Run, Rabbit, Run

So, to continue on with this 'new era', I'm setting myself a challenge:

Make one whole game, start to finish, & publish it.

Every.

Single.

Weekend.

Sounds horrendous, no? Well it is, but I'm hoping it'll bring a few benefits along with it.

First of all, I'll need to seveeerely pare down my ideas. I've got some really good ones on the backburner, but they're just so massive I can't get a good grip on them. Realistically, I won't be able to complete those projects without a great deal of help, a great deal of funding, or both. Needless to say I currently have neither of those things.

So, in scaling down ideas to something more like a game jam (with less body odour & screaming, hopefully) I force myself to think small & manageable. If I don't get the game out by Sunday evening, it's onto the next one, so I've got to be careful.

Secondly, if I actually manage to get these games done & published, in whatever sort of a state, it'll help serve as a portfolio for potential job opportunities in the future - something I've been woefully bad about before now primarily due to the previously mentioned scaling issues.

Thirdly, I'll just get better? At making things? Practice makes perfect & all that. Going to probably stay reasonably safe for the first few games, but then set myself a goal to learn about X for the next one, whether that be something like "Next week's game has to have a compute shader" or "I'm going to make a bunch of custom textures in shadergraph" or "Multiplayer???", as examples from the horrifically untidy notepad to my right.

I'll also get better at the design side of things, ego permitting. More games = more eyes on my games = more feedback I can either ignore or learn from. Who knows what people want, after all?

Fourthly & finally, I might actually make a little bit of money doing this. Of course it's not expected or my immediate goal, but if all goes to plan, in 10 weeks I'll have 10 games out there, hopefully of a reasonable quality. Someone finds one, maybe they like it, they look to see what else I've got & they think "Hey let's buy ALL of them" or "Hey let's throw money in the fire & sub to this guy's Patreon".

Basically, the more games I have out there, the more chance I have of a little bit of 'passive' income, which would really do a lot to further my goal of being completely supported by games I make.

I haven't completely thought it all through, but at a first thought, I feel like just saying at the start that all the weekend games I make will be a flat $2/£1.50 is pretty reasonable, with free copies of course going to any Patreon subs of the appropriate level.

That's the plan anyway. I'm about halfway through my first one, by the way. The screenshot above is the current state of the main menu, though it isn't going to change much between now & tomorrow night. It's a 'fun' little choose your own adventure about a displaced rabbit trying to get to safety. Definitely not anything to read into.

I'll put out another post with full details as & when it's done!

Tim

P.S. I'm also very slowly trying to learn how to make a custom CSS for the formatting of this website, but that's going to be a while, as it's entirely outwith my wheelhouse! Deal with the very barebones, no dark mode nonsense for now please.