Every year, around May, my partner and I take a holiday. We've done a few different types in the last few years and always around May. One staying in the UK at a quaint little seaside town in Devon, one being a more "active" holiday around Amsterdam doing things like visiting the zoo and touring the canals, and then this year we opted to do something more chilled by visiting Corfu. It was a lovely time and the most relaxing of the holidays mentioned, but the one thing that all of these have in common is we use it as a "checkpoint" of a year to think about how far we've come. The one danger of a holiday where you do absolutely nothing is that it allows the mind to wander, and wander it did. Going far beyond the usual approach of a checkpoint, I was re-evaluating my actual employment, my game dev, my approach to how I organise my day to day life, and what I want life to be in a few years time. Given my dinner tonight consisted of dino nuggets and fries, I do not think I'm mature enough to have these thoughts.

So, given what I just said above, let's take all of these things one by one;

Holidays

Go to Corfu. Yes, the landing will always be bumpy as fuck. The runway is uncomfortably short so the pilot has to make sure that the plane is DOWN. Yes, mosquitos will bite you. But the island is gorgeous, the weather is a lovely 28c in late May, and if you go to an all inclusive, you don't have to think about anything beyond what drink you want. Take a holiday. They're fucking important.

Game development

Every May where I've reviewed where I'm at, it's been a case of "I know what I want to do, not sure how to do it". This year was a little different. In the last 12 months, I've switched from Unity to Godot, put Simple City to rest for now and began thinking about the next project. Then I started actually thinking about making it, and how it'd be done. I looked at what I want to make, and broke it down into components, and have now started made a nice little crafting system package.

This whole approach of building a utility asset rather than trying to build a game was an interesting one. I mean, it still came from my desire to build a narrative based game about a coffee shop, but at the same time, this gives me a single object to build and publish as well as a great playground to learn in. The best thing for me is that I'm going to use this asset. Other people might use this asset. I'm not going to charge for this asset. I'm just going to make something for free that will help me to learn, will get used in my game, and might help other people. All in all, it's a great little project.

I did have to put Simple City to rest, for now at least. I couldn't find a way to make it a fun game. It's a shame because I'd love to have seen it through to the end, but I had to accept where I was going wrong. That hurt. You always want this idea of yours to be good, but eventually I discovered that I got bored. If even I got bored of my game, it's really time to acknowledge there's a fundamental problem, and I just didn't have the solution. It shouldn't have hurt. Ideas come and go, and they're not always good, but I guess I got too attached and thought myself too clever, bit off more than I could chew, and struggled to death. Hopefully the new footing on Godot and the crafting asset pack will help avoid that in future.

I've also looked at some of the other changes in my life and determined that now is the time to make a push. In the next 3 or so months, I'll be moving house. Once I do, I'll look to incorporate as a company, and that gives me the clear path to releasing a game, as well as providing a framework for actual publishing of my works.

My main employment

My work has changed. I've been moved onto a new team and while the people directly involved seem great both as people and engineers, there's some fundamental problems with the actual team structure and the direction from higher management. Any attempt to point out these issues seems to be ignored, and all in all, it fills me with a fair bit of dread. I'm now in a team that I'm not familiar with, dealing with systems that are old enough and outdated enough that they should really be sent to live on a farm, where they can be shot and buried and far away from me. I really do want to stress that I think the people on my team are good engineers. Some of them are absolute geniuses, but that doesn't dig us out of the hole of having far too much work for far too few people. I've actually got a job interview coming up. Because I decided the stress of moving, helping my partner with her business, and doing my game dev wasn't enough.

Game Jam

I took part in Ludum Dare back in January of this year. It was a great experience and my first game jam in near a decade. Really did re-ignite the spark of game development for me after being knocked on my arse about Simple City. I forgot how much I could enjoy having a problem to solve in a game dev world. I also used this game jam as my starting point for Godot. Trial by fire, as it were. I'm really proud of what we achieved as a team in LD, and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do next. Myself and the others who worked on the LD game we made have agreed to let the others work on it as they see fit, so there is all the possibility that'll become something someday. Idk. Who knows.

I can see myself doing more game jams in the future. I really respect the way that GMTK have handled their upcoming game jam, by setting it over 96 hours to encourage competitors to get some sleep. Sleep was very important to how to game jam, and in general.

So, what's next?

More of the same, by the looks of it. I'm really happy with how life is going at the minute, aside from my day job. I've got a brilliant and beautiful partner, two lovely cats, we are moving to a really ideal house in the near future, I'm learning how to game dev, I'm maybe kinda toying with the idea of learning cyber security and transitioning out of pure software engineering. Who knows? All I know is I'm going to keep pushing forward to release a game. I've finally got the crafting asset working, so now I'm just moving forward to start on my coffee shop game, and hopefully grow by this time next year. Let's see how it goes. Much love!