Countless game projects have ended before they even started. As a middle-aged game developer, I’ve completed many projects at work and am confident in my programming skills. However, in my indie projects, only one puzzle game has been successfully released, while the others stalled for various reasons. Looking back, I’ve identified a few key issues:

• Overambitious Goals: Too many ideas, too grandiose, and ultimately unachievable (time costs too high).
• Too Focused on Technology: Spent too much time on development, neglecting other skills (good architecture, toolchain, code reuse, performance optimization).
• Perfectionism: Aiming to match the best indie games in my mind, requiring an engaging hook, beautiful graphics, innovative gameplay, counterintuitive puzzles, a consistent game experience (like using gameplay to implement UI), good performance, and smooth operation.
• Lack of Deadlines: Although there were iterative versions, there was no final release date, leading to endless tweaking and increasing sunk costs.
• Work-Life Imbalance: High-intensity development early on drained my energy. When faced with development challenges or life/work pressures, the project would stall and be hard to pick up again, leading to resistance and eventual stagnation.

To change this, I decided to set a one-month deadline to create and release a game (similar to a one-month GameJam). Given the limited time, I chose the following types of games:

• Remake Classic Old Games: Save time on asset creation and planning, focus on technical implementation of gameplay.
• Puzzle Mini-Games: Low art cost, low development cost, and good for honing puzzle design skills.
• Gameplay Demos: Focus on innovative gameplay design.

The game will be released for free on itch.io. If it’s well-received, I’ll spend another month refining and re-releasing it; if not, I’ll move on to a new game the next month. Through this method, I hope to validate some gameplay ideas that have been on my mind for years.

mota24

The goal of the first game was to remake the classic 24-floor Magic Tower by Fat Mouse Studio. I had attempted this several times before but never completed it.

This time, mota24 is essentially a perfect remake of the original. The assets are all from the original, and the values and flow (including all hidden elements) are faithfully recreated. I also improved the UI, optimized the controls, added save/load functionality, supported basic game settings (fullscreen, music, sound effects), and even included an English version.

Although it’s just a remake, I reflected a lot during this process about the essence of Magic Tower gameplay, the issues with modern Magic Tower games, and how the gameplay could evolve. I plan to develop new Magic Tower-like games based on this project in the future.

Reflection

Looking back at this month, the first week was incredibly productive, with the core gameplay mostly completed. I naively thought a month might be too long.

In the second week, productivity halved. This week was mainly about determining the UI art style and UX layout, completing most of the interfaces. Since this isn’t my forte, efficiency was low, but the final result was satisfactory.

In the third week, productivity halved again. This week focused on the dialogue system and trigger editing for Magic Tower. Although the events in the Fat Mouse version of Magic Tower are quite simple, it still took a lot of time to finalize the plan. The goal was to keep it as simple as possible while covering all event types (given the limited development time, if there was no deadline, I might have spent a lot of time writing a complex framework here).

In the fourth week, productivity halved once more. I got sick and had to spend half a day each day in the hospital for therapy, while also prioritizing bug fixes for a company project launch. Finally, I went all out during the weekend, fixing most of the bugs and completing most of the peripheral systems like credits, game settings, opening and ending scrolls, game icon, splash screen, packaging, and the itch.io page.

Not being able to complete a game made me very anxious and even lose confidence in myself. Sometimes I wondered if I was cut out for indie development, especially now that I’m middle-aged. Should I still persist?

I hope that by making a game in a month, I can regain my confidence. If I still can’t do it, maybe it’s time to reconsider whether to continue down the indie development path. I welcome everyone to supervise and give feedback.

The next game is planned to be a small puzzle game, starting around July 8th. Let’s do this!