Well, both the original goal and the follow-on goal I had for 2021, release and iterate on one game over the course of a year and write twenty-six blog posts, respectively, went unmet. I’ll go into why I think my goals failed in 2021 in my retrospective,¹ but it wasn’t all bad. Despite making no visible game dev progress, I did make a good deal of progress behind the scenes on various games.

I’ve accumulated a lot of half-finished game debt throughout the years, and I’m hoping to finish some of them this year. Specifically, I want to finish six games this year, with preferably at least half being in-progress games.

I’m not sure if writing my game dev goals out will be useful for motivation, but I do like reading and understanding my past thought processes. Hopefully future me will understand why I inevitably end up failing at my goals in 2022.

All My Unfinished Games

Only counting ones where I spent more than three hours of work, without context (and with code names!) but haven’t finished yet.

• Boar3D
• Connection Terminated
• DaleZ
• Escape Room Professor
• HodgePodge
• Fighter’s Guild
• LowRezExplorer
• PushPull
• Sacrifice Game
• Solitaire
• Strange Traveler
• Untitled Bound Prototype

The Projects

Since it’s January and my interest waxes and wanes, I imagine these projects will shift over the course of the year. This is just a snapshot of my ideas at the current moment. It’ll be interesting to see how much this deviates from what happened, if I get around to writing a retrospective.²

My Current Project: FBD Gaiden (New)

It’s January, which means it’s Four Block Drop time.

This time, I want to spin off a new game mode for Four Block Drop into its own game. The game mode is more in depth, and there’s already a severe discoverability issue with FBD’s current offerings. Adding another entry in a list feels disproportionately minor for what I want this game mode to be.

The scope for this project is small: take the existing FBD game logic (decoupled from the presentation code), retheme it, make new menus, and add the new game mode. It should theoretically be straight-forward, so hopefully it’ll be doable within the first two months.

Some Potential Projects

Strange Traveler (In-Progress)

A game that I started on in 2020 and picked up again in 2021. I dropped it in 2020 when LOWREZJAM popped up in the middle of the jam period for this game, and I didn’t end up coming back to it after that jam was done.

In 2021, I dropped it when I ran into performance issues with the procedural generation and began a refactor to change some things, a pretty common place for me to fall off of a project.³

The story is complete, and it’s fairly light on modeling work I need to do. I need to do some work on the procgen algorithm and implement some procgen building algorithms, but this one is fairly close to being finished.⁴

Untitled Bound Prototype (In-Progress)

This is my white whale. I’ve been working off and on⁵ on this project since 2014. A bound is a type of custom map for StarCraft. If you search “StarCraft bound” on YouTube you can see numerous examples. Basically it’s memorizing and analyzing patterns then using that knowledge to dodge obstacles. It’s a fun blend of thought and reflexes.

I’ve put a lot of time into this project, but last year I found out that there was still a fairly active bounding community, filled with some people I’d played with almost 20 years ago. That was an incredible discovery, and made me want to get back to working on the game. At the same time, I felt I had to be realistic with my scope. I came to terms that I wouldn’t be able to put everything I wanted into it.⁶

Instead of being the full game I wanted it to be, this will be a prototype,⁷ which means that some of the art assets will be placeholders, and all of the levels would have to be hand-crafted in XML instead of a level editor.

Who knows, if it gets some traction,⁸ I might come back to it.

HodgePodge (In-Progress)

HodgePodge is the test project I use for all my Unity library changes. The idea was I’d use it as a testing ground for new mechanics and areas in games, and you’d be able to move from game world to game world, along with some one-offs just for the game. This was inspired by the variety of the game 10 Beautiful Postcards.

I like this being a dumping ground for little projects, and it really shouldn’t require all that much work to finish off. I kind of like the idea of doing one or two bonus rooms while working on other projects,⁹ so I may not dedicate a set period of time for working on this.

I’ve already started out strong on this front, as I’m planning on having a room with my CHIP-8 emulator.

Super Mario Land-esque Shmup (New)

Did you ever play Super Mario Land, the platformer for the GameBoy? Well, if you did, you’d know that it had some shmup sections. Were they great? No, not really. Did they have gameplay that might work for a LOWREZJAM along with sprites low-rez enough that I might be able to draw them? Yes they did.

If I’m feeling a lack of motivation, a relatively quick 2-week jam might be what I need to get back into the swing of things and get things done.

Fighter’s Guild (In-Progress)

In November of 2021, for NaNoWriMo, I wrote a lot of story about a person who is a member of a fighter’s guild. The plan was to flesh out the text with some D&D-style encounters, all taking place in text format and written in Unity.

This one has a lot of work left: I need to write the entire battle system, finish off all the scenarios, proofread the writing, convert the writing to some parsable format, and do acceptable text rendering. This one is certainly one of the biggest reaches I have here, so I won’t be surprised if this one falls by the wayside.

Connection Terminated (In-Progress)

This one is a set of four opaque puzzles that takes place in a small room. The puzzles are mostly already done, but I’d need to program the computer interface to accept the puzzles, write a script, and model out a whole room. This one is incredibly art heavy, so I’m not entirely optimistic about it being done. At the same time, I’d love to have something to submit to the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc in 2023, and this could be a contender.¹⁰ This would be a demo, but larger in scope than most games I’ve released.

A Notable Omission

The game that I had the goal of working on for all of 2021 is not in this list. I imagine I’ll come back to it from time to time, but I don’t think any of the aspects that kept me from finishing it then have changed in an appreciable way. If all goes to plan with my Bound game, this one could be my new white whale.

The Blog?

Notably, I have no official goals about posting more to this blog. I’d certainly like to (I just posted the CHIP-8 post and theoretically I’ll have a retrospective for 2020 and 2021 coming), but I think putting hard numbers on content is fundamentally at odds with what I want this to be, which is just enjoying writing about things I’m working on.¹¹

Conclusions

2021 was a scattershot year for me in terms of game development, and my hope is that I’ll be able to focus more on getting some solid games out this year. It’d be great to see some of the seeds I’ve planted come to fruition.