After participating in a number of weekend game jams over the past few years, I happened to hear about one that spanned a longer time period – two weeks – and although it was a smaller jam hosted on itch.io rather than a large community like Ludum Dare, it seemed to be getting a fair amount of interest. Read more...

Some backstory: I got my first Macbook back in early 2008. Before that, I had owned a couple of low-end Windows laptops – pretty much whatever was the cheapest thing on sale at Best Buy at the time – and managed to physically destroy both of them within about a year of purchasing them. Read more...

After participating in two Ludum Dare game jams (#42 and #43), and then sitting out the following two for different reasons (#44 due to wanting to work on finishing my first mobile game, and #45 due to the timing overlapping with some pre-existing travel plans), I decided to get back into it with Ludum Dare #46, which ran from April 17 to April 20, 2020. Read more...

After releasing my first mobile game (Bitey Trees) exclusively on the iPhone App Store last September, I set my sights on my next game development goal: Building and releasing a cross-platform mobile game, for both iOS and Android. It’s still in the very early phases right now – I’ve been taking my sweet time getting started with it and trying to plan things out – but for this blog post, I wanted to share my preliminary experiences with building for both platforms using Godot Engine, the game engine I’ve decided to use for this project. Read more...

Last month, I attended my first in-person event as a game developer: the annual Playtest Party at Logan Theater in Chicago, where I showed my first iPhone game, Bitey Trees. I found it to be really fun and interesting, and a valuable learning experience as I’m continuing to grow as a (hobbyist) game developer. Read more...