I chose to change the scope of the Halloween Game, focusing on releasing it for free at a later date on Itch.io rather than on Steam. One of the reasons for this is because of poor internal playtesting feedback. By scoping down, I can still use what I had created for a fun and small side project with more creative liberty, as we do not have to consider a market perspective.
Despite this change of plans, I felt I had still learned a lot from the two weeks of development targeting Steam. I was able to get comfortable with Steamworks development features such as the store page editor and the Depots feature, which lets you upload and update game builds. I also gained an understanding over how Steam’s tagging system worked, matching your game to related ones.
The following are some of the capsule artwork and description I had made before scrapping the Steam release. I will focus on doing a Steam release on October 2024 instead with a different game, and focus on building my skills up to that point in the meantime.
Game A Week
I also decided that I should be focusing more on making even smaller games every week to further build up my skill, before slowly working my way up to bigger scoped games every month and then a game every three months.
You can read more about the game I had finished this week here. I detail some reflections and context there too.
Other Stuff
Beyond ‘Game A Week’, I have some other side projects I am considering. Not going to say too much before they are done though, other than that I want to experiment with WebGL 3D stuff. Something like the Sims build mode where you can build and decorate a simple house in your browser… which is something I always wanted to play myself. No gameplay loop so its not really a ‘game’ though.
I also still need to write the retrospectives and post-mortems for two of my undergraduate capstone projects. One was a 2D card game I had worked on in a small team as a sophomore, and the other was a 3D driving game as a junior.
I have been putting them off because they aren’t that interesting to me while not being that recent, but in hindsight there were many interesting things that I learned since then. I might as well complete posts on them for completeness sake.
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