virusey swoop, and I haven't looked back since. I still learned a lot from my time with it, so it isn't a total loss to me. But for anyone wanting to play it, well, it is a total loss for them.
On the bright side, it was just going to be a platformer prototype in much the same way
Verily is a tile-based RPG prototype, so it wasn't going to be much fun anyway. Additionally, I don't really even have anything to add to the platformer genre. Miyamoto I am not. It was mostly an exercise just to prove that I could do it.
That said, my morbid fascination with serial killers still exists, so I do very much want to bring Jack back at some point in some form or another. I had an idea of doing an oldschool point and click adventure game ala Monkey Island starring Jack and friends. I think having an insane-but-lovable serial killer as a main character and a bunch of naive and totally unaware supporting cast could lend itself well to the kinds of comedic situations and puzzles that Monkey Island type games need to be fun to play. We'll see.