The last two years in a nutshell - a retrospective
January 12, 2022 • 5 minute read
Happy twenty-twenty… two?! Damn, time has certainly flown by since the last time I wrote and as I was going through my 2GB “GAMEDEV” folder, I started realizing how many projects I have started and never finished in the past two years. Sad indeed, but as a way of starting 2022 with a bang, I thought I’d do a quick rundown of some of these abandoned projects as well as share my plans for the near future. This post should also mark the first of the (hopefully) many upcoming devlogs, that are intended to be somewhat lightweight and casual in nature.
TL;DR: I start a lot of projects, finish very few and I want that to change in 2022. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
2020: The Game Boy saga continues…
After the release of Escape Obliterizer DX in 2019, I kept dabbling with Game Boy programming for a few months and ended up participating in the Global Game Jam 2020 with a Game Boy game called This Is Not A Drill: The Inside Job. The jam happened in January and it was definitely a fun way to kickstart the year. Little did I know it would also be the last game jam I’d attend in person before COVID-related lockdowns would start to hit us in Portugal.
During that time, I also got around to play Celeste which led me to start porting Celeste Classic (the original PICO-8 version) to the Game Boy. I eventually gave up because I found out it had already been ported to the Game Boy Advance and there wouldn’t be much purpose to this port.
Celeste Classic‘s abandoned Game Boy port
The moment GBStudio (a drag and drop engine released in 2019) started to get really popular I was already getting tired of developing for the Game Boy and having so many games being released every single day was the final push I needed to hop off the train and move on to something new. The idea was to move the current game I was working on, Shadows of Madland (a simple RPG) from the Game Boy to the PlayStation Portable but it never really panned out. It’s another one of those projects which is archived until further notice…
Logo for Shadows of Madland, a simple RPG made originally for the Game Boy
2021: The year of the moon…
Somehow I ended 2020 by learning Lua and trying out a couple of frameworks that facilitate development of simple games for the PlayStation Portable. To put those skills in practice, I attended the Global Game Jam 2021 where I worked with a friend on a game called Shuffle Dungeon, a simple RPG for the PSP where both your own and the enemy stats are random and the idea was to collect cards around the dungeon to fight a boss at the end. Sadly we never got to finish it because I overestimated my Lua programming skills…
Shuffle Dungeon, a PSP game prototype made in Lua for the GGJ2021
I ended up really liking Lua programming, so much so in fact that throughout 2021 I fiddled with LÖVE and PICO-8 programming with which I explored the mechanics behind typing games and made some prototypes.
A nameless typing game prototype made in Lua for the PICO-8
Besides playing around with Lua-based frameworks, I also found the time to fiddle around with both raylib, in C, and MonoGame, in C#. I kept pursuing the “typing game” idea which led me to Keyboarders. Sadly, a few weeks into development I realized the game wasn’t very fun to play so I eventually called it off until I get a good idea to give it a good overhaul. In hindsight, I really should’ve spent more time during the prototyping phase…
A cool palette shifting effect made for Keyboarders (MonoGame)
2022: New Year’s resolutions?
I look back at 2020 and 2021 and see them as years of learning, experimentation. My objective then would be to release an actual game this year. I want to keep it short but fun, and that’s the most important thing. Everything else, from platforms to genres, is TBD. Ideas are abundant, now I just need to pick one and stick to it. Hopefully I don’t deviate from the plan this year?