'Isola' is Italian for island.
It's also the first five letters of 'isolated' or 'isolation'.
This game's story is in large part
about isolation, and about the sort
of gradual self-delusion that tries
to rebrand a creeping loneliness as 'solitude' or as a thing of beauty. Relevant today? Yes.
But the story of a prolonged voyage and an escalating mass of lies and delusional agendas
as the crew slowly lose their minds... has yet to become a finished game 15 years later.
The process of getting this game going anywhere, perhaps, has been as deluded as the characters in its story. The only game with a worse unraveling was the ill-fated 'Traveler's Engima' which got to a roughly 90% completion before the software used to make it was officially discontinued after over a year of zero updates.
Sure, I *could* finish that ancient mess, but the dev software doesn't run on anything but Windows 98 through XP, and the output won't run on anything past XP either. The only hope *that* still has is to redo the entire game in a new game engine. I'm unsure if it's worth it given that game's messy narrative flaws.
The following few years were full of well-intentioned bunny trails where Scott tried to make a thing happen for me as a 'game developer' who could make a living doing that - with failing results - Galilee Games was a second attempt which emerged after I conceded I could not make Isola as a mobile game as he wanted it to be, and Isola going awry, was followed by a year of work led by Scott that ended in a little Christian game that was rejected by Apple and was never even submitted to Google, it's just there as freeware on the GalileeGames site alongside some art merch that has yet to sell even once a decade later. His third try was nonPareil Institute, which was a waste of two years of my life.
The core design of Isola dates back to 2007. There's always been a sort
of artifice or uncanniness, and a
sort of beautiful loneliness in the
puzzle-adventure genre, or at least
in first-person 'Myst-likes' though
few would make the dark flip side of it a central theme. I personally love the idea of a game where the style is superficially appealing and then the cracks start showing under it all, and it's entirely recontexualized by the end as something sad and dark and terrible, indeed far more so than in Scott's truncated and simplified version of the story. Scott's a great father. He is a kind, generous person who also knows almost ZERO about game design from a game player's viewpoint.
So finally, after three lengthy tries, Scott sort of gave up and accepted that I, despite my evident art skill and enthusiasm, had no future as a successful game developer or digital artist. Or at least, that he couldn't will it to happen.
It's that moment of 'hands off' when he let me do my own thing, when he got focused on other efforts like helping with my sister Katie's new children, that my income actually started growing slowly but steadily.
Not that I am a 'success' mind you. I've yet to make over $10k so far in a single year, but I'm edging closer to that target, and ideally within a couple years I'll be earning enough to cease assistance from both my parents and the small but still ongoing disability payments still coming in via the govt. I've applied for jobs, found myself unemployable (seemingly blacklisted for various reasons - mainly the fact that I'm too honest about my mental health issues and such, and that plus the long gap in work history are huge red flags that make me 100% unemployable.)
And yet: It's not a lack of work ethic or drive - I worked long grindy hours on mTurk for several years, initially for about $2/hr and averaging by the end around $5 an hour. That got me going at a loss initially, selling online. I started off selling on eBay making personalized art, at first for a 90% loss, but it got me the first handful of reviews as a seller. I literally made and shipped custom art to people at a starting bid of 99 cents for over a year. Sometimes that 99 cent amount was the final amount. I would still make and ship the item at a loss of about $7-9, plus the three or four hours of work involved.
The bidding started off pitiful in most cases but climbed - if not for people widely abusing the refund policy to the point where I was doing hundreds of hours work on art for people at a loss due to the 30% or so of buyers who claimed the packages were 'lost or misdelivered' and demanded full refunds, but had eBayers been honest, it could, in theory, have been a really successful ongoing thing.
While on rare occasions I'll list something on eBay, I've basically fully pivoted to art sales and print services, among other things, on Etsy, and have a growing track record on Itch.IO selling stock media asset packs - collections of seamless PBR textures, efficient 3d model packs in .FBX and.OBJ formats.
