In an effort to make Pixelbyte Studios more visible and to challenge myself, I’m announcing the game-a-month plan. Kind of like the meal plans at school, only tastier. Between February 2016 and July2016, I will be releasing one free game every month. I have some rules for this experiment:
- The latest non-beta version of Unity3d must be used.
- Announce the next game and its idea at the beginning of the month (Except for February which I’ll announce today).
- Release games at the end of the month (some platforms might release later depending on store approval times).
- The games will be released on PC, Mac, maybe Linux, Android, and iOS (iOS will be dependent on how well Unity’s IL2CPP works).
- I can only use material/ideas from my 20 previous Ludum Dare competition entries and any other unfinished prototypes I have laying around.
- I can optionally put Ads and/or In-App purchases in the games if I have the time. (I probably won’t)
- Each game should somehow advertise the availability of the previous ones for marketing purposes. Hopefully I can come up with something good here, but this may be difficult.
- Weekly (or maybe daily Monday-Friday) text or video blogs about the progress. I might also do some twitch streaming of development too if there is enough interest.
- Daily tweets on the current game project or unity-related tips/tricks.
- The game content must adhere to the Pixelbyte Studios family-friendly policy.
Some notes:
- I may have trouble with the iOS and Mac store releases since they are more time consuming than the others. Plus, Mac OS is not something I use daily (I am installing El Capitan as I write this).
- I’m going to keep the option of releasing the Mac builds directly on itch.io if the Mac App Store takes too long.
- I suspect that gathering screenshots and other media for release to stores will be quite time-consuming. Hopefully through this I can come up with some time-saving software utilities.
- Yes I do know about the One Game a Month initiative, but it doesn’t fit for what I want to do.
- One of my other goals will be to come up with a way to do in-game polls asking users what extra or different things they would like to see in the games. This might be too much for my constraints but I still want to try it.
- I will be participating in the Ludum Dare game jams, but I’m not sure how that will look. I’ll cross that bridge when it comes.
- I will keep a Google Keep TODO list of my daily tasks and also one for my monthly tasks (mainly releasing the binaries to various stores). Ideally I would this to be publicly-viewable so I’ll look into alternatives like Trello.
Well, as I’m finishing up this post, El Capitan has downloaded and has begun installing on my Mac. Oh man. I have to download and install the new Unity3d tools on it too. So much to do and so little time.
