2016 was a crazy year. I did all these things:
- Tweetfairy for Global Game Jam 2016. Made on Phaser.
- Matajuegos bilingual blog about videogames, society and the people who play them. We publish an article bi-weekly, once a week if we’re on fire.
- Evita Sempai a Twine for the Spring Thing 2016.
- Latch Trap a Twine about being trapped in a shady bathroom at the suggestion of Paolo Pedercini.
- Como la gente civilizada a Twine I made when I got fed up of people being wrong on the internet.
- The Intern a GameMaker game for Alt Ctrl Jam that is controlled by a flashlight in a really non-intuitive way. Arduino and GameMaker don’t gel nicely, so Arduino Leonardo and it’s keyboard library saved the day.
- Se nos llena de agua el ranchito a Twine about aliens and the Antarctic originally made for teaching Twine that turned out to be too complex for it’s intended purpose.
- I mentored and poked people to make games at Sex & Game Jam and I submitted ¿Qué pensás hacer? there.
- I made a twitter bot for Tweetfairy because the game would break biweekly if no one tweeted.
- I also started a game for Ludum Dare that I never submitted nor finished called Meltdown. It’s about things that made me super anxious and how I felt about it.
- With Matajuegos we created a printable game to teach people how to write IF when no computers are available. It’s been battle tested enough by a nice teacher from Rosario so we’re planning to release the rules on itch.io soonish.
- I gave freelancing a shot and it didn’t work out for me and I still don’t know how to Unity, but I have a healthier relationship with Twine and game making in general. I will also try to fiddle with PICO-8 a little bit and see if it makes jams like Ludum Dare a bit easier to deal with.
I also made wonderful friends and learnt that my feelings are valid and I don’t need to be a robot to be cool.
I now know that:
- Good game and interface design is WAY more important than cool controllers.
- What works for a showcase can suck when players have to actually play the thing.
- Games that work at events can and might suck at everything else.
- That people might not care much if your design is clunky as long as you give them flashy stuff, but it will be super sad to have people miss out on the message you wanted to give.
- Use itchio metadata! It’s like super useful.
- I love writing for Matajuegos and making my own game thingies, but going to events and being public and social feels too much like work. I should do less of those for free on my spare time. Ideally, I shouldn’t do stuff that feels like work for free at all.
- Giving resources to people who are already interested in something is way easier than having to pique people’s interest in something new. Specially when you don’t have a lot of time and/or money.
- A lot of decisions on the gaming industry and/or community are based on hunches instead of hard data and I find that scary. Super duper scary. We need more data and we need to actually share it and use it.
- People don’t mind critique that much if they know you from real life. This is also scary, but not that scary.
Hopefully, you will hear from me sooner than before.