Category: Personal Development

I’ve taken some time at the end of December to look back on the previous year and think about what I want for the coming year.

In 2024, I wanted to build upon the success of 2023, a year that saw me hitting a sales goal for the first time.

One sale per month is barely pizza money, but it is a start, especially since I had never earned that many sales before in the years I’ve been trying to run my indie game development business.

However, I decided that metrics like the number of sales isn’t really an actionable goal. It is more of a lagging metric.

So for 2024, I have the following outcomes I am aiming for:

Increase my newsletter audience from 30 to at least 42 subscribers by December 31st
Earn at least 2 sales per month by December 31st

As for actionable goals:

Release at least 2 Freshly Squeezed Entertainment games by December 31st
Perform at least 2 SEO activities per month by December 31st

My thoughts were that if I make and publish games AND do things to make my website more effective and easier for people to find what they want, then I can increase my audience and my sales.

So, how did I do?

My Goals

Published Freshly Squeezed Entertainment Games (Target: 2) — 0

Two games a year for someone to work on alone very, very part-time is technically doable, but I haven’t been able to do it yet.

In fact, I didn’t do it last year, either:

That’s two years in a row in which I did not publish a new game.

Much of my current business strategy depends on releasing games in my Freshly Squeezed Entertainment line, which are polished, playable prototypes that provide complete entertainment experiences and are given away for free. The general idea is that the games are supposed to be quick to develop and have a low barrier to entry so that they are more likely to find an audience. I hope to get feedback from that audience, and if enough interest exists, I can always create a “deluxe” version of the game that I can sell.

So not releasing a game isn’t great, because there cannot be an audience for a game that doesn’t exist.

At the end of 2023, I had put in a year of game development effort into a family-friendly, non-violent party-based role-playing game called The Dungeon Under My House, and it wasn’t anywhere near done yet. I didn’t have any reason to be optimistic that I could complete it within six months of 2024, but I moved forward as if I could.

About 20 months into the six month project, I decided to put it on hold. I finally sat down and scoped out what I thought the rest of the project looked like, and an optimistic estimate said I still had at least another year of development. Oof.

So I made the hard decision to put the project on hold. I published a post-mortem for The Dungeon Under My House, and I hope one day to publish a second one after I return to the project and truly finish it.

For now, I started work on a project with a much smaller scope. I normally try not to plan everything upfront and instead let the project build up in iterations.

This approach works fine. I’ve built and published games this way. But it clashed with my goal of releasing games quickly. I had to recognize that there was a difference between publishing a game eventually and publishing a game on a more or less predictable schedule, and that only the latter was going to help me satisfy my business goals.

Thanks to some advice I got from Dora Breckinridge (you should hire Dora, by the way), I decided to try to truly capture as much of the scope of my new project as I could, plan on working on features and technical infrastructure for only part of the project’s schedule, and leave the lion’s share of the schedule for leveraging what I had built to fill in the content of the game.

As of this writing, I am finishing up the first phase of work, and thanks to a realization I had about how to arrange the work in a more Agile way, I am incredibly confident that I will ship this project in six months easily, mainly because the project will always be in a shippable state long before then.

Basically, I went from a project with no end in sight to a project that could potentially be done early if I really want it to be.

However, it won’t be released in 2024. I can’t work miracles.

Perform at least 2 SEO activities per month by December 31st (Target: 24) – 2

Ok, so I abandoned this one fairly quickly. SEO felt like a solution that might not make sense in a world where search engines are getting less useful and almost actively hostile towards websites that aren’t in the top results, plus a world where genAI is allowing people to churn out garbage so cheaply that the search results are polluted anyway.

Also, my website barely gets any traffic. Not like it used to when I had more time to blog more frequently about a variety of topics, anyway. Much of that existing traffic is from game developers interested in my blog posts about project management and copyright for indies, and so not necessarily people who would be in the target audience for my games.

But just having this goal, even if I did give up on it, did get me to make some important changes.

I felt like I didn’t have a good baseline to know if my SEO was actually doing anything positive. I didn’t want to make a bunch of changes without any concern about how effective they were. A change could produce a negative outcome, and I would want to revert that change right away. But how would I know?

So I started creating automated metrics reports from my website, plus I started grabbing page visit and download data from the various app stores my games are in and throwing them in a combined spreadsheet. It’s a bit more manual of an effort, but it is worth it to know this data, and I can probably figure out how to automate some of it.

These metrics came in handy when I decided to experiment with ads for part of the year, giving me a good insight into whether or not a particular ad was moving the needle for my games in any particular app store.

I think I might revisit this goal for 2025, not because I want to improve my search engine rankings but because there are things I could do to make my website look and feel better to people who actually visit it. If I optimize the site for real people and their goals as opposed to trying to appease some search engine algorithm, I think things will work out better for everyone.

My Outcomes

GBGames Curiosities Newsletter subscribers net increase (Target: 12) — net 4

My current business strategy has my GBGames Curiosities Newsletter at its core. I want to cultivate an audience of people who specifically said that they wanted to hear from me and are fans of the kinds of games I make.

