It's been awhile

I haven't posted anything since I rewrote my website so I thought it was time to do so. Since I posted I have participated in the Github GameOff game jam with my game Moon Liberator. The game jam lasted the entire month of November. This was the first game jam I've ever participated in and I am glad I did. I mainly joined it to force myself to finish a game. And it worked! I am very happy with how the game turned out. I ended up using the Heaps game engine and started with deepnights game base template. It helped tremendously. Along with LDtk and his Haxe library, I can't thank him enough.

But the game jam isn't the main reason I am posting. Since the game jam, I've not created any other games. I truly want to create something but I keep getting stuck in a "death loop". By that, I mean, starting a project, making good progress on that project, then quitting the project, rinse and repeat. On top of that, I keep switching game frameworks and engines thinking that would help. And lastly, my time is severely limited between my wife, two toddlers, a full-time job, a side project, and this. So it has been hard to get any game development in.

One Game a Month

To combat this cycle, I've decided to give the One Game a Month challenge. The goal of the challenge is for it to force me to decisions that would ultimately lower the scope and make decisions that would allow me to finish a game in a month.

I've decided I would go back and choose some Ludum Dare themes to base my games off. I've decided to go with the past Ludum Dare theme Stuck in a Loop. I've already started on this game a few days ago. Although we are already in the middle of a month it was still early enough for me to give it a chance.

The game I've decided to do revolves around solving some puzzles with levers, buttons, gates, and such. The exit is always open to the next room. But that does not mean you will appear in that next room :). If the puzzle isn't solved completely, every time you step through the exit you will just loop back around to the start where you see your current puzzle.

For this game, I've decided to go with the same tooling I used in the GitHub GameOff game jam. I am using Heaps and Haxe again. This time though I've got a better understanding of the engine and LDTk has improved a lot since November.

Here is the 3-day progress of the game:

One Game a Month - Stuck in a Loop: Showing off some functionality.