I've posted a lot of news and articles about projects I've worked on, but almost never about the big picture and where Gamieon is going. I figure since we're near the end of another amazing year, I'd do just that.
First to set the table: I actually work in medical software development full time. Any game development I do on projects is in the spare time that I choose to piece together.
2016
My goals in 2016 were to shore up all of Gamieon's existing releases; specfically Hyperspace Pinball, Tiltz. and Hamster Chase which haven't been updated on mobile markets in forever. The mobile versions of the first two projects got major facelifts, and Hamster Chase just had some back end updates. All were updated or re-released onto the App Store and Google Play. It doesn't sound like much, but that took up a great deal of time this year. All in all I met my goals.
As far as income; well, I made a few dollars here and there from mostly Hyperspace Pinball Steam sales...nowhere near enough to maintain a studio full time. That was never really my focus, but I'd like to ultimately earn back everything I spent on game development someday. At the current income rate, that would be decades away assuming I never spend a dollar on game development again.
I also dipped into more Paper Cowboys / Texas Bounty and Field of Heroes development a bit. Texas Bounty, a 2.5D online scroller, seemed to have the greatest interest of people monitoring Gamieon given it's excellent prototype art and feature set. Field of Heroes, an online Soccer MOBA, would have remained untouched had I not witnessed another developer make a small network game in just one month and have it go viral. I started rapidly prototyping it in Unity in October and I'm still working on it at the time of this writing. I hope to have it online and playable as a prototype by Christmas to see if it's a viable game for Steam.
I'm more socially connected than I was last year, too. I visited GDC 2016 to meet some friends and just see first hand what all is going on in the game development world. I also joined a Discord channel with lots of Indie developers and we talk daily. Before Discord I briefly used Google Hangouts; and before that, an IRC channel that was quiet 95% of the time. My Twitter follower list also passed the 500 mark.
2017
So what's in store for next year? If Field of Heroes gets a positive response, I'd like to find a studio to collaborate with and finish it as a Steam game. I may do the same with Texas Bounty.
Beyond that I have no plans. I'm making more personal time for non-game-development hobbies now; I don't want to miss out on other things the world has to offer :)
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