I don’t have many subscribers yet, and this is the second year in a row in which I was aiming for a net increase of one subscriber per month and didn’t make it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do anything specifically to try to grow the list, so any efforts to do so were one-offs and not consistent at all. Still, I gained 4 subscribers and lost 0, which is a positive trajectory.

Clearly if I want this number to be higher, something needs to change in terms of my approach.

Earn at least 2 sales per month by December 31st (Target: 24) – 16

Last year I sold 13 copies of my games, beating my 1 sale per month goal by one. I was sure that doubling the goal was both ambitious and doable, especially if I kept up my promotion efforts.

Unfortunately I did not, as I spent much of my capacity trying to make progress on game development.

Now you might think that at least 16 sales is more than 13 sales. And it is true.

But the reason most of those sales appeared is because I spent money on Facebook ads, and unfortunately I spent more on ads than I earned in sales income.

On top of that, this is the first year I have put my game Toytles: Leaf Raking on sale. I was experimenting with the price to see if it might encourage more purchases at a lower price point, or if the act of being on sale made it show up more easily in various app stores. In the end, I think it just served to earn me less money for each sale.

To compare, in 2023 I sold 13 copies of my games and made a total of $103, much of it because of people contributing more than the minimum amount on itch.io. Despite selling 16 copies of my games in 2024, I only made $76 from those sales, and 0 came from itch.io.

Analysis

I sold more copies of my games but made less money, as I said above.

I didn’t take advantage of itch.io sales as much as I maybe should have. I think I was disappointed in the amount of work I put into some sales at the end of the previous year that resulted in nothing, and I am also wondering why I don’t always get advance notice from itch.io about joining an upcoming sale so I can prepare.

But frankly, most of my effort went into game development and not promotion, and so it is no wonder I didn’t see more success in terms of sales.

Last year, I said that my megaphone is tiny, and it still is.

My website has very little organic traffic, and my social media accounts all have limited ability to get awareness out.

I said then:

Basically, the more I rely on social media to promote my game, the more effort and/or money I need to expend for at best a temporary boost in potential traffic.

Focusing on social media isn’t sustainable, and it is partly why I wanted to focus on SEO. However, I worry that the days of useful search engines and a useful Internet in general are behind us.

So should I focus on advertising some more? Maybe. In my experiments this year, I basically proved to myself that if I could get my game in front of the right people that some of those people do, in fact, purchase the game.

That’s good!

But ads are too expensive to run for one-time sales, and I don’t have enough of a backlog of games to cross-sell and make it worth it.

However, if I focused on promoting my mailing list rather than any one particular game, then perhaps the calculus changes significantly. One purchase of a game today doesn’t necessarily mean more purchases in the future, but one mailing list signup today means being able to promote my games indefinitely.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that people are finding that their inboxes are getting more and more useless the same way that search engines and the Internet as a whole are getting worse. Maybe all the data about how mailing lists are still very effective isn’t accurate anymore?

Or maybe they are, but most game developers are so tied to the app stores and Steam that they don’t find mailing lists useful for THEIR business models.

And I think my target audience doesn’t necessarily even know what Steam is, let alone uses it for finding and playing games.

Relying on Apple and Google to sell my games is therefore a bit risky because I have no way to contact the players who play my games unless they specifically sign up for my mailing list.

Some numbers

I did a total of 359 hours of game development for the year.

For comparison, a full-time game developer working 40-hour weeks would have accomplished that number in a little over 2 months.

I did 62 hours of writing and published 59 blog posts and 12 newsletters.

I did 23.75 hours of video development and published 12 videos.

The above mostly represents a weekly development log, plus the occasional video update, as well as some one-off blog posts and sale announcements.

I originally continued the weekly devlog videos, but the amount of work that went into each video took away from development work. After a couple of months of this pace, I decided to release videos once a month or so. It meant more details in each video, making them more compelling for viewers, plus an easier work schedule for me.

I wanted to focus on my health. In 2022 I had horrible back pain due to an unknown reason, and I think my regular morning exercises are keeping me strong enough to keep it at bay, but I felt like missing a day of exercises was enough to make day to day living feel risky.

So I started doing more exercises meant to help build up strength and stability. I used to do yoga, but I think I was doing something to cause problems. Instead, I started doing weight/resistance exercises.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep things up. My knees were hurting until I stopped doing squats only a couple of months after I started doing them, which is too bad because they were supposed to be a great all-around exercise. I did 780 squats total.

Also, my wrists were bothering me from doing push-ups. I stopped doing them in May, so I ended the year with only 1,230 push-ups.

The good news is that I added regular walking, slowly building up from 10 minutes a day to 25 minutes a day and from 2 mph to now warming up at 2.4 mph and increasing to 3.2 mph before cooling down at 2.4 mph again. I have done about 50 hours of walking for the year.

As for losing weight, I didn’t want to count calories or anything too onerous, so I simply cut snacks. I now eat three meals a day and if I have a snack it is once in awhile. I probably still have dessert too often. But I ended the year down a few pounds, despite heading into the holidays to potentially gain them all back.

