I’ve now registered for my third copyright! The second one will get used later, thanks to the beauty of creating games for myself I get to make that decision without many an hour spent preparing presentations then selling them both inside of outside of meetings. It’s really quite refreshing.

I took a stay-cation from creating games in the wonderful world of warcraft, whose new expansion has given a small group of friends and I the excuse to be online together almost every evening. The bulk of 2020 socializing has fallen right in December and we were loving it. Alas, it’s time effort gently shifted from friends and fun times back to growing my personal game library and the journey to become a truly independent game developer (this next one hopefully makes money).

I wasn’t idle in December on the creation front, I have some prototypes, tested theories, and settled on a clear direction where I’m headed (which was a ninety-degree turn from where I originally thought I was going before I relaxed my brain for the first time in the year). Game #3 I’m hoping will be much more accessible than Game #2 (numbered by intent to create thus now chronologically out of order) and I genuinely am shocked anything similar hasn’t been done before (I looked! In a lot of places, not just the first page of a google search!), I’m super excited to bring the idea to life.

Certainly more accessible than a whole bunch of text that then lets you pick an option out of small boxes of text, haha. Read Play Game, you were a joy to create, but I understand your financial unviability. It’s okay though, it served as a great launching-point for this grand new adventure. Learning, it can’t be converted to a direct ROI for an investor (and I don’t have to, ha!) and yet it is absolutely invaluable.

Due to several combined factors (including a decision months ago to stop purchasing alcohol – that stuff is expensive in BC) I’ve fairly dramatically expanded the time I can take to create games before falling back into a corporate environment to pay the bills. I’m going to use that advantage to not charge right ahead like I did with Read Play Game. Many decisions were made based on how to save time, like which GUI framework to use. Since then I’ve learned quite a lot, let’s continue with the GUI example: I own NGUI, and am familiar with it, so that’s what I used. Since then I’ve seen quite a few very handy and time-saving Unity Asset Store items that leverage Unity’s built-in GUI solution… and well, I’m kind of tired of not being able to take advantage of them. So perhaps I’ll make the switch, or maybe I’ll discover it was a huge mistake and run back to NGUI. Either way, I’ll have learned a thing, and I think that’s much more important than having something fully playable as fast as possible right now.

Speaking of the asset store, what a perfect time to be an independent developer. There are technical items I’ve seen senior developers take weeks to deliver (then more weeks to bug fix, then refactor because they weren’t happy with it, then bug fix…) that I can just straight up purchase for less than a skip-the-dishes order. They’re tested, have reviews, and are supported over time. There’s a whole freakin’ RTS Engine that I bought because why not?! (current dream: Next game can financially support my family and I can whimsically make an RTS with it, no profit all fun) Not to mention the art assets, things that not just save me time but give me something I couldn’t possibly create even if I had all the time. In combination with so much going open source, so many services having free tier options (like how I do Cloud Saving in Read Play Game), I really feel my options are quite broad to create something fairly complex/large in a reasonable timeframe.

My own personal optimism for 2021 comes from an excitement to create, and I can’t wait to see what comes out the other end of that process.