GameMaker: Studio – “Win Big” Contest

The past couple of months have been pretty dry for me in terms of doing new stuff. I’ve been making videos, but often missing my release schedule and generally not getting enough done outside of work. My day job is starting to get more taxing and it’s increasingly difficult to come home still motivated to work. This is the advantage of starting this kind of work early, in school or university where you have more free time than you know what to do with. If you’re trying to establish yourself independently while still needing the income support of a tiring day job it takes a tremendous amount of self motivation to be successful. When you commit an evening to independent work you’ve committed a whole day to work. It’s pretty unhealthy to never have that regular space available to relax, socialize and so on but where I’m at right now it’s still the strongest way to see results. Just not the easiest. Luckily what I do is pretty fun, or I’d basically have no chance at all.

So I saw this yesterday. Exciting stuff. I’m in. My last foray into a game dev contest ended with an unfinished game and a deep sense of self-disappointment. This time I’ve adjusted for my mistakes and will hopefully do a lot better. The conditions are generally more favourable. (It’s not Christmas, for a start.)

I have about 50 days to go from nothing, to approved on the windows store. I’ve worked out a brief schedule of how I’m going to do this. Technically I’m not starting from nothing, I’m picking up from the work I did on my December 2012 Steam contest entry that was never finished. I’ve reworked the design into something I’m confident can be completed to a quality bar I’m happy with in the time I have and all that remains is to build it.

I’ll be keeping a bit of a devblog here about the game’s progress, and putting a lot of other things in my life on hold to try and make the best of this entry. I’m really out to do well in this thing so it’s going to get all of my attention. I’ll also be trying to live stream some development of the game from my twitch channel.

That said I’ll still be trying to put out tutorial content over the coming weeks because I don’t want to risk the channel losing momentum. But other than that I’m really just going to be putting all my time and resources into this project.

Wish me luck!