Business Update

This week I've created a handful of social media accounts in prep for a little bit of a marketing push. For now - I'll be posting links to these blogs in all of those places, but just having some sort of presence should help me keep people up to date as I'm working on the game. I'm trying my best to give this a "real" attempt at a marketing push, generating some sort of audience, etc. I'm well aware that launching a game or product without any sort of following and hoping folks show up isn't a recipe for success.

As this is my first "real" game release, I'm also treating this as a bit of a science experiment. Following a bit of a rigid process and seeing what results I get. This should help me adjust my strategy for future games, and continue to improve. For now, my question is: If I post weekly blogs and do minimal social media interactions leading up to the launch of the game, is that enough? We'll see!

For now, I've got an X (twitter), TikTok, Instagram. I'm hoping to spin up a youtube account as well for a little bit more long form videos and trailers as I get closer to a finished product. Links for all of those will be at the bottom of the website.

Story Time: How Did I Get Here?

This is the fun part of the blog post. I get to talk about my efforts so far, and what lead me to forming a business and giving this a real shot. This week, I'm going to start from the beginning. How I wound up picking Game Dev back up, and the early choices I made as I went.

Earlier this year I was asked to look at and critique some soon to be released games being made by friends and friends of friends. Seeing what they had managed to put together as solo developers in their spare time inspired me to take another shot at this. I've picked up and put down game development multiple times in the past. Some of that was the stress of my day job not allowing me the time and energy, but a lot of it was the initial learning curve of the various development tools that I was trying to use.

I started with a short tutorial on Godot, rather than jumping into Unity like I had in the past. I had really only heard about Godot as an option from the fallout of Unity's bad press around licensing. When looking at Godot's totally free and open nature, I figured this was a good engine to build on top of for a game that I'm not sure will see the light of day. I was able to have the basics of a platformer working in the first 10-20 hours of fiddling around. Much faster than the months it took to get to that point using Unity on my prior attempt.

Once I got the basics working, I decided to start ideating on what I can build with the knowledge I already have. What sort of game could I build with 0 additional knowledge other than what I learned from this single tutorial? This lead me to the idea I'm currently working on. I've found in my career that some of my best work was done under heavy constraints. As someone who'd describe themselves as less creative and more technical, I think the constraint forces me to be creative. This also gave me an attainable goal. I'm starting a project I know I can finish. It might be a small game, but it will be a finished game. A complete thought.

And that is motivating. That is the part that has motivated me to get to this point.

Sign Off

I'm hoping these blog posts start to follow a consistent format from here on out. I've got weekly goals set to hold myself accountable and make sure I'm on track to get this game fully released. Part of that weekly cadence is posting here and keeping everyone following along up to date.

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee