Ross Karchner

Two years ago, while my son was attending an event at the library, I spent some time flipping through a book about the Unity game engine (maybe this one?). It wasn’t intimidating, and looked fun. I came away thinking: “huh, I could make games”.

Then I got home and couldn’t make Unity run on my laptop. There’s a happy ending, though: I found Godot, which ran just fine.

I followed a few tutorials to make a flappy bird clone, a breakout clone, a simple platformer, and made progress on a much larger platformer, but after a few months I kind of drifted to other pursuits.

One year ago, I decided to dive back in an embrace game development as a serious hobby. I finished the platformer tutorial, and started entering game jams. Between July 2023 and June 2024, I made six games. There were no unqualified successes, but I usually did OK in one or more categories, like “innovation”, “mechanics”, or “fun”. What I’ve proved to myself is that I’m pretty good at coming up with ideas for interesting game mechanics, and have enough Godot-fu to turn those ideas into actual software that someone can play, and even have fun playing.

Honestly, this makes me feel a little like a wizard.

BUT a good game is more than just a collection of playable mechanics, and a successful game takes way more than just interesting ideas. It takes quality, style, a well-designed progression/difficulty curve, marketing (and a market!), and good timing.

I think my next step is to take a couple of the ideas I’ve worked on (either as jam entries, or other projects) and try to make good, complete, games out of them. I’m not sure about trying to market anything, but I’d at least like to have one or more games that are, in theory at least, marketable.

I think three of the six game jam entries represent concepts that could be developed further (Beat Game, Zummoning, and Brakes Escape), but I should probably narrow it down to one or two.

I’d also like to keep working on a Spin Doctor-inspired puzzle game, and a cybersecurity-themed game I’m still fleshing out (working title: “CISO Clicker”). I’ll try to use #screenshotsaturday and local meetups as my drumbeat: in a successful week or month, I’ll have some progress to share.

And I guess, I’ll plan to post a new retrospective/update in July 2025!