I read a total of 60 books, of which 26 were audiobooks. Some favorites include:

• Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
• The Impact of Iwata by Lucas M. Thomas
• Secret Iowa by Megan Bannister
• Black AF History by Michael Harriot
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (first time reading it since it was assigned reading in high school)
• Useful Delusions by Shankar Vedantam
• Killing Commandatore by Haruki Murakami
• Hunter by Val Gale
• Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang
• Procedural Generation in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
• LAN Party by Merritt K
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Zero by Charles Seife
• Finna by Nino Cipri
• This Is What It Sounds Like by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas
• To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
• Mindful Games by Susan Kaiser Greenland

I was playing Minecraft heavily in the beginning of the year. I played in Hardcore mode, but each time I died, I would create a new world with the same seed and play again. It was like Groundhog Day in that I can’t keep anything I made except the memory of where resources and landmarks were located, and I found it quite compelling.

But otherwise I wasn’t playing games regularly. Steam says I only played 3 games, but most of the games I do play tend to be through GOG or Humble or itch so that’s not representative.

I found out that Flatspace, a game I reviewed a long time ago for GameTunnel.com, is available on Steam, so I played that game quite a bit. I played a little Tooth and Tail as well as Gods Will Be Watching. None are recent games.

More recent games included Once Upon a Jester, which I really enjoyed.

But the game I probably played even more was Kitsune Tails, a fun Super Mario Bros 3-inspired platformer, which did release in 2024, so I’m still hip and with it.

Goals for 2025

Once again, my goals will focus on game development efforts and promotion efforts.

I ended the year feeling very positive about being able to ship my next game in a few months, and I think it has given me confidence that I can repeat this feat.

But I also want to revisit Toytles: Leaf Raking, partly to improve it, which I know will take up some time. While I’m proud of the game and think it is still a good one, I can tell that it is rough around the edges and might not appeal to more people because of it, especially from screenshots.

So two actionable goals are:

• Publish at least 1 free game by June 30th
• Publish major Toytles:Leaf Raking quality improvement update (including demo) by December 31st

I think I’ll easily accomplish the first one early. I already have almost two of months of effort in, so I should be able to finish this six month project by the end of April. Still, I’m one person and very, very part-time at that. I could get sick, my day job could take up more of my time, or there might be family emergencies. So between April and June, expect my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment game.

Meanwhile, I clearly need to do something more proactive and consistent in terms of getting my games in front of people.

I don’t know if I can capture it in a goal by quantifying specific activities such as SEO or ad campaigns, though.

In fact, those are tactics, and while they might be useful and important, I find that I struggle because I don’t have an overarching strategy for them to fit into. I’ve put the cart before the horse.

There are some fundamentals to marketing and selling a particular game, but I also want to promote GBGames as a whole.

Specifically, I want more people to think of GBGames when they think of compelling entertainment that encourages curiosity and supports creativity. I want people to think of GBGames when they think about family-friendly, LGBTQ+-affirming entertainment. I want people to think of GBGames when they want to play games that respect their time and their privacy.

And I’m still figuring out the how for making it happen.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

—

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

It is time for my annual review of the previous year and preview of the coming year!

How did 2023 go for me?

Well, it was a mixed bag, but I am very excited about my successes.

Last year, I wrote in “Reviewing an Underwhelming 2022, Previewing a Better 2023”:

I normally would right-size my goals based on the previous year’s results, but I think last year was an off-year for me. I think those goals are still doable despite the fact that I didn’t get them done.

So, I’m keeping them as my goals for 2023:

• Release at least 2 Freshly Squeezed Entertainment games by December 31st
• Increase my newsletter audience from 25 to at least 37 subscribers by December 31st
• Earn at least 1 sale per month by December 31st

That’s at least one new subscriber and at least one new sale each month, and I’ll need to focus on shipping as quickly as possible to get two games out.

To hit my goals, I had two priorities: game creation/development and game promotion/awareness building.

Published Freshly Squeezed Entertainment Games (Target: 2) — 0

Despite putting in significantly more game development hours than I have ever tracked before (averaging over 7 hours a week, which still isn’t much in the grand scheme of things), I released 0 new games.

That’s two years in a row in which I did not publish a new game.

Much of my current business strategy depends on releasing games in my Freshly Squeezed Entertainment line, which are polished, playable prototypes that provide complete entertainment experiences and are given away for free. The general idea is that the games are supposed to be quick to develop and have a low barrier to entry so that they are more likely to find an audience. I hope to get feedback from that audience, and if enough interest exists, I can always create a “deluxe” version of the game that I can sell.

So not releasing a game isn’t great, because there cannot be an audience for a game that doesn’t exist.

My current project, The Dungeon Under My House, is perhaps too ambitious for my goals. Or maybe the scope of it is. For example, I spent a significant amount of time developing a way to customize the main characters in the game, and perhaps if I had my producer hat or my product development hat on, I could have decided that such work was a nice-to-have that could go into a potential deluxe version of the game so I could focus on the core of the project.

I am going to continue working on it because I like the concept (a non-violent 1st-person dungeon crawler focused on conversation and relationships) and I want to see it through, but I am really going to need to identify exactly what I want in the game and be strict about recognizing nice-to-haves vs enhancements that help make the game playable.

