I'm entering in the One Game a Month 2013 challenge!

As a goal for this year I knew I wanted to complete more games this year than last year, but it was a little tough to decide what I should aim for?

So I started off by recapping my accomplishment 's for last  year - technically speaking I made 3 games last year:

1:  Pirates Treasure in DBPro - completed but did not commercially release.
2:  Pirates Jewels for iPhone, iPad and PC on Indie City
3:  Holiday Cheer for iPhone, iPad, and PC on WildTangent

So that's pretty good honestly. I learned to program last year starting in February no less!  Getting 3 games finished is awesome.

So I figured - why  not double the goal?  That's fairly reasonable and I should be able to get it done?

Well I am part of the Meetup.com's Sacramento Game Development Meetup Group but most of their meetup's are day-long or weekend-long GameJam's (which is very cool) but as a 40+ year old married guy with kids I can't abandon my family for that long (or don't want to - take your pic).

But I am a member and therefore read the news and posts and our Organizer +Joseph Burchett mentioned and recommended that we should think about participating in One Game a Month's challenge  to create one video game per month in 2013.

But that's pretty huge ..



In fact that is double the goal I had thought about setting for myself this year!

But hey - last year I told myself I was going to learn to program as a 5 year goal!  I beat it by 4 years!

So I really think I should set my goals as high as I can possibly imagine that I might be capable of.

Even if I can't get this done -- lets say I only get 9 games done? That is 50% higher than the goal I was going to set for myself to begin with and would be a monumental achievement for my second year of programming.

Honestly from what I've read about a lot of indie game developers getting even one game done in a year is not common - many of us struggle with motivation, the ability to complete a project and feature creep.

I know this approach is not necessarily conducive to making the next  Skyrim ; but lets face it I don't have 200 artists and 12 programmers and a 10 million dollar budget right?

The fact is I'm an indie developer. Just me. I will do this by myself and its quality will lie some where in the indie level. By laboring over the graphics for a game for 6 months I would be unlikely to exceed the sales of 5 games.

I also believe I may stumble upon a formula for a successful game design this way.  If I make a platformer, or a puzzler, or an action game .. and its a lot of fun just not as polished as it might have been if I had taken 3 or 6 months ... I can always update it or make a version 2.0.

Whats important right now is to get far beyond hip deep in development..  dive in or get out right?

So I am accepting the challenge.  12 games this year.

At minimum I will post about each game as I complete it - I'ts hard to imagine how much blogging I can do when I'm doing that many games. But I will try to do an update once a week if possible. I think that sharing is also a motivating factor sometimes.

Wish me luck!

- punchy out