A Game a Month

I made a new years resolution this year to develop release one game per month for the entire 2016. This resolution came about because for far too long I've felt that I am skilled and capable in game development, yet I have nothing tangible to show for it. I want to be a successful developer, yet I have nothing that proves I deserve success. So 2016 is meant to be the year that changes. 

I work full-time in AAA, and I teach as an Adjunct faculty two nights a week, but I still have around 20 productive hours throughout the week available to use, and I have been pouring those hours into side projects. So far this year I have developed and released 4 games, with another well on the way. 


What have I learned from this process up to this point? For one, promoting a game without a marketing budget is very VERY difficult, though not impossible. Second, a month is actually a pretty long time to make a game, but not long enough to polish a game...I feel like I could easily make 2-3 functioning games each month, but I am attempting to polish the games I release, so I get a game working and then I try to start polishing, and then I get to my release date and I have to forgo the rest of the polish in order to continue to meet my milestones. The third thing I'm learning is very obvious, but I had not previously ever published/released a game on my own, so I am learning a lot about publishing to different platforms. Publishing to Android turned out to be easier than expected, as did publishing for web, but publishing to iOS is shaping up to be quite a challenge. I'm also hoping to start making releases for PC, but maintaining all of these projects cross-platform is a lot of work!


Anyway, here are the games I've released in 2016! I hope you like them, and please share :)

January - Slapdash Bones: A multiplayer dice game, players take turns rolling dice on one phone/tablet.
Available on Google Play - https://goo.gl/O3UBvK

February - Cat Cave: An endless runner, keep the cat safe as she runs through a treacherous cave! Leader-board allows you to compete with friends.
Available on Google Play - https://goo.gl/ubhKBi

March - Color Bounce: A physics/color puzzle. I made and released this in 12 hours start to finish (from the moment I decided "I'm gonna make this!" until the moment I released it, there is no tutorial but I bet you can figure it out).
Available on Google Play: https://goo.gl/Q2AwUp and web: http://goo.gl/tTSpkw (does not work on Chrome)

Bonus - Ice Breakout: a breakout clone with some snazzy juice. I'm actually a little bit ahead of my goal right now because I decided to follow a tutorial on making HTML5 games, and ended up making this available online: http://goo.gl/Q6g2pL

April's game will be for Google Cardboard, and I hope to have ported the others to iOS and PC in the next few weeks. Thanks for playing!