GBGames Curiosities Newsletter subscribers net increase (Target: 12) — net 5 (+8, -3)

My goal was to increase my GBGames Curiosities Newsletter subscribers to a total of at least 37, up by 12 from the previous year. In last year’s review, I lamented that I only increased the number by 3, which was only half as much as I gained the previous year and a far cry from 12.

My newsletter (have you subscribed and gotten your free player’s guides yet?) is the core of my business strategy. As such, it is very important that I grow my audience of people who are interested enough to hear from me that they give me permission to reach out to them.

I started the year with only 25 subscribers, and I ended the year at 30.

I gained 8 subscribers, which is more than I have gained in any one year since I rebooted the newsletter in 2020, so that’s good.

But for the first time since then, I had 3 people either unsubscribe or otherwise get removed from my newsletter.

So, this goal’s metrics had a positive trend, but I didn’t hit my goal and while I expect that over time people might unsubscribe or drop from my newsletter subscribers, I hope it doesn’t become a trend itself.

Sales (Target: 12) — 13

Ok, I am seriously excited about this one!

In the past, I’ve set sales goals such as “$10,000 in sales” or “$10/month in sales” or “1 sale per week” but I’ve always fallen short. They never really motivated me to take the drastic action needed to make them happen.

In 2022, I set a goal to sell at least one game per month, which I considered both a doable yet challenging goal. I figured that if I could hit this goal, I could build upon it, and maybe I should try to hit this seemingly small goal before worrying about making enough in sales to get anywhere near full-time indie status.

But 2022 was kind of a bust, and I had only 4 sales, which I guess was good despite my lack of promotion efforts.

In 2023, I took advantage of itch.io’s various sales and Creator Days throughout the year. Things seemed promising early on when I sold 4 copies of Toytles: Leaf Raking in March through itch.io’s Creator Day sale. I had done a little promotion on social media, and it seemed to be working out well! Add to those sales the two mobile sales I got, and the first quarter of the year was telling me that I was going to make my sales target early!

And then months went by with no sales, until itch.io had a Summer Sale followed by a Creator Day sale in August. I sold one copy of my game in each sale, plus someone donated money to get my free game Toy Factory Fixer. Mathematically, I was still on track for 1 sale per month, but it was disappointing that sales had slowed down.

My biggest disappointment was the combination of the Halloween Sale and the Black Friday Creator Day sale. Despite the time and effort I put into promoting my games then, including the creation of videos, I sold no copies of my game at all.

Luckily, for some reason, I sold three copies of Toytles: Leaf Raking for mobile between November and December, bringing my total to 13 sales for the year.

So on the bright side, I not only hit my target but exceeded it!

But I wish I knew why suddenly people decided to buy my game at the end of the year. Half of my sales came from itch.io, and as that’s where my promotion efforts were aimed at, it is clear that those sales came from my efforts.

But I don’t have any way to determine how customers found the game on the other app stores, and I would much rather have a good idea for how to reproduce these results.

Analysis

I had more sales in 2023 than I had in any of the previous 11 years. In 2011 I had sold 23 copies of my first commercial game Stop That Hero! totaling $91.25 in take-home money, which includes pre-orders as well as actual sales, but ever since, I’ve had very inconsistent and much lower sales numbers.

In 2023 I earned earned $103.91 from my 13 sales. That’s what I get after the various stores take their cut (which is why Creator Day sales are so nice, as itch.io allows me to keep all proceeds from sales on those days). That’s more than I’ve earned in the past six years combined and more than I have ever earned in sales from a single year.

So, relatively speaking, 2023 was a great sales year for GBGames! I mean, I know this is barely pizza money, and I’m not quitting my day job yet, but I set a new baseline for myself and my business!

How did I do so much better than previous years? I spent more time on promotion than before.

I think a big part of my early success was taking advantage of my Facebook page for GBGames. While I always shared my blog posts on that page, I otherwise didn’t do much with it.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to post daily on it. Monday through Friday, I would make sure I had at least one post on my Facebook page. While I still had my blog post link on Mondays, I also started sharing images of my past games, with links to their pages. I also would ask people to sign up for my newsletter weekly.

I didn’t expect miracles, but I thought things would grow, if slowly. I quickly got frustrated with Facebook’s algorithms because I was in a catch-22 of Facebook not showing my posts to people because people weren’t seeing my posts.

They’ll gladly take my money to help promote it, though, or at least the promise of doing so. I paid to promote my Black Friday sale event and got way, way fewer than the estimated number of people reached, so that wasn’t great, but on top of it Facebook said that they’ll show it to more people for real this time if I spend more.

Anyway, I suspect the reason why my sales figures dropped after the initial few months was because I tapped out my friends and family, the only people who Facebook was showing my posts to.

I also have Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, but my company’s Facebook page seemed the most likely social media account I had that could target actual potential customers rather than other game developers.

Recently I had asked a colleague of mine, someone who has had great success with his game sales going back almost 30 years, how he does promotion these days. He used to do a lot of search engine optimization, but in his response he said that “Search engines don’t seem to be the main driver of traffic anymore. Everyone is on social media” and so that is a bit disappointing.

