So, last time I left you, I had cancelled development on Life’s Impetus. So the question is, what am I going to do now? Before I can get to that though, I need to establish what my goals are. Let’s get into it!

What are my goals?

First things first, the first important thing to aim for is smaller, simpler games. Life’s Impetus wasn’t necessarily too large, but it was definitely too complex, so now I’m reverting to the other end of the spectrum. I had been working on Life’s Impetus for 2 years when I stopped, but for these games, my goal is to take around 3 months in full development for each.
Something else that I’m interested in is learning and broadening my horizons. Of course I was always learning stuff while developing LI, but in the end, it was just learning more about what I already knew about. Now, I wanna get into things that are completely new to me. Perhaps not all of it will be useful in the future, but learning is a skill you must practice.
And talking about practice, another goal is to practice certain skills. I mean, just by making games I’m improving in some areas, but I want to make a conscious effort to improve myself in specific activities. Ideally, these will be activities I got the hang of but am not great at.
And finally, my last and probably most important goal is… to discover my strengths. Art, mechanics, narrative; the three main elements in most games. To some degree, I can basically do all of them by myself, but which one am I best at? Which one do I suck at? That’s the question I want to answer with the games I’ll make.

What do I want to work on?

The Main Three

One game focused on art, one game focused on mechanics, one game focused on narrative. I’ll hopefully be able to tell which is my strength depending on the reception of the projects, and my experiences making them. And if any of these turn out to be particularly popular, I might even make it into a full game.

• Narrative Project:This is the first one I’m working on, and as you can guess, the focus here is the story. Thus, it’s going to be a… visual novel (with gameplay elements), and I decided the theme will be memories. I should be releasing a prototype soon, so I’ll be writing a devblog getting into more details about this project when it’s done. Also, I’m running a poll to decide on the context of the story, so I’d really appreciate if you answered it.
• Art Project: As you can guess, I want to do something that lets me demonstrate my artistic skills. But besides that, I also want this project to be “artsy” and experimental like Passage, Proteus and such. What about, I have no idea, but I hope it’ll be interesting.
• Mechanics Project: Something fun and simple. I also hope to create an interesting setting like in Canabalt that makes you wonder ”Why is the character doing that?” and ”What’s the back story to this world?” without making it the focus of the game.

Side-Projects

Since I’ll be free now to do more things, there are also various side projects I’d like to work on in-between the main three games. It’s all good for broadening my horizons.

• Nightmare Guardian (working title): @RPGgrenade’s game is looking really interesting, and I’d love to help him make it reality. It’s also a good chance to practice teamwork, something I don’t really have experience in besides gamejams.
• Local gamedev class: Besides just being a full-times game developer, one of my life goals is to be able to help other people become game developers and impulse the Chilean gamedev industry. As a way of practicing, I decided it’d be a good idea to try organizing a small class based on @awoywood’s Construct  workshop. Don’t know yet if anyone will be interested, though…
• Sky’s Isles Port to Android: Something I wanted to do a long time ago but kept ignoring. I’m not really interested in mobile development, but it’s something that sounds fun to learn nevertheless.
• Gamedev Webcomic: There’s already a webcomic about gamedev, but it’s more of a comedy strip. What I’d like to do is something fictional with a serious story that is also funny at times.. basically like Bakuman if you’ve ever read it. I’m just not sure when to do it… Perhaps it could be something I could work on just whenI felt like it, but that would make it pretty irregular… Nevertheless, I know for sure it’s something I’d like to work on.

So, that’s it for now! Next time, I’ll be getting into the details of the Narrative Project and talk about how I plan to work on my games from now on.
Any idea you liked in particular? Tell me in the comments!