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:

1. The latest non-beta version of Unity3d must be used.
2. Announce the next game and its idea at the beginning of the month (Except for February which I’ll announce today).
3. Release games at the end of the month (some platforms might release later depending on store approval times).
4. The games will be released on PC, Mac, maybe Linux,  Android, and iOS (iOS will be dependent on how well Unity’s IL2CPP works).
5. I can only use material/ideas from my 20 previous Ludum Dare competition entries and any other unfinished prototypes I have laying around.
6. I can optionally put Ads and/or In-App purchases  in the games if I have the time.  (I probably won’t)
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Daily tweets on the current game project or unity-related tips/tricks.
10. 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.