Partly because the dynamics of social media mean that instead of having something out on the web that others can find on their own time, as Cory Doctorow said in The (open) web is good, actually, “The social media bias towards a river of content that can’t be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.”

Basically, the more I rely on social media to promote my game, the more effort and/or money I need to expend for at best a temporary boost in potential traffic.

If I think of my options for promotion as part of my megaphone, I have my website, blog, newsletter, and various social media accounts, including a YouTube channel that I started using earnestly at the end of the year. None of these have a large number of followers or subscribers. My megaphone is tiny.

Which means that even when I do expend a lot of effort, my megaphone only reaches a small number of people.

As I mentioned in my 2023 Black Friday Creator Day post mortem, even though I had put in more effort than ever before, and even though the metrics showed that the result was more views of my games than ever before, it still amounted to a total of only 50 views. And none of those views turned into a sale.

I go into more in that post mortem, but my overall promotion strategy has been to leverage my own megaphone as much as possible, and to supplement things, sometimes pay small amounts to unreliably leverage the much larger megaphone of a company such as Facebook or Google.

Clearly, this strategy has its limits, or at least my available megaphone has its limits at the moment.

Some numbers

I did a total of 397 hours of game development for the year, a new record for me since I started tracking my hours in 2013 (I was a full-time indie who didn’t track my game development time between 2010 and 2012). My previous record was 299 hours in 2021.

For someone working full-time, that amounts to less than 2.5 months, assuming a 40-hour work week. So it is not a lot of time, but it’s an improvement over not even doing 2 months of full-time game development in a year. You can see why I refer to myself as a very, very part-time indie game developer.

I wrote for a total of 75 hours, which resulted in 76 blog posts published and 18 newsletter emails sent.

My weekly development blog post got paired with a second blog post sharing my new video companion devlog. I published 13 Freshly Squeezed Progress Report videos in the final three months of the year.

I try to send out a monthly newsletter, but in my last few sales I sent out multiple newsletters for the beginning, duration, and end of a sale, which accounts for the relatively large number.

As for my budget, I mentioned my earnings from sales earlier. I also earned some money from a short contract job. While I haven’t been paid for all of my sales yet, I can say that I’ve taken home over $570. Again, not quite pizza money.

I spent slightly more than the previous year, but I still kept my expenses down by resisting games, books, and other purchases. My major expense categories were web hosting (a three year plan), educational subscriptions (Pluralsight and a book club membership), and the Apple App Developer Program annual fee, something that auto-renewed on me when I was still contemplating whether or not to drop it since I wasn’t earning enough to justify the expense. All told, I spent over $2,000.

Eventually I would like to report that I’ve made more than I’ve spent, but this isn’t the year.

I pulled back on some personal goals. I used to try to do a doodle a day and do 15 minutes of focused learning a day, mainly to take advantage of my Pluralsight subscription. But I found it was stressful trying to fit everything in, so I ended up dropping a lot of them. I fantasize about getting back to full-time indie status and being able to spend more of my time on these kinds of things.

In 2022 I had hurt myself badly enough to stop doing my regular exercises. After some physical therapy, I was back to exercising regularly in the morning, but partway through 2023 I had to stop again due to leg and back pain.

Around July, I started regularly doing push-ups again, but I ended the year weighing the most I’ve ever weighed.

I read a total of 64 books. Well, some were audiobooks, and 11 were trade paperback comic books. My favorites for the year were:

• How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweed
• Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
• We Were Dreamers by Simu Liu
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
• The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi
• Good Arguments by Bo Seo
• Sandy Hook by Elizabeth Williamson
• Magical Mathematics by Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham
• The Name of the Rose and The Role of the Reader by Umberto Eco
• The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks
• Time Travel by James Gleick
• Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games by Kaitlin Tremblay
• Y: The Last Man (the entire series)
• and Sweat the Technique by Rakim

I still haven’t figured out a regular game-playing schedule for myself. As I’ve said before, since I give myself so little time to work on game development, if I find myself with time to play a game, more often than not I treat it as time to develop.

Steam shows I only played 4 games: Homeworld: Remastered, Etrian Odyssey HD, Nowhere Prophet, and Skatebird. I also played a Etrian Odyssey II on my Nintendo DS, plus Signs of the Sojourner, Oxenfree, Battletech, AI War Collection, Pontifex, and Baba Is You.

The last two I played a lot while I was recovering from COVID.

Oh, yeah, I tested positive right before my holiday break and was out of commission for a couple of weeks. I caught up on a lot of TV and played some games, but mostly I slept. It was a forced break that prevented me from finishing the year strong.

Overall, last year I focused on game development and game promotion, and in both cases I can see room for improvement. My game development focus needs to drive towards shipping sooner rather than having a continuously open ended development. My game promotion revealed to me the need for some more baseline analytics data so I know how to make better decisions and can see whether or not my efforts are effective.

Goals for 2024

For years I was setting goals that I thought were right-sized and could be a jumping off point for bigger and better goals.

But I kept failing to hit them.

So I find myself in a new position when it comes to my sales goals. I hit my target, and now I can improve! Normally, I would take my 1 sale per month goal and double it. Can I sell at least 2 games per month in 2024?