And - over the time since around 2019 - after the move from Texas to Pennsylvania, when all that was sorted out... I've resumed game development not as a primary business aim but one I still care a lot about whether it is profitable or not.
The stock media is in its way a means of supporting other game developers with useful resources, while also financing my own game dev efforts. I have some new-ish game projects in the works, they're all moving forward and all of the below should be done hopefully by summer 2025 (though that may be overly optimistic?). Once they, or at least some of them, are out there, I'm aiming to ramp up work on Isola as a mobile AND desktop title with Android .apk version on Google Play, and a Windows version on Steam and Epic and Itch.IO. The reworked version would be realtime 3d, which means reworking a lot but... realistically the [at most] 2.4 million polycount worlds that 'could only possibly work' as pre-rendered worlds in '07, increasingly seem viable as realtime worlds in the mid 2020s. Especially given some basic LOD and occlusion culling, it should not be hard to reduce the running polycount to more like 400,000, which means it's basically not only viable on really old low-end PCs but also higher-end mobile devices. In the last few years I've dug heavily into learning and working with Unity, and have been gaining experience doing so to the point where, when I'm done with some other things, I should have already solved all the major interaction and code issues which otherwise might be tripping me up going on to remaking, reworking this old half-finished game. Many of the other titles I am nearing completion on are similarly puzzle-adventure game, so the knowledge and workflow gained will transfer easily over to Isola. My main worry at this moment is thatafter years getting into a functional workflow through Unity 3d, it'll all get torn up by bad decisions from the Unity management at the top. There was a major controversy around the company and the CEO was replaced... major layoffs, major backlash. I'd advise new devs go with Godot today, but in my case too much time and learning curve and project development's gone into Unity already and I'm unlikely to be able to switch out from Unity any time too soon. As far as my projects in the works... look in particular at, in descending order of scope,
Miniature Multiverse -a Myst-like where all the worlds are 'real', tactile, if fantastical places built in O scale miniature! (I've spent hundreds of hours working on it, and $600+ in mini supplies). About $3 at time of release (Steam, Epic, itch.IO)
Miniature MiniGolf - a minigolf game, isometric or 'orthographic' view, all similarly done with detailed and charming scale models. Another one representing hundreds of hours work and hundreds of dollars in materials. Will be posted to Steam, Epic, etc priced at about $3, with enormous potential for free updates/DLC if it sells at all well.
Astounding Worlds - a batch of artfully built 3d worlds to explore that may be expanded steadily over the long term post-launch. It's open-ended, the story will be fairly thin and in general lacking an ending, but that's the cost of a thing that can be extended indefinitely. It's financed with a small ($2 ish) one-time access fee on one of a few gaming shops [Steam, Epic, itch.IO...]
Crowdsourced Adventure is the alternative to Astounding Worlds as it is paid for entirely by ads on the site that it'll release on. So if you'd like a beautifully intriguing adventure artgame in an HTML5 format for free online, this is the free one. There's also potential for player input, ideas via a related community area on the site.
Spiral Skies - initially designed as a prerendered narrative minigame about a crashlanding on a strange world, may be completed soon as a realtime one instead.
VORTEX - A stylized and largely monochromatic minigame adventure involving a future trillionaire faced with his personal demons in a devious trap.
Eracer - a 'hand drawn' (pencil) racing minigame racing hotseat with another local player, in racing courses drawn intricately by hand. Top down, isometric.
Easely - How can a person travel the world - bypassing all obstacles - when they have the power to walk into their own paintings? As the title portmanteau suggests: Easely. This minigame experiment is built around a painterly 3d world and uses a nifty painting-portal effect in its puzzles.
Basically, as insane as it is, by 2026 or at latest, maybe 2027, Isola might still happen - perhaps a full 20 years after the idea and design initially took shape!
And that could be amazing. I'm still working on a lot of things, mind you, and that's why they individually move slowly, I still have Etsy orders to ship and a vast pile of stock media assets to improve/expand on, and even beyond those an hour a day or so working on video productions, which has been a hobby of mine since 2001.
