I'm Not Going to Publish a Game This Year.

So it turned out I did kind of lie when I said I was going to publish a game this year. In that I haven’t, I won’t, and maybe I shouldn’t?

It’s been very nearly a year since setting myself this goal, and whilst I’ve made fairly decent strides (if I do say so myself), it turns out that publishing a game is just really hard or something. However I have learned a lot of different things and should probably document some of that stuff too so I remember what I did without having to go digging. So that’s what I’m going to do next to feel like I’ve accomplished something.

However! I’m not entirely without success here. I probably could publish something, it just wouldn’t be very good and there’s probably no point in putting something out there that I’m not proud of just to tick off an arbitrary goal. I might learn something from the process, but I already did put a lot of the legwork in so maybe that counts already.

However, feast your eyes on a year of work (actually maybe a couple of months really since I scrapped my original idea 10 months in).

I maybe kinda finished the title screen mostly? There’s a title screen, and it’s kind of interesting and lets you do the stuff you need to do from a title screen. I even spent way too long implementing a little easter egg if you stay on the title screen too long and let the meteor impact the earth. I think it’s funny, but it did take too long to implement, and I made a mess doing it that I need to clean up. But it does look cool!

I made a little splash / loading screen too which was fun to implement and is reasonably extensible too. A good option for some blogumentation.

But it’s not just fluff and stuff that isn’t important, I’ve done some actual gameplay too! I’ve just put in a little test level for the first forest (jungle?) level and implemented a lot of the main mechanics for jumping, enemies, platforms, backgrounds, etc. which has been pretty neat.

Then I was planning on publishing this as the first little demo level on itch.io but decided against it, but not before putting a bunch of work in to get it ready!

Like the description:

And I even made a cover image for the main page and this cute little widget. Neat right?

Anyway the plan is - clean up some of the stuff I’ve done, blogument some of the neat things I might want to do again, and continue to work on this same game next year. I’ll probably even do periodic devlogs too so I can remember what I’ve done and when. And then eventually maybe be in a position to actually publish? We’ll see.