This is my motto for 2018.
I’ve learned so much this past year by diving head-first into game development. I picked up Unity, started coding and away I went. I’ve spent over the last 20 years in the advertising industry, listening to the analytics team discuss lead-generation tactics, SEO teams discussing keywords and copy, strategy teams defining KPI’s and objectives, and yet I barely used any of those tactics in approaching my own personal game dev attempts.
I know better now. There are a lot of things that a game dev has to be responsible for, especially if they are completely independent and doing this alone like me. Here’s a list of the hats I’ve worn this year launching Stupid Aliens, a very basic mobile game.
- Game Designer
- Concepting & Ideation
- UI and User Flow
- Art Direction
- Asset creation / Purchasing
- Sound Designer
- Music writing, recording, editing and mastering
- SFX sourcing & editing
- Game Developer
- Coding
- 3rd Party Integrations
- Testing
- Deployment
- Maintenance
- Marketer
- Promotional Asset creation
- Promotional Copywriter
- Social Media Manager
- Outreach and Partnerships
- Day job & Family time
This a quite a list! If you’re interested in gamedev, please understand that the ‘dev’ part is just one little piece of the puzzle and a lot of times not even the most important! As a long-time developer, this was a bit of a shock, even though I have the experience working for an agency that deals with all of these pieces daily.
So, my motto for 2018 is: “Retool, Rethink, Learn & Improve”. I have three main goals for this upcoming year:
- Release of “All Aboard!”
- Release of “Stupid Aliens AR”
- Release of new content for “Stupid Aliens”
There will likely be another game idea thrown in there for good measure that I’ll get started on, but I’m setting my sights on #1 above, the release of “All Aboard!”.