Ouch.  That hurt.  I’ve joined @OneGameAMonth two months ago and I have zero games.  Actually, upon making the announcement I failed to put any more time or energy into it.  I’m rebooting though, and hoping to make something count for November.  I’d really like to get TurtleBrains working a bit better before LudumDare 31, coming this December 5th-8th!

I’ve yet to decide what to make, pong? snake? asteroids?  Or should I slap the old Scrapyard Racing project back into drive and do a “simple” top down racer.  I am addicted to speed, and that would likely hold my interest longer, so it is tempting, but it is also overwhelming because I don’t want to just create a game…

Part of my issue is making the commitment, and even those small games take time to polish.  I don’t want to just throw out some game and call it “my finished game this month”, I want to finish games that pop.  I am after-all a professional game developer, how hard can it be to make a game in a month?

Very.

But in November I will work on TurtleBrains as little as possible, mostly just enough to get better sprite handling and possibly sounds, but my focus will be on a game.  Yet to be decided.  I should have something started this weekend.

It is time to start working out a bit.  I’m not talking about going to the gym and pumping iron, or waking early to go for a jog, although those are not bad ideas.  I’m talking about game development.  I’ve been participating in LudumDare events for several years now, and recently LD30 took place so making a game was on the list of things to do.  The weekend was quite a failure for me, the theme had beat me and left me to dry.

After the theme was announced, no game ideas came.  It was a struggle to find something that might become fun.  I tried three different ideas from a runner, to an action shooter, to a twist on snake.  At approximately halfway through the weekend the result was a version of snake with place-holder art and was not actually fun to play.  I abandoned the project and went on a downward spiral, after 15 years of making games this was all I was able to come up with?  It felt awful.

When you fall down, get back up.

It would be easy to stay down, but it is time to get better.  Practice.  Work on the game development skills that I’ve dried up upon.  I feel good about my programming skills, but I certainly lack some subtleties that are extremely important for game development.  I’d like to be able to make a game in 48 hours and have it be something that comes out looking reasonable and playing reasonably well.

So I’ve joined the #OneGameAMonth community in hopes to create a basic game every month, and look forward to both the challenge and the learning experiences that will come.  I will be building upon my #TurtleBrains framework that is aimed to be a high-quality C++ framework for 2D game development and real-time applications.  #OneGameAMonth will also allow me to work on my artistic skills which currently stand far below that of the average five year-old.

Having joined #OneGameAMonth it is time to get a jump start.  This weekend I will be working on my failed LudumDare in an attempt to make a playable, and possibly fun version of Snake.  My focus will not be on design, or programming complexity, my focus will be on the art, and polish.  Snake is an extremely simple game that I’ve used for prototyping and framework testing before, so polishing it should be a good first exercise.