(Those videos will in many cases wind up on a redesigned HornbostelVideos.com soon)
But even if all those things, website updates included, add up to roughly 40 hours a week, the so-called '9 to 5' the good news is... I work another 40 hours every week BEYOND that.
Thing is, all this creative 'work' is the stuff I love doing. So it is almost all I do whenever I'm awake. I am putting - on average - 5 hours a day into game dev, plus 6 hours into other art work, or around 77 hours a week of 'being creative'...
I am working essentially two full time jobs at an average pay rate barely above $1 an hour... and am so happy it's working out as well as it is, as I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing.
And in the event my income miraculously spikes to ABOVE $10,000/year or [roughly] $2.25 per hour, I'll be absolutely thrilled by that and will give nearly all I gain above that threshold to charitable causes. I think it could easily happen, that maybe, just maybe, people will be excited about the ambitious game ideas I've been pouring all this [as yet unpaid] effort into in between immediate paid work.
And yeah, there'll always be detractors. There'll be people who hate what I did due to the unavoidable rough edges and limitations inherent in an indie project. But at least, hopefully, someone will like these things too. Maybe there will be enough who like them, that they actually become modestly successful in a few cases.
Wouldn't that be amazing? Like... imagine if the games launched the next two years made a total of 5000 sales per paid game? You all should recognize that would mean about $50,000 in income for me, over the years 2025, 2026. That also would mean, the $10k a year kept, and about $30,000 in donations across a range of effective and proven causes like the Against Malaria Foundation (which prevents one death, on average, for every $200 donated there, according to third party analysts.) Holy ****, I'd love to move into the late 2020s having actually saved 150 human lives from avoidable premature death. I'm not certain, mind you, that there's any real form of karma or justice in the end, certainly in this world there seems decidedly not to be, and I cannot prove that there's a God or a legit afterlife that isn't just a few minutes of ecstatic delirium and hallucination as brain death progresses, but... even if there's no heaven ultimately, I want to be able to get to the end of my life feeling that it, that going through it all truly meant something, and that my being here made a real and beneficial difference to people.
'Isola' is Italian for island.
It's also the first five letters of 'isolated' or 'isolation'.
This game's story is in large part
about isolation, and about the sort
of gradual self-delusion that tries
to rebrand a creeping loneliness as 'solitude' or as a thing of beauty. Relevant today? Yes.
But the story of a prolonged voyage and an escalating mass of lies and delusional agendas
as the crew slowly lose their minds... has yet to become a finished game 15 years later.
The following few years were full of well-intentioned bunny trails where Scott tried to make a thing happen for me as a 'game developer' who could make a living doing that - with failing results - Galilee Games was a second attempt which emerged after I conceded I could not make Isola as a mobile game as he wanted it to be, and Isola going awry, was followed by a year of work led by Scott that ended in a little Christian game that was rejected by Apple and was never even submitted to Google, it's just there as freeware on the GalileeGames site alongside some art merch that has yet to sell even once a decade later. His third try was nonPareil Institute, which was a waste of two years of my life.
The core design of Isola dates back to 2007. There's always been a sort
of artifice or uncanniness, and a
sort of beautiful loneliness in the
puzzle-adventure genre, or at least
in first-person 'Myst-likes' though
few would make the dark flip side of it a central theme. I personally love the idea of a game where the style is superficially appealing and then the cracks start showing under it all, and it's entirely recontexualized by the end as something sad and dark and terrible, indeed far more so than in Scott's truncated and simplified version of the story. Scott's a great father. He is a kind, generous person who also knows almost ZERO about game design from a game player's viewpoint.
The process of getting this game going anywhere, perhaps, has been as deluded as the characters in its story. The only game with a worse unraveling was the ill-fated 'Traveler's Engima' which got to a roughly 90% completion before the software used to make it was officially discontinued after over a year of zero updates.
Sure, I *could* finish that ancient mess, but the dev software doesn't run on anything but Windows 98 through XP, and the output won't run on anything past XP either. The only hope *that* still has is to redo the entire game in a new game engine. I'm unsure if it's worth it given that game's messy narrative flaws.
