And so here we are, in the future. 2020 is the most sci-fi sounding year so far. Anyway, as per tradition, I’ll review the goals from last year, and set some new ones.

Last year I said I wanted to learn Unity, make a game in Unity, and also make a mobile game (maybe in Unity?). How did that go?

Well, it was a big failure, really. I followed part of a tutorial about building a Zelda 1-type game in Unity, but got really fed up for some reason. Then I just never got back to it.

I did make a mobile game though! I decided to make a fantasy-adventure game inspired by FTL for the js13kgames compo, and since I wanted a game like that on my mobile, I decided to design it for my mobile phone.

Unfortunately I ran out of time to implement all the features and events that I wanted, so the game was a bit light on content. After the compo I decided to put it on the shelf and rather re-implement it in a proper engine if I ever pick it up again. I still think it could be a really fun game!

Speaking of re-implementations… another idea I have is to create a mobile version of The Lich Ruin, a PICO-8 game I released in January ‘19. It’s a pretty full-packed PICO-8 cartridge, and there’s a few missing bits of functionality such as save/load that would be very useful. The game itself got some attention and ended up on a 3rd party site where it (apparently) has been played more than 34k times (!).

As usual, I entered a fair amount of jams. I made a digital card game and spent some time making the engine re-usable. I used twine to create a visual novel which I thought turned out pretty ok.

What else? I submitted one of my onehourgamejam games for the 4th Alakajam tournament, where people beat my own highscore.

I continued to make games in PICO-8. I did a sim city-inspired game, a puzzle game about global warming (ish) for the Climate Change Jam and LOWREZJAM, failed to finish a game for the 7th Alakajam and managed to make a game for the 2019 PICO-8 Advent Calendar!

There was some large periods where I had very little time for gamedev, and I also have spent a lot less time than I wanted on actually playing (and reviewing) games. In fact I only added two more games to my “review 50 games” list. Oh well, life happens.

So what’s next? I am interested in at least finishing that tutorial I started in Unity. Maybe make a small game just to tick that box. Let’s see what happens - the main goal is to keep the gamedev going!