Full Steam Ahead!
I hope all of your enjoyed my little April Fools joke at the beginning of the month, although in the long held tradition of The Wonder Room, the "joke" was a genuine game!
If you missed it, you can play Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt The Game in your browser. You can also get my 2024 April Fools game The Mycroft Holmes Simulator free on Steam.
(In 2025 I was too busy releasing The Beekeeper’s Picnic, and I make absolutely no promises about 2027!)
Some of the exciting memorable characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt The Game
Now, on to this months’ news…
The Museum of Everything has a Steam Page!
A big chunk of this month was dedicated to getting a Steam page set up for The Museum of Everything. There's a lot of debate amongst game developers about the best time to do this - should you do it as early as possible, or wait until things are nicely polished and make it a big marketing event? I decided to go for sooner rather than later, so I have a place to point people to throughout the development process.
The beautiful artwork for The Beekeeper's Picnic was done by the talented gooolabatooo. I did try illustrating my own cover art for The Beekeeper’s Picnic, but I never felt satisfied with it.
This time around, I decided to attempt some mental fortitude and persevere with doing it myself. I’m moderately happy with the result!
I created each part of the illustration separately so I could chop it around for all the different image sizes and orientations Steam requires. There are big banners, little banners, landscape banners, portrait banners, banners for streaming, banners for the library page...
This month also saw me complete a first draft of a pretty big, intense planning flow chart for the game. This was the final action of my planned pre-production stage, which started about seven months ago with me sitting down with nothing but “big space station? mystery?”
This means that the game is officially entering… production!
The Sherlock Showcase prep
As a break from staring at screens, I’ve been enjoying doing some prep for the Sherlock Showcase which is happening in Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in May. I’ll be there selling from 12pm - 6pm selling art prints and postcards, and giving away newt fact stickers! I hope I get to see some of you there
Other Stuff
Outside of the world of making games, I… ok, just hear me out on this one, McDonalds paid for me to stay in a castle. No, really.
I won a Merlin Entertainments holiday on their Monopoly promotion. Merlin mostly run incredibly exciting theme parks (Alton Towers, Chessington World of Adventures, Legoland Windsor, Thorpe Park…) but I’m a sedate, Mycroftesque personage who prefers chilled out edutainment breaks, so instead I chose to stay at Warwick Castle
And it was a brilliant decision.
For starters, this was my bedroom:
I filmed a load of footage about it and hope to put together a vlog about the experience.
The Monthly Malkin
Miss Malkin greatly enjoyed snoozing in the sunshine this month, but in her more active moments she has discovered the joys of actually climbing up the cat tree I bought her. It only took her three years to deign to use it.
See you all next month!
Helen