So finally, after three lengthy tries, Scott sort of gave up and accepted that I, despite my evident art skill and enthusiasm, had no future as a successful game developer or digital artist. Or at least, that he couldn't will it to happen.
It's that moment of 'hands off' when he let me do my own thing, when he got focused on other efforts like helping with my sister Katie's new children, that my income actually started growing slowly but steadily.
Not that I am a 'success' mind you. I've yet to make over $10k so far in a single year, but I'm edging closer to that target, and ideally within a couple years I'll be earning enough to cease assistance from both my parents and the small but still ongoing disability payments still coming in via the govt. I've applied for jobs, found myself unemployable (seemingly blacklisted for various reasons - mainly the fact that I'm too honest about my mental health issues and such, and that plus the long gap in work history are huge red flags that make me 100% unemployable.)
And yet: It's not a lack of work ethic or drive - I worked long grindy hours on mTurk for several years, initially for about $2/hr and averaging by the end around $5 an hour. That got me going at a loss initially, selling online. I started off selling on eBay making personalized art, at first for a 90% loss, but it got me the first handful of reviews as a seller. I literally made and shipped custom art to people at a starting bid of 99 cents for over a year. Sometimes that 99 cent amount was the final amount. I would still make and ship the item at a loss of about $7-9, plus the three or four hours of work involved.
The bidding started off pitiful in most cases but climbed - if not for people widely abusing the refund policy to the point where I was doing hundreds of hours work on art for people at a loss due to the 30% or so of buyers who claimed the packages were 'lost or misdelivered' and demanded full refunds, but had eBayers been honest, it could, in theory, have been a really successful ongoing thing.
While on rare occasions I'll list something on eBay, I've basically fully pivoted to art sales and print services, among other things, on Etsy, and have a growing track record on Itch.IO selling stock media asset packs - collections of seamless PBR textures, efficient 3d model packs in .FBX and.OBJ formats.
And - over the time since around 2019 - after the move from Texas to Pennsylvania, when all that was sorted out... I've resumed game development not as a primary business aim but one I still care a lot about whether it is profitable or not.
The stock media is in its way a means of supporting other game developers with useful resources, while also financing my own game dev efforts. I have some new-ish game projects in the works, they're all moving forward and all of the below should be done hopefully by summer 2025 (though that may be overly optimistic?). Once they, or at least some of them, are out there, I'm aiming to ramp up work on Isola as a mobile AND desktop title with Android .apk version on Google Play, and a Windows version on Steam and Epic and Itch.IO. The reworked version would be realtime 3d, which means reworking a lot but... realistically the [at most] 2.4 million polycount worlds that 'could only possibly work' as pre-rendered worlds in '07, increasingly seem viable as realtime worlds in the mid 2020s. Especially given some basic LOD and occlusion culling, it should not be hard to reduce the running polycount to more like 400,000, which means it's basically not only viable on really old low-end PCs but also higher-end mobile devices. In the last few years I've dug heavily into learning and working with Unity, and have been gaining experience doing so to the point where, when I'm done with some other things, I should have already solved all the major interaction and code issues which otherwise might be tripping me up going on to remaking, reworking this old half-finished game. Many of the other titles I am nearing completion on are similarly puzzle-adventure game, so the knowledge and workflow gained will transfer easily over to Isola. My main worry at this moment is thatafter years getting into a functional workflow through Unity 3d, it'll all get torn up by bad decisions from the Unity management at the top. There was a major controversy around the company and the CEO was replaced... major layoffs, major backlash. I'd advise new devs go with Godot today, but in my case too much time and learning curve and project development's gone into Unity already and I'm unlikely to be able to switch out from Unity any time too soon. As far as my projects in the works... look in particular at, in descending order of scope,
Miniature Multiverse -a Myst-like where all the worlds are 'real', tactile, if fantastical places built in O scale miniature! (I've spent hundreds of hours working on it, and $600+ in mini supplies). About $3 at time of release (Steam, Epic, itch.IO)
Miniature MiniGolf - a minigolf game, isometric or 'orthographic' view, all similarly done with detailed and charming scale models. Another one representing hundreds of hours work and hundreds of dollars in materials. Will be posted to Steam, Epic, etc priced at about $3, with enormous potential for free updates/DLC if it sells at all well.
