Hester Games... The Beginning!

Horray! Hester Games, LLC, exists, and is a real and legally verifiable entity! :D

This is exciting to me, but maybe not to you. What should be exciting to you is that I'm going to be making games you will hopefully find creative, compelling, and awesome!

Social Sessions (Hester Games' first game that will be released in the coming weeks on the Google Play Store, and soon after that on Apple's App Store) started a few years ago when I started to teach myself Unity game development and C# programming. Suddenly, my imagination came alive with ideas of what I could make! Social Sessions took form slowly, and went through several iterations. At first it was just an idea that I found intriguing, and surprisingly, hadn't seen anything else quite like it.

The puzzles were challenging, for sure. That was what I liked, but that was the main hurdle: getting people to grok the puzzles right away. Playing that balancing game between challenging and fun. Lots of people threw up their hands and said "I just don't get it!" So, with that in mind, I worked hard to give useful tips to the player along the way, and chose a progression of levels that would slowly introduce players to the more difficult concepts. Eventually I began to see that spark of determination in people's eyes when they really got it and were self-motivated enough to buckle down and solve the puzzles (and even try to get a 3-star rating on all the puzzles!).

I've spent the last 2 years developing this mostly in solitude, but I hope to connect with the community of gamers who might be interested in this or my future games, from now on.

I'll post more about Social Sessions more specifically (video soon!), and also keep you updated during and after launch, but for now, here's a rough draft of the Play Store description:

Be the therapist you always knew you could be and try to make all your patients happy by manipulating their feelings and relationships!
Social Sessions is a group-therapy-themed game that will seriously challenge your puzzle-solving abilities. Make your way through the calendar as you right the wrongs in each group of dysfunctional relationships. Push yourself to perfection by figuring out how to solve each session in the most efficient way.
Then, just when you start finding your groove, you'll be challenged by four new special level types, introduced each new week in your therapist's calendar.

 Leave a comment if this sounds like something you'd like to play!