My 2016 - games worked on
2016 was a relatively unproductive year - only two games released as opposed to five in 2015 and seven in 2014. The first half of the year I spent procrastinating from one project, and the second half I spent focusing on another to the exclusion of all else. That said, what I did work on I’m really happy with.
This is part one of my 2016 retrospective. The other parts:
- games I made
- books I read
- podcasts I listened to
- films/TV I watched
- videogames I played
- boardgames I played
A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build
We launched A Good Snowman for iOS/Android in December, so I didn’t do a lot of work on it this year, but it would probably be wrong to omit it completely from this list.
Somehow we were chosen as one of TIME magazine’s top 50 apps of 2016, and then their top 10 apps of 2016! I’m still not entirely sure how that happened, but it’s a real honour.
Sokobond for mobile
I spent the first six months of this year with this being the main thing I needed to get done. It is still not done, obviously.
Things I have said about when Sokobond will come to iOS/Android:
- “2015” - 2014
- “2016” - December 2015
- “Will 100% definitely-well-probably be out at some point in April.” - March 2016
- “Not coming this month” - May 2016
- “Hopefully soon, definitely eventually” - June 2016
- “It’ll still happen eventually” - September 2016
So… cross your fingers for 2017 I guess?
Max Capacitor
For the second year in a row, I took part in Train Jam: a game jam taking part on the 52 hour journey from Chicago to San Francisco with 200 other game developers.
I teamed up with the incredibly talented Andrew Shouldice to make this game about pushing power cells around. He was a delight to work with and this came out really well.
Talk: Putting the “game” in “edi-game-tor”
I was happy to be chosen to talk in the Tech Toolbox panel at GDC 2016. I spoke about PuzzleScript and how we used it as the level editor for A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build.
Skip to 24:00 in the video to watch my part, or watch the whole thing so you can think “too bad none of them are as hilarious as Alan” to yourself.
Super Tiny Mini Golf
This never got released. Maybe that’s for the best…
(Collaboration with John Bujalski)
Boxes Love Boxing Gloves
This is a real hard game, apparently. I advise taking frequent breaks and coming back to it later if you’re having trouble with it!
As with my favourite free game I made in 2015, this started at a game jam where I wasn’t sure it was going anywhere interesting, but I ended up spending an entire month working on it.
It’s somewhat inspired by Hanano Puzzle, which I was playing for a while in the weeks before starting this game. I blame part of the fiendishness on that.
Cosmic Express
Coming 2017. Definitely.
Okay, a few more words on it than that. At GDC I started talking to Benjamin Davis about potentially making another game together, and we talked to a few people including some of Klondike to see if anyone was interested in doing the art. Tyu said she had two months free, and together the three of us settled on this idea in preference to the painfully out-of-scope ideas Ben and I were talking about.
The game is a remake/expansion of my 2015 Train Jam game Train Braining, but at this point it’s so far beyond the original game that it feels weird to compare the two. You can play that to get a feel for the core gameplay, but obviously Cosmic Express is prettier and will have a slightly more gentle difficulty curve.
Since July I’ve been working on this full-time, which is possibly the longest stretch of time I’ve ever worked on anything without taking a break to make a jam game in between! It’s going really well, and I hope people are going to like it when it’s out.