And since I haven’t increased my subscriber count by 12 in a single year, I would just keep that goal until I manage to accomplish it.

But as my colleague Tim Beaudet likes to point out, “goals should be things you can control.” And I can’t control sales or subscriber numbers.

Those are lagging metrics. They are the results that might get influenced by my actions, but I can’t influence them directly.

And frankly, I think I struggled throughout the year with these as my goals. The only goal I could control was how many games I released, and even though I didn’t accomplish it, I knew that the thing I needed to do was make a game and publish it.

But whenever I saw my other goals, there was a vague sense of “Ok, so?” A lagging metric is one that I can look at and see what already happened, but it didn’t by itself indicate actions I should take, and I think seeing those goals always put me in a position of needing to figure out what those actions are.

So while I like to keep those lagging metrics as outcomes that I am aiming for, they can’t be my actual goals.

So for 2024, I have the following outcomes I am aiming for:

• Increase my newsletter audience from 30 to at least 42 subscribers by December 31st
• Earn at least 2 sales per month by December 31st

As for actionable goals:

• Release at least 2 Freshly Squeezed Entertainment games by December 31st
• Perform at least 2 SEO activities per month by December 31st

Ok, so make and release games is a pretty straightforward goal. I just need to focus on the shipping part.

But SEO activities? The benefits of search engine optimization would be more traffic to my site, which means more potential customers turning into actual customers and/or subscribing to my newsletter.

What’s risky is that the major search engines are, well, becoming worse for people. They seemed to be doubling down on AI and making the search experience kind of awful. Google used to let me see results for multiple pages, but now it seems very interested in showing me videos after the first few results, and if I don’t want videos, there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid it. Plus, lots of websites are now dominating the search listings with poorly generated content, which makes it hard to find good stuff.

And as my colleague above said, most people are on social media these days, so what’s the point of SEO?

Well, I can always stand to make my website better, more effective, and easier for people to find what they want. I can do keyword research, ensure my pages are optimized, and keep my site speedy and responsive.

More importantly, I can control my website, while I can’t control how Facebook or YouTube algorithms impact whether or not people even see my content even when they like or subscribe to do so.

I plan to continue my weekly devlog and companion videos, my daily social media posts, and more, but I didn’t think they made sense as annual goals. They are already something I’m doing, so “keep it up” seems the default. Plus, maybe I’ll find that some of these activities need to be changed or tweaked as I find out they are more or less effective or a good use of my time.

2 SEO activities a month might seem low. If I think of my SEO work as experiments, I think one experiment a week would give me plenty of time to see if a particular change made a difference, and if I spend money to get more traffic, I can see the impacts much more quickly.

But I am trying to keep in mind that I am not working on this full-time yet nor am I made of money, so giving myself a couple of weeks to make each dent seems reasonable, and if I find myself able to do so more quickly and easily, I can always do more.

As for personal goals, I liked the ones I had for last year: make my physical health a bigger priority, invest time and money into learning, and give myself time to play.

For all three, I need to be deliberate and make some habits. I already track my exercise and my reading habits, but perhaps 2024 is the year I start tracking which games I play.

Well, happy new year! I hope 2024 is full of creativity and that you allow yourself to follow your curiosity wherever it leads you!

At the start of the year, I like to look back on the previous year to see how well reality matched up with my plans, and then, trying to incorporate any lessons and insights I’ve gained, I make new plans for the coming year.

In the past, I’ve found myself weeks (or even months?) into the new year before I get around to this work. I was not exactly hitting the ground running, partly because I was still finishing the previous year’s efforts up until the end of the year and didn’t give myself time to reflect before the new year.

But this time around, I took off the month of December from my day job with the intention of journaling, reviewing the past, and figuring out what I want out of the future. December tends to be my least productive month in terms of GBGames, and while there were still plenty of errands and holiday preparations to work on, I did manage to make some time for some serious thinking effort, especially thanks to an early Christmas present from my wife for a week-long solo retreat.

The short version: 2022 kinda sucked. I’m looking forward to making 2023 into what 2022 should have been.

Here’s the long version.

In A Review of My 2021, and Looking at 2022, Already In Progress, I was coming off of the success of finally publishing Toy Factory Fixer, my first one-month Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project, after about 12 months of development.

I had a goal of releasing 6 such games over the course of a year, and so I was recognizing that my capacity as a very, very part-time indie meant that I needed to be a LOT more realistic about what I could actually accomplish.

My overall strategy didn’t change, but the values were significantly smaller. My goals for 2022 were:

• Release at least 2 Freshly Squeezed Entertainment games by December 31st
• Increase my newsletter audience from 22 to at least 34 subscribers by December 31st
• Earn at least 1 sale per month by December 31st

Maybe publishing 2 games was still too ambitious, but I figured at least one game with one in development was still an improvement. And maybe 1 sale per month sounds laughable, but I didn’t come anywhere close to 1 sale per week OR per month in the previous year. And if it is so laughable, it should be easy to get more than one sale a month even if all I do is post a plea on Facebook asking friends and family to buy the game.

I right-sized my goals for what I thought was simultaneously a small step and also a stretch from what I have so far been demonstrating.

