Local creator releases first video game

Self-taught game creator Aaron Taylor spent the last few months making a new video game called Everett Isle, which is now available on Steam.

The game was launched on Sept. 1 and has already sold about 60 copies, which is above his projections for the first month.

“For this game, I solo developed it in three months,” explained Taylor. “I saw it as a personal challenge to myself.

“Everett Isle is an exploration-based puzzle game where you wake up on an isle with no memory of how you got there. Your main goal is to find a way off it. You have to explore the Isle and solve lots of environmental puzzles to piece together what happened on the island.”

There are five different areas of the island to explore and puzzles in each one. The player must come back to certain areas with items they have collected throughout the game. Taylor said it is a short experience and takes about an hour and a half to complete, although he can now get through it in 30 minutes.

To pay expenses and bills, Taylor works fulltime at Save on Foods. He has also been directing a team of around 11 people for the past five years in the development of another game, Time Crackers, which he is hoping to launch on a major platform. Taylor has been in contact with Nintendo Switch for over a year and the biggest issue he keeps hearing from them is lack of commercial experience. He felt it would be faster to develop another game before publishing Time Crackers, which is almost complete with just some voice acting and polishing to do.

The only thing Taylor didn’t do on Everett Isle is composition, saying he’s not very talented musically. Otherwise, it was a solo project from development to play testing and launching it on Steam.

“Everett Isle was an incredible learning experience for me as a developer. It gave me more insight on my developers I am leading. I already have a general sense of how everything works in game development. This really pushed me far on programming.”