Ok! I’ve been promising a general “what’s going on” post for a while now, and I guess it’s time to write exactly that. When this year started, I had a couple specific plans for how I’d handle my game development throughout the year (and in some cases onwards from there):
- I intended to start a more structured weekly schedule, sleeping times included, in an effort to both differentiate my free and work time better and to get my terribly unstable daily rhythm under control.
- I planned to make a small game every month for a total of 12 small games, both as a way to try out this system I had first seen used by Petri Purho in… 2007, was it? and in order to take a mental break from Baba Is You and other large, multi-year projects that had been on my mind over the past years.
So how did all this turn out? Not very well. The structured schedule and the monthly game system both fell apart already in January. I couldn’t get myself to stay awake long enough if I woke up early, and preferred going to sleep when I felt tired, sleeping through the day and then being awake overnight. The first monthly game I had planned, a refined version of my earlier Ludum Dare #47 entry Keke’s Underwater Adventure, turned out to be way too large in scope (and most of the other ideas I had picked for monthly projects had the same issue, I suspect) and while I did get some stuff implemented, by the end of the month things were way too unfinished to call the result a success.
So yeah, not great. I don’t remember the exact order of events at this point, but I think I decided pretty quickly to try to make 12 small games over the year in total instead of trying to make one game every month. As for the weekly schedule, it seemed that since the issue was mostly feeling tired (and a decade of getting used to being a night owl), I was better off trying to live with it for the time being, especially because on top of tiredness I was noticing a slightly concerning lack of energy to make things. I did eat more than a half of a Carolina Reaper chili, though!
I had a plan for an April’s Fools game (two, in fact!) but the aforementioned lack of energy posed a fairly serious obstacle because I couldn’t muster the will to make either game happen on time. Luckily later in April I participated in Nordic Game Jam, which allowed me to actually finish a project, RUDE CHESS. I guess this triggered further productivity, because over the weeks following RUDE CHESS I managed to also finish It’s A Me, Baba Is You XTREME (one of the two April’s Fools games), Baba Friend and Keke in the Caves of Peril. Yay!
Before NGJ I started having constant restless leg syndrome, which further caused trouble with sleeping and keeping my daily rhythm straight. I often had to tire myself to get any sleep at all, and after the above burst of productivity, over the Summer I fell into a serious lull in motivation, resulting in me stopping bi-weekly gamedev streams and not really feeling like working on games at all for ~3 months. Ugh!!! I did manage to do some paper puzzle design and comics drawing in the meantime, but something was seriously not right.
October drawing close, I was contacted about a plan to make a small bundle of Halloween-themed games. This seemed like a potentially good way to get back on track gamedev-wise and I agreed, deciding on a whim on my game idea (or maybe it was more than a whim, I can’t remember. I think I had come up with the idea slightly before and decided to use it because it seemed funny?) Around this time I also had some blood tests taken and it turned out that I had a serious iron deficiency both in terms of hemoglobin and body iron reserves. And would you believe it, this turned out to have been the issue all along: getting some extra iron gave me motivation & energy back, and the restless leg syndrome went away, too! What’s funnier, a friend had recommended having my iron levels checked just before this (advice which I didn’t heed). Lesson of this story is: don’t get iron deficiency.
With the iron issue sorted out, I managed to finish The Plumber Thing, and this then led into a bunch of unrelated small games: Mamono Mower, Cavern Sweeper, Babataire, Babataire EX, a rerelease of Cavern of Flight, a rerelease & update of Once in Space, a holiday update to The Plumber Thing, some paper puzzles and finally It’s A Block-Pushing Game, fulfilling the goal of the year (or not, depending if the rereleases count). Overall I’m really happy with this year’s productivity, which is a bit surprising considering the iron deficiency. I also recorded a playthrough of a game I liked as a child, Lost Valley.
There are a couple things that were left somewhat or entirely unfulfilled over the year:
- Most of the games I did end up making weren’t part of the original list of monthly games. As stated, most of those were too scope-creepy for this project, but nonetheless.
- My sleep schedule is still mostly terrible, and I didn’t get enough exercise this year, spending most of the time sitting at my computer.
- I didn’t paint almost at all! And I mostly drew just the usual 4 comics I make annually for the student magazine. I mean, that’s definitely something, but I’d want to do some watercolours again.
And now, what’s planned for the next year?
- I’ll keep making some smaller games, although this time without an explicit count I’d aim for. There are a couple ideas I think I should be able to get done with semi-limited trouble, so hopefully at least some of those can become reality.
- It has started to feel that working on ESA2 might actually be fun again. Maybe? We’ll see! I’ll try to make ESA2 my main project next year, and actually get that thing somewhere instead of it staying forever in a limbo of sorts.
- The weekly streams will return; hopefully this time I won’t lose steam halfway through.
- I think it’s time to move on from Baba Is You, at least for the time being. Next April I’d have spent about 6 years of my life around Baba, and while it’s been largely an enjoyable ride (and I do have Baba-related ideas for the future, about which I’ll post when they’re ready to be revealed), it’d be nice to feel that the game as it is now is more or less a “finished” product. Note that this doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything more with/to BIY, but rather that I’d wish to mentally move on from the game and get the feeling that it’s where I want it to be.
- My internal deadline for getting my master’s degree in Psychology has been set to the beginning of April. There’s so little left!
- I’ll try to exercise more.
Here’s a list of the games released this year, alongside the source of inspiration for them (if I can remember it):
- RUDE CHESS (A combination of pondering about randomness as a puzzle mechanic and my earlier No More Sweden 2018 entry, Chnakess)
- It’s A Me! (A joke I made in AuthorBlues‘ Twitch stream chat and then realized sounded actually funny)
- Keke in the Caves of Peril (My entry for Ludum Dare #48 finished and polished)
- Baba Is You XTREME (Idea for an Aprils’ Fools version of Baba Is You)
- Baba Friend (Based on that old desktop sheep toy, I’ve wanted to make one of these since forever)
- The Plumber Thing (Can’t remember the exact thought process leading to it)
- Mamono Mower (Exuno, Goost & Maurice from the Mystery Tournament community joked about odd combos of genres + the community has an inside joke about Lawn Mower, a NES game. Heavy inspiration from Mamono Sweeper)
- Cavern of Flight rerelease (A 2016 Ludum Dare entry, which I edited slightly to remove some game-breaking bugs and rough edges)
- Once in Space 2022 (Updated version of Once in Space from 2011, which in turn was a remake of Once in Space from 2007)
- Babataire (An idea borne out of Cluj solitaire, which I saw in the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection)
- Cavern Sweeper (A separate concept for Mamono Mower that I wanted to explore but removed from the lawn-mowing theme)
- Babataire EX (A serious attempt to combine Baba Is You and solitaire)
- It’s A Block-Pushing Game (Possibly started as a chess-themed sokoban idea? Can’t quite recall)
Maybe that’s enough of that?
