Bacon and Games

What Do We Do Now? is a short puzzle game made in 48 hours for the 2015 Global Game Jam. It also happens to occupy the January slot of my new “One Game a Month” experiment (more on that below). I very much enjoyed working on WDWDN and so far I’ve been getting positive and useful feedback from a wide range of players.

You can play What Do We Do Now? via this link and if you’d like to leave feedback please do so in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

So What’s Next?
While I intend to explore a deeper and longer version of What Do We Do Now?, my current  focus right is rapid prototyping. Making a game is a big time commitment and so choosing the right project is paramount. Producing many tiny prototypes (like this one) before you saddle yourself with an 18 month workload  is a great way to suss out the best concept to pursue.

To that end, I’ve decided to take part in Christer Kaitila’s website, onegameamonth.com (1GAM) , which is exactly what it sounds like… a challenge to create one game each month. But more than a challenge, it’s a framework and a community that supports your doing so.

1GAM helps game developers to stay on track by dangling XP and achievements in front of them. It’s a well known fact that people like to-do lists and progress bars, so in that regard the site works as a motivational tool. Though while that’s all well and good from a Pavlovian perspective, what I appreciate more about 1GAM is the group mentality the site cultivates. There’s this “we’re all in it together” feeling you get from participating in 1GAM and that, for me, is far more valuable than collecting badges or marching an XP progress bar across the screen (which I’ll admit are also both things that have a marked affect on me as well… *blush*).

The site encourages you to share you work with peers, to comment on and support each others’ efforts, to take risks, to embrace imperfection for the sake of discovery and to level up via XP (which is really a proxy for the inevitable personal growth that happens when you keep up with the challenge). One Game a Month is a safe place for veterans and first-timers alike to grow individually and as a community, side by side. Strength in numbers, right? (10k+ strong as of this writing) And to top off this hug-fest, the whole experience is wrapped in a wonderfully positive vibe that, frankly, this industry and the world at large needs a lot more of.

Whether you’re new to game development or a veteran of multiple decades, I urge you to give One Game a Month a look. It’s definitely one of my new favorite corners of the web.

On and if you’re still reading, please check out What Do We Do Now? as well.