So how did I do?

Not great, actually.

Published Freshly Squeezed Entertainment Games (Target: 2) — 0 (or maybe 1)

I’ll explain more below, but other than working on porting my existing games to the desktop and creating Disaster City, my Ludum Dare 50 game, in a weekend, I made no new games.

I don’t really count my Ludum Dare game, though, because it was conceived and developed for the compo and wasn’t really something I was planning to make into my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment game. I thought about making it a full-fledged project after the compo, but I never got the energy behind it to do so, even though I liked the germ of the idea I had created. I wanted to be more deliberate than “Here’s a game I quickly threw together, so maybe I can make a bigger version of it?”

At the end of the year, I started putting together a design document for my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment, but it isn’t ready enough yet for me to formally announce its existence yet.

I might be too hard on myself, as I did put in time and effort to create ports, so it wasn’t a complete blank of a year, but it is my most clear-cut failure for a major goal to not get addressed at all.

GBGames Curiosities Newsletter subscribers net increase (Target: 12) — 3

On the bright side, it’s above 0. I should be pleased about that fact at least. And no one unsubscribed, at least.

My newsletter grew by 6 subscribers the previous year, though, so I’m not happy with gaining fewer subscribers, especially since I have Toy Factory Fixer and Toytles: Leaf Raking released on the desktop and so had more exposure with more incentive (you can get a free player’s guide for each game) to join the newsletter.

I don’t know if I should take it as a refutation of my strategy to release free games and grow my audience through them, or if it is still too soon to tell.

Sales (Target: 12) — 3

I sold 7 copies of Toytles: Leaf Raking in 2020, 5 copies in 2021, and only 2 in 2022, with one person giving me an optional couple of bucks for my otherwise free Toy Factory Fixer to make for what I technically call a third sale.

I don’t like this downward trend, either.

On the other hand, due to one of the two sales happening on itch.io which allowed for one customer paying me significantly more than the asking price (thanks, Mike!), I actually made almost $1 more than the year before, and making more money is a trend that I like.

But obviously I can’t rely on such generosity for everything.

Analysis

My major goals are above, but I also had minor goals to port my existing games to the desktop, especially after Ludum Dare 50 and my efforts to port my game for it to get as many potential reviewers as possible.

But before all of that, there were two big tasks.

One was to finish some post-release efforts for Toy Factory Fixer, such as creating and uploading a player’s guide and updating my website for it.

Another was a presentation I meant to give early in the year that never happened. I was scheduled to give a Toy Factory Fixer post-mortem presentation at my local IGDA chapter in February, but that month the meeting never happened, and the chapter hasn’t scheduled another one since.

At the time, I thought it meant I had more time to polish my presentation before it was rescheduled, but I didn’t really track the time I worked on it, so I don’t know how much effort it took.

My vague plan was to finish the presentation, then switch gears to quickly port my games, then switch gears again to creating my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment game. Basically, my major goals were on hold, and maybe they shouldn’t have been considered my major goals if that were the case?

I worked on my presentation on and off for a few months, finishing it in May, but then never actually presenting it or recording it myself, completely wasting the effort for this supposed priority.

After Ludum Dare in April, I finally put together a backlog of tasks to port my games, only to kick myself for having put off for so long the 5 minutes it took to do it.

What followed was a few months of development effort to do the ports. Frankly, getting the games onto the desktop was easy work, and while I spent weeks creating the Linux port despite the fact that my main development system is Linux-based, it was because I wanted to make it a one-button, reproducible build. The Windows port was fairly straightforward as well and was almost a one-button build that needed a few tweaks. The Mac port was a little troublesome, but I eventually figured out the arcane incantation Xcode required.

In August, I participated in 60 FPS Fest again, and it was insightful watching complete strangers try to play Toy Factory Fixer. A number of people struggled to figure out how to start, which I addressed through some hints and UI changes in an update I made in the following weeks.

And then, after my Toytles: Leaf Raking desktop ports were announced, for some reason, I did nothing.

Well, that’s not quite true. In September I tried an experiment in which I did a daily game design exercise based on the day’s news headlines, and while I enjoyed the experience and think I got a lot out of it, it required too much of my time, way more than I could justify spending on it.

But I didn’t have a product plan. At the very least, I didn’t have a next project ready to go, and apparently my theme for this year was to struggle with overcoming inertia.

I also had some health problems which impacted my ability to sit long enough to work on anything.

So basically, my major goals took a backseat until I could get what at the time looked like quick goals accomplished, which ended up either taking me longer to get around to or taking me longer to finish than I originally anticipated.

But it wasn’t like I vastly underestimated how much work there was to do. I think it came down to not getting myself to do the work consistently.

In 2021, I had habits that got me to slowly but surely publish a game. I did exercise every day. I dedicated regular time to learning, mostly to take advantage of my Pluralsight subscription.

I had set my course, and each day I executed part of a plan that moved me in that direction until I was at my destination.

But this past year? I found myself between plans often. It’s one thing to take a step forward with an existing project. It’s another to figure out what a new project should be.

I think I usually find that I need a major break after a game project is completed, but I felt like I couldn’t get back into the swing of things this past year, and I still can’t quite put my finger on why.

