What have I been working on? (2018-Apr 2021)

It’s been a long time that I’ve been too busy to even look at this site. So what have I been doing? Well like any indie developer I work a day job or two, I also have a family with a couple kids that take heaps of my time. But I do always program and make new things. I spent about a year and a half in hardware, working on MCU’s for a variety of things professionally and for hobbies. I really got into micro gaming consoles based on MCU hardware such as the pyCade, ArduinoBoy, etc. Microsofts Make Code Arcade was a bit of fun running that on some actual hardware. I love these devices for nostalgia but also to try to get my kids into some programming.

As far as games, a couple years back I made a game called 11s Up! It was based on an old tabletop bar game collection I used to love to play. When Lemmy from Motorhead passed away, I remember this being his favourite game as well so I cracked out a version of it from memory and released it in under a month. Life got in the way and I forgot about it for over a year. When I looked back I saw it had a little traction and following. I then started playing it and realized the rules weren’t arcade perfect and there was a lot to be tweaked. So like any good developer I started from scratch and re-wrote the whole game from ground up. It continues to do good for my size games grown a couple users every week, which I’m really happy with.

With that “success” I got re-invigorated to get back to making games, I have another game similar style bar-arcade card game I’m 99.99% done with, I even enlisted the help of a UI designer. That’s going to hopefully be wrapped up and announced in my next post. I also have asked the UI Designer to do a refresh on 11s up so that will get a major update soon.

I am trying to watch the comments on the app stores (I wish people would contact me directly, but app stores give that sense of anonymity I guess. ) But I try to fix issues or make enhancements customers request. Unfortunately I can’t get rid of the ads, because I need to pay for this somehow. (And I make probably .001c per ad so I’m not making much of anything, but it’s enough to pay my software license to keep building games each month). That’s another post for another day…

I also made a small word game, this is functionally done but needs some graphics. I have one more tile puzzle game that’s about 80% done, but would probably take 2 months to get 100%. And I have one of my classic games to revisit and make new again, and a brand spanking new game knocking around in my head. I wish I could do this full time, but I’m running late for work so fingers crossed I get another hour tonight. 🙂