Astounding Worlds - a batch of artfully built 3d worlds to explore that may be expanded steadily over the long term post-launch. It's open-ended, the story will be fairly thin and in general lacking an ending, but that's the cost of a thing that can be extended indefinitely. It's financed with a small ($2 ish) one-time access fee on one of a few gaming shops [Steam, Epic, itch.IO...]
Crowdsourced Adventure is the alternative to Astounding Worlds as it is paid for entirely by ads on the site that it'll release on. So if you'd like a beautifully intriguing adventure artgame in an HTML5 format for free online, this is the free one. There's also potential for player input, ideas via a related community area on the site.
Spiral Skies - initially designed as a prerendered narrative minigame about a crashlanding on a strange world, may be completed soon as a realtime one instead.
VORTEX - A stylized and largely monochromatic minigame adventure involving a future trillionaire faced with his personal demons in a devious trap.
Eracer - a 'hand drawn' (pencil) racing minigame racing hotseat with another local player, in racing courses drawn intricately by hand. Top down, isometric.
Easely - How can a person travel the world - bypassing all obstacles - when they have the power to walk into their own paintings? As the title portmanteau suggests: Easely. This minigame experiment is built around a painterly 3d world and uses a nifty painting-portal effect in its puzzles.
Basically, as insane as it is, by 2026 or at latest, maybe 2027, Isola might still happen - perhaps a full 20 years after the idea and design initially took shape!
And that could be amazing. I'm still working on a lot of things, mind you, and that's why they individually move slowly, I still have Etsy orders to ship and a vast pile of stock media assets to improve/expand on, and even beyond those an hour a day or so working on video productions, which has been a hobby of mine since 2001.
(Those videos will in many cases wind up on a redesigned HornbostelVideos.com soon)
But even if all those things, website updates included, add up to roughly 40 hours a week, the so-called '9 to 5' the good news is... I work another 40 hours every week BEYOND that.
Thing is, all this creative 'work' is the stuff I love doing. So it is almost all I do whenever I'm awake. I am putting - on average - 5 hours a day into game dev, plus 6 hours into other art work, or around 77 hours a week of 'being creative'...
I am working essentially two full time jobs at an average pay rate barely above $1 an hour... and am so happy it's working out as well as it is, as I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing.
And in the event my income miraculously spikes to ABOVE $10,000/year or [roughly] $2.25 per hour, I'll be absolutely thrilled by that and will give nearly all I gain above that threshold to charitable causes. I think it could easily happen, that maybe, just maybe, people will be excited about the ambitious game ideas I've been pouring all this [as yet unpaid] effort into in between immediate paid work.
And yeah, there'll always be detractors. There'll be people who hate what I did due to the unavoidable rough edges and limitations inherent in an indie project. But at least, hopefully, someone will like these things too. Maybe there will be enough who like them, that they actually become modestly successful in a few cases.
Wouldn't that be amazing? Like... imagine if the games launched the next two years made a total of 5000 sales per paid game? You all should recognize that would mean about $50,000 in income for me, over the years 2025, 2026. That also would mean, the $10k a year kept, and about $30,000 in donations across a range of effective and proven causes like the Against Malaria Foundation (which prevents one death, on average, for every $200 donated there, according to third party analysts.) Holy ****, I'd love to move into the late 2020s having actually saved 150 human lives from avoidable premature death. I'm not certain, mind you, that there's any real form of karma or justice in the end, certainly in this world there seems decidedly not to be, and I cannot prove that there's a God or a legit afterlife that isn't just a few minutes of ecstatic delirium and hallucination as brain death progresses, but... even if there's no heaven ultimately, I want to be able to get to the end of my life feeling that it, that going through it all truly meant something, and that my being here made a real and beneficial difference to people.
