During 2018, I’ll be trying to make and release one game a month. The idea is to make a game that can be completed, and released in one month. The implication of having to release it is that it has to be a complete game that people can play and be able to use.
But why?
You may be asking yourself. Why would anyone do this? Well, there’s several reasons.
One is that by making a large number of small games, one gets a lot of experience by doing different things.
Another one is that it allows for experimenting with all kinds of different ideas and gameplay.
Yet another one is that allows for learning the process of releasing for the different platforms.
Also, it forces reusage of components for repetitive tasks, in order to free more time to focus on what’s actually different from game to game.
Additionlly to the points above, I’ve got quite some experience in scoping the games such that I can get exactly what I want out of it, in the short period of a month.
How it all started?
The abandoned projects
A common problem amongst hobbist game developers is the large number of abandoned projects. For years I’ve struggled with the same problem. I addressed this by forcing myself to stick with a project until I released it.
This project was Starminer, which I forced myself to stick with until it was out for the public. The problem was that doing this mean I didn’t work on may other games for a few years, so I started thinking about how to create games with a smaller scope.
That lead into looking at different development platforms. So, towards the end of last year, I decided to give it a go at seeing what Unity was all about. Having shipped Starminer, I was not too happy about Haxe+OpenFL.
Unity seemed like it would remove a lot of boilerplate, so even though has a name for being directed towards beginer game developers who are not too strong at the coding side of things, I decided I should give it a try.
Come 1st of January, I was going through my twitter timeline and I came across this tweet, saying that the theme for January this thing called One Game a Month was going to be REBIRTH. I had never heard of this challenge, but the theme reminded me of a game idea I had some time before. I started thinking about it and decided that I should try to do it, and since I was thinking of learning Unity, maybe I should do it in Unity.
Giving it a try
That’s when I decided I should probably give it a try. At this point, I had never done a game in such a short span of time, so I wasn’t so sure how it would go. So I started working on January’s idea, but decided not to commit to the whole 12 months thing yet.
You can find part 2 of this series of posts here: One Game a Month - January