Tag: New Year

A Humbling Look Back And A Sobering Look Forward Into 2018

New Year ResolutionsAs 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.

Happy New Year Resolutions!

New Year ResolutionsWith 2016 behind us and 2017 before us, we have the need to set new goals for the new year. This is something that we failed to do at the beginning of 2016 and it sure had an impact on what we accomplished this year. Frankly, that is not much. Instead of looking back and feeling bad about what didn’t happen, we, instead, want to look forward to what we want to do.

This year, we have a booth at Super! Bitcon, the local gaming convention run by the great guys at Oklahoma Retro Gamer Society. We had a lot of fun at 2014’s S!BC and had a good show. So I wanted to set us with another deadline for having a good gaming show. We won’t be doing another game jam, but we will show off a game or two. We really want to finish Shattered Star: Prelude and we hope having this deadline will get me there.

Once that is done, we will begin serious development on Shattered Star. This game has been in pre-planning for a long time and we really need to get it going. So once Prelude is done, we will have a good base to build on to bring the main game to life.

Those are the two biggest goals for this year and we hope that it will all work out. We have some other small game ideas we would like to play with, but we think the main focus should be on these main games. We do have other goals too.

We want to post more on this blog and on social media to build hype for our games. We really need to build our fan base and drive interest for the games. We think these games can be really successful if we can drive that interest early. We have already started and just need to keep it up.

We also want to create more videos. These will be development vlogs or something else similar. No strict plans for this, but something that we think could help build interest in the long run.

Finally, we want to support more of the tools we use. This includes contributing to the development of HaxeFlixel or paying cash to those who maintain the tools we use.