2012 : That was... fun?

It’s that time again, where I take a look back at the events of the last year and ask the question : what the hell was all that about?

Previous installments : 2011 2010

Well, my plans for the year ganged pretty damn agly but everything pretty much worked itself out in the end. Seems I just don’t have the required hustle for contracting - after 6 months on the bench my cash reserves were pretty much all gone, Mrs Beerman was beginning to get a little impatient with bankrolling me, and our conveniently-timed rent-free house/cat sitting deal was fixing to expire.

On the game development front, Playing Gods was sadly cancelled and Droidy Shooty Thing was an engine looking for a game. The outlook was bleak for our Hero.

But with one mighty bound, the Beerman was back in the game! After deciding it was time to start looking for a real job again, I landed a new permie gig in less than a week. With a shiny new revenue stream secured I was struck with inspiration and knocked out Lagertron in the space of about 6 weeks - something of a record given how long things usually drag out for. That segued neatly into this year’s October Challenge, so I polished up the Android version and finally dipped my toes in the exciting world of commercial game development.

So far it’s not exactly set the world on fire in terms of sales but then I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to promote it - you know, like actually telling people about it or anything. Still, it’s shifted a couple of copies - some of them even to people I don’t know! - and I’m calling that a win :)

With that done, I was feeling pretty good about my achievements for the year, so I decided to settle back and coast through to Christmas in consumer mode and not make anything. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but of course I’d forgotten about the impending Ludum Dare 25. I’d missed 24 due to being sat in a field in Wales - not the best of locations for making videogames unless your name’s Minter - and I didn’t want to let two in a row go by so I dusted off my trusty game-making hat and sprung into action.

Beerman models his trusty game-making hat. Pretty cunning, dontcha think? The theme was “You are the villain”, for which I came up with Frankenstein Complex - a thrilling tale of SCIENCE gone MAD!!! Considering I only had the one day to work on it, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out - I think there’s a halfway decent mobile game lurking in there somewhere. All of which brings us lurching erratically into 2013, and it’s shaping up to be…interesting. As previously mentioned, I’ve signed myself up for onegameamonth.com. I somehow suspect that keeping on top of that will take care of pretty much all the coding time I can find this year, so it’s gonna be small projects all the way. Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll be significantly quicker at putting together something complete, and all being well at least a few of them should be worthy of flogging for beer money. Plus, I’ll actually have something to blog about on a fairly regular basis. Should be fun :)