A Humbling Look Back And A Sobering Look Forward Into 2018

zacharyJan 1, 2018

As I write this, I can look at the blog feed of this site and see that the second article is the 2017 New Years post about what we had planned to do in this year. I am a bit ashamed in what didn’t happen this year and know that I could have done better.

There are lots of excuses I could lay out about why I didn’t make any progress on any of those goals, but that would be exactly what I shouldn’t be doing. Instead, I am looking at this past year and deciding to make a change in my life for the better.

Back in 2014, I attempted the One Game A Month challenge. It wasn’t bad. I successfully completed 6 games, even if not all of them were good. It did feel great to make that many games and get them out there. I learned a lot, tried some new things, and had fun. That was the primary goal of that challenge. I would have loved to have actually made 12 full games.

This year, I want to do that again. But I am going to do it differently. Instead of trying to make 12 games of different genres and play styles, I am going to focus on only one play style, top-down action adventure games. These will be 12 Zelda like games. They certainly won’t all be swordplay and action, but they will all follow the same constraints.

The purpose of this particular challenge is to get me back up and running as a game developer and actually build up a set of classes, tools and libraries that will help me start work on Shattered Star: Prelude and Shattered Star. I really feel good about those games and feel that they would do well in the current indie game climate.

In addition to this goal of creating 12 games this coming year, I will be running a Patreon campaign to support the effort. As a perk to supporting this effort on Patreon, you will get the games earlier than the public, you will get to see the development process in action, and depending on your backing level, you may get to contribute creatively in some fashion.

Once a game is done, it will also be published to our itch.io store and posted for sale. I don’t plan on using any other store front at the moment, but I do want them all to be available for purchase. This will provide another avenue for people to support this effort to make 12 games this year.

In addition to this, I really want to do another conference. With the sad news that Super! Bitcon won’t be happening this year, we will instead like to shoot for the XPO conference that happens in September. That way, I will have more games to show off and will be able to have a greater impact on the success of this challenge. If I can have 9 games ready to go for that event, then I would be exciting.

I will also continue work on the Simple Site Builder and add some additional features for the free version as well as make some premium features. I would like it to be a tool available to as many game developers as possible. I think it could be very helpful for many people.

That is what I want to do this year. I want to do better this year than any year before it. I know I can do this. So here’s to a great 2018.