Current GameDev Plans

 

Over the last few years of learning how to make games, I have figured out a few things that I hope will help me as I restart my activities.

Firstly, with game jams, while I feel they have been a great experience and have helped me to explore my own capabilities for making games, I always tend to feel that my projects are pretty much bespoke to the jams themselves.  By this I mean that the games are made for the jams and built around the work I feel I am able to do in the allotted timeframe of the jams.  As a solo developer who also aims to make their own assets as much as possible, this means that in a two week jam, I might only spend about five or six days actually working on the code and building the actual game.  Of these five or six days, I might only be able to average about four hours a day of time I can use on my projects, meaning that for a two week jam, I am spending the equivalent of two or three good days of work actually making the game.  The remainder of the time is normally spent between planning the game, creating the art, graphics, sounds and music used in the games.  Obviously depending on the scope I give myself, and the more complex a game I aim for, the greater the amount of time needed to create the various assets I need for my game.

This approach has always had a massive impact when it comes to both the type of game I can make for a jam, and the apparent quality of the resulting games.  They are always playable, but for what I actually want to be able to create, both the scope and quality are far less than I would like to achieve.  This inevitably leaves me comparing my games to those of other developers that can have more experience, work in larger teams, have more disposable time, or use premade assets.  This results in my feeling as though my games are worse as a result, regardless of how positive the feedback is or how well my games do in the rankings.  While I remind myself that I'm still learning, I feel that the amount of work I give myself by being a solo developer directly contributes to a feeling of inadequacy, and while my games can perform reasonably well in the jams, there are always games that look better, maybe play better and feel more polished than my own.

Regardless of the negatives, I still feel that participating in jams is a massively beneficial experience, and it has allowed me to learn and experiment in a more structured way than I otherwise would have been able to do.  A jam can be a great experience for expanding your creativity, and creative outlook, and it also serves as a way for you to measure up against other developers as well.  In my current situation however, I have decided not to focus on participating in more jams for the time being.  I might decide to do more in future, but for now, I would like to start figuring out my own style of gamedev.  I want to work on my own projects and continue to evolve my skillset without the constraints that come from trying to scope a game into maybe 20% of the total available time of a jam.

Instead of working through more jams, I currently plan to start revisiting some of my older projects and game ideas, reworking them, expanding them and improving them.  This will also include revisiting some of my game jam games to possibly expand upon them as well.

With so many old projects hanging about, and ideas as well, I would like to be able to finish at least a few of them in the next year and maybe turn them into releases so that other people would be able to play them as well.  I already have a few ideas about some of the projects and what I would like to do with them.  Like most learning devs, I have a lot of half started experiments and projects that need more work.  Also like most learning devs, I have been consistent in my habit of starting, stopping, starting something new, stopping again, and repeating.  Believe it or not, I actually despise leaving things unfinished, and having so many ideas getting dusty in a hidden corner of my laptop is a constant reminder of how I seem to never be able to finish something, which can be quite demoralising.  So I've decided to do something about it.

With regards to some of my more recent ideas, they currently require me to focus on improving my art skills and finishing my world building project, so this means that they are not going to actually be made yet, and while part of me writing this feels that it is a continuation of the start and stop problem, I am currently working to improve my art skills through actually drawing the things I know I struggle with, and I'm continuing on the world building front as well.  To tell the truth, the world building project has kind of been paused for the last few weeks, but my current plan is to share it with you in its current state through my world building blog, and once I'm caught up with it, I will continue to build my world.

As things presently stand, I'm trying to maintain my blog more effectively, mostly as a record of my activities, but also with the hope that someone will find it interesting or useful.  Between the various blog series I've now started, I hope to not only discuss them each week, but also take time to work on the areas I'm discussing in the blogs.  This way, I have deadlines each week to aim for with the various topics, that in turn make it so much more likely that I will actually put some work into these activities.  While I don't plan to overload myself, at the moment I need to get into a routine of doing these things, otherwise I will forever be a novice gamedev, and this whole endeavour will just become another momentary project that I got bored with, or chose to forget about.

So, as for the games I plan to look at for the immediate future, there are two of my past projects that come to mind that I would like to continue to work on.

The first is a jokey horror style game that sprung from my imagination one day during my day job in a supermarket.  This game was going to have a series of maps you could play, but you would never know which map you were playing until you started playing the game, consistently leaving you disoriented whenever you start a game.  The goal would simply be to escape before you're caught.  I had this idea not long after starting doing game jams and did quite a lot of groundwork on it.  When I pick it up again, I will need to rework quite a lot of the game and remake the 3D models, but I think this could be a fun project to try to complete, at least the end result should be pretty fun.

Development Screenshot of Horror Game (2024)

The second game is a clicker style game I made for a game jam.  The game itself got quite a lot of good feedback, as well as suggestions on how to possibly expand it.  The game itself was built on a simple concept of clicking to move a cell around the screen, as you moved, you could pick up food and medicine, or you could encounter viruses and contaminants.  Once you had eaten enough food, the cell would split with you still controlling one of the cells.  If the cell split while contaminated, the next generation would develop a partial immunity to a contaminant.  To win the game, the cell needed to develop a total immunity to at least one contaminant.  The theme for the jam was "Tiny World", so taking it literally, I based the game around cells and evolution.

Petri Dish Jam Game Start Screen (2025)

If you want to look at the jam game - https://crazyhoundgamedesign.itch.io/petri-dish-gdtv-jam-25

Expanding this game is going to require some thinking, but I would very much like to keep it as a clicker style game.  My hope with this one would be to launch it through Google Play.  With it being a clicker style game, I think it would be suitable as a mobile game as you would just need to tap the screen to move or progress.

As I work through these projects, review the others, and work on my other creative skills, I will continue to upload new posts to record my progress.

Thanks for reading.