👽 Another piece of the alien centipede

Hi pal!

I’m sending this one out early, BECAUSE I CAN and I’m satisfied.

Recently I complained that I hardly ever finish any projects and that I’m basically a long chopped up alien centipede. And well… today is a heroic day, because I finished the game I talked about in that issue.

You can get it for free (or pay what you want) on itch.io. It’s playable on both PC and Mac! All you need is a mouse to click with.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on it if you feel like playing it!

What I learned

• I could add all the bells and whistles right away; settings menus, leaderboards, rewards, longer progression and extra gameplay variation. But I decided to not do that. I decided to only add those things if people actually show interest in it, it’s the simplest possible version of the game.

• There were some design flaws in the initial version of the game that bothered me, I tried to fix those flaws by changing the core of the game about 3 times. I could have finished the project much faster if I would’ve had a better mindset. Going forward I will stick to the original idea unless I’m more excited about a new direction.

• It feels damn good to call something finished and sharing it as opposed to letting it become a dusty file on my computer.

• I have become a much more efficient programmer and designer since I made Dropert. It felt like I went through the same rollercoaster of doubt, excitement and confusion but 10 times faster (it’s not as feature complete as Dropert though).

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Mini Notes

🍷 Essay - Pour Out Lesser Ideas to Get to Great Ones

Bach wrote a piece of music every week, Thomas Edison had more than a thousand patents. Just make more stuff and put it out there, the only way to know wether an idea is gonna stick is by showing it to people.

💼 Blog post - Portfolio Theory

“The best portfolios have elements you’re pretty sure are wrong. They often end up being right.”

I’m pretty sure Plock is one of the wrong elements in my body of work, but I could also imagine it being a popular mobile game. I poured one out.

📽️ Twitter Thread - The making of Plock

I composed this series of tweets to give a bit of an explanation on how the game developed.

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My long, alien centipede is taking shape, maybe I’ve broken the pattern of never-finishing. Have you tried to scale down? Did it help you finish something?

Thank you for reading! Have a creative week.