More than a year ago, more exactly 14 months ago, I decided to start this little Project to make a new game every month using a different engine everytime. So let’s take a look at what I’ve actually done:

• Game 1: Supershot (LibGDX)
• Game 2: Castle Adventure (Godot)
• Game 3: Tapmoji-Web (Defold)
• Game 4: Tapmoji-Android (Defold)

Wait, 14 months means 14 games, right?! Well… The whole thing didn’t work as expected, as you can see. What happened? Let’s start at the first game, Super Shot. In January 2019 everything went well, I made a game in a month. For the second game I needed two months. Honestly this Godot platformer made so much fun, so why not! So in april I anounced the third game. Making Tapmoji not only the engine was new to me, but the language (Lua) as well. So another two months passed and the web version of the game was released. Meanwhile I started to think about renaming this blog to “A Game Every Other Month”. But naah, there were still 7 months left, it should definetly work! Using Defold as engine and the potential of Tapmoji to be a casual mobile game convinced me to polish it a bit and release it a second time as an Android app. So another two months passed and the “fourth” game was released.

So it was August. What happened then?? Well, I had this little thing called Master Thesis that I was working on. I absolutely underestimated the amount of time, I will need for this last phase of my studies! In fact I worked on a (serious) game, as well, but of course it doesn’t count as a part of this A-Game-A-Month project.

So due to this fact, I didn’t start making another game, as well as I didn’t take part in any other GameJam than Ludum Dare. (Which I thought to be a good way to expand my A-Game-Month games portfolio!)

So whats my summary for the past year?

Making every month a new game is very hard! It’s harder than expected. At first a lot of free time is needed to plan, design, code and release a game. One month is very very little time. Especially if you don’t do it full-time. Secondly, getting in a new engine everytime, slows down development heaviliy. And of course in such little amount of time it is not possible to polish a game to a state, where it makes so much fun that everyone wants to play it day and night. For example Tapmoji has something about 10 downloads in Google Play, Wow! I had a lot of fun adding features but the game design should be definetly optimized. Nevertheless I learned a lot releasing Tapmoji.

I released just four games, but I definetly learned a lot of things! Especially about my time management 😉 I would definetly recommend everyone interested in game development to make a lot of little games using different technologies. You learn a lot of techniques and coding styles. And maybe you’ll have this one idea which will make you a successful game developer!

Future Plans

I’ll try to keep this blog alive and to finish at least an amount of 12 games. Let’s see what 2020 brings! Stay tuned for the anouncement of the next game!

Phil