Wow, a new year already! I wanted to review the goals from last year, and set some new ones.

I wanted to spend longer periods of time on games, rather than just a weekend or similar as per most gamejams. I made a few games that I spent significant time on (more than a month). Some of these were originally made for a jam, others were just made because I wanted to.

First there was Smoke Screen, which I originally made for the second Alakajam. I continued working on it, and got it working with two players playing against each other over the internet. As an aside, getting the UI/UX right for multiplayer internet games is pretty complicated!

Then there was The Growth, which was a team effort for the 3rd Alakajam. We encountered some pretty big bugs, and failed to get it working during the jam. I then spent the next month trying to make it work. It’s in a better state now but still has some weird glitches.

The Lost Beans is a PICO-8 platformer with no enemies. I quite liked the development of this, as it felt quite organic. The coffee jam was just one week, but I continued working after the jam and completely re-did the graphics.

I then spent a month working on Wildfire as documented in that blog post.

Finally I made Wizard duels for the 4th Alakajam, and since then, I have added a single player campaign on top of the core battle gameplay over the last couple of months. Hopefully the game will soon be released - just trying to cram in some AI at the moment!

All in all I am happy to say this goal was successful!

I also wanted to play more games, and made a goal of playing and reviewing 50 games! I didn’t get anywhere close to that - but I will continue the project into this year. A highlight last year was Tijn’s review of Commandos!

But what about gamedev? I wanted to learn Unity for a while, and I think this is the year to prioritise it. One reason is that GGJ is 99% Unity, and I’d like to be able to join as a coder. Another reason is to be able to make mobile games, and also Unity seems to be the industry standard for gamedev.

Let’s say learning Unity and making a mobile game is my gamedev goal of 2019! Let’s get on with it!