I was fine so long as I was tracking some effort, but for some reason if I wasn’t dedicating time to development or writing or learning, I found it harder to keep on task, or start a task in the first place, even if I knew what that task was. In fact, whenever I don’t know what I should be doing, I take that as a clue that what I should be doing is figuring out what I should be doing. Yet, I couldn’t muster up the effort.

Was it burnout? Was I questioning why I was trying to accomplish things I set out to do so long ago that I forgot why I was doing them? Was it frustration that the rest of society seems to be trying to get back to a pre-pandemic normal that doesn’t and shouldn’t exist anymore? I don’t know.

But as someone who aspires to one day get back to full-time indie status, this past year felt squandered and lost despite the accomplishments I can point to.

What else?

Compared to the previous year, I only put in a third as much game development, a total of 101 game development hours. I only had five months that were productive, and they weren’t full months.

I blogged a lot less, with only 35 published posts compared to last year’s 60. About 9 of the posts were for Ludum Dare 50 weekend, and I don’t think I tracked my writing time then. Since many of my posts are sprint reports, and I was doing less development, it makes sense that I had less to say, but there are other kinds of blog posts that I could have written. I put in about 53 hours for writing that I tracked which is surprisingly only a little less than the time I put in the year before and which doesn’t include when I wrote for the player guides. My newsletter is supposed to be a monthly one, but I only sent out 4 issues last year, mainly because the only things I had to announce were the ports and updates to existing apps.

I had managed to keep my expenses down significantly relative to previous years, mainly by resisting game and book sales (I have plenty already purchased I could play/read instead), but it was still a bit more than I had planned and a large multiple of my income.

My personal goals were:

• Do a minimum number of walking hours, push-ups, squats, and planking
• Read a book per week
• Create at least one doodle per day
• Do 15 minutes of focused learning a day

I wasn’t able to keep up with my 15 push-ups, 15 squats, and 30 seconds of planks, mainly because I hurt myself bad enough that I had to stop, only doing the exercises for about half of the year.

I continued to do my exercise and stretches more or less as I have always done it, which has kept my back strong and meant that I haven’t needed to see a doctor about it in a couple of years. Unfortunately, at some point I had a severe pain that was quite debilitating, and I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what might have caused it other than helping someone move a mattress or twisting under a bathroom sink trying to fix a leak.

People tell me that part of the fun of getting old is getting hurt for no reason, and I don’t like it.

So unfortunately I spent a chunk of my summer recovering and doing physical therapy. For some time it was not my favorite thing to stand, sit, or lie down. The latter two were especially tough because getting up would send my back into painful spasms, and working in my office for longer than I needed to for the day job was not happening much. The physical therapy helped, and these days I feel a lot more confident and way less self-aware of everyday movement.

Even when I was feeling well enough to exercise, I wasn’t doing cardio, something I keep saying I’ll prioritize but never make happen, but we just got a new treadmill and I’ve started walking on it daily, and when the weather is nicer I might start making a point of going out for a walk instead. I want to eventually build up to running and perhaps look into actually joining a recreational soccer team. I miss playing the game, and I loved helping to coach my daughter’s awesomely inclusive soccer team in the previous year.

I read a total of 28 books last year, none of which were related to game development. Whoops. That’s usually something I try to prioritize. One book was “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, which I read because I was playing the game around May, so does that count?

Only 4 of the books were fiction, including Ellison’s. One book was about advertising, another was about product management, and the rest were either about history, computer science, business, self-improvement, and a few other topics. My favorites for the year include The Profiteers by Sally Denton, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Work by James Suzman, and Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.

Compared to the previous year’s 137.75 hours, I only tracked 22.5 hours of dedicated learning. I was trying to keep a daily streak going, which normally is fine since that’s the point of a daily habit, but it was stressing me out to do so. The problem was that I was also aware that I was making enough time for learning but not enough for doing. Why was I stressing myself out to do one but not the other? So I dropped the habit after a few months, intending to pick it back up when I was ready.

In fact, at some point I wondered if it made sense to carry over my daily habits from the year before, especially as I kept finding new ones I wanted to add and wondered what to cut. I don’t have infinite time, and while I find a number of things valuable, I needed to prioritize. It didn’t help when I found myself stressed about trying to keep on top of some of them, such as my daily doodle, daily learning, and daily Duolingo Italian lessons, so I dropped a few of them early in the year.

I found it incredibly helpful trying to stop self-inflicted stress from happening. Much as how in the previous year I didn’t need to stress about an arbitrary game publishing deadline I created for myself, I found myself questioning why I was staying up late to catch up on missed doodles that week or finding myself annoyed that a meeting I was in meant I couldn’t finish a Pluralsight module that day. I instead was trying to live by the philosophy of “do more of what makes you happy” although I did find a lot of relief just removing things from my life rather than adding to it. Pluralsight isn’t cheap, so I have some incentive to actually make use of it, which is what my daily habit was helping me to do, but I need to find a more sustainable way to do it.

Last year I said I wanted to make more time to actually play games, something I usually don’t do because if I have time to play then I have time to do development. I wanted to be more deliