I have now been doing gamedev for 2 years, albeit more intensively for 18 months. Still, that’s some real experience right there. I’ve done five Ludum Dares, a few miniLDs, and 35 onehourgamejam.com games - this is a lot!

Somewhat incidentally I seem to have ended up focussing on quantity thus far - I guess it just came naturally from getting into 1hgj. Looking back, I think it was probably the best thing I could have done - it would be nice to make a longer game or two, but I think there’s a real risk of getting stuck if you try to make a larger game too early in your dev adventure.

However, I think the next step is to switch my focus to quality. Spend a bit longer on a bigger project that isn’t completed in one or 48 hours. Something to come back to and add to iteratively. I still want to participate in 1hgj because its a lot of fun, and I do find that I almost always learn something new during the jam.

But I think there are some very big warnings with developing larger games: it’s easy to become obsessed and expand the game into AAA-territory, or dream up all the awesome features you want and instantly get de-motivated due to the huge TODO-list. I want to try, really hard, to focus on iteratively adding things and not thinking about the final list of features. I find that once I have a game that runs and can be playtested, adding small new things is super-gratifying, so my aim is to try to get a game into a playable state and then add lots of small but super-gratifying things to it!

However, I don’t want to spend the whole year on one project. Ideally I’d do 3 or 4 larger games while also doing the LDs and 1hgjs and other cool jams. We’ll see, but the goal(tm) is to gradually shift from quantity to quality this year. It’d be awesome to have atleast one game in my portfolio that I could proudly point people at without having to excuse it with “made in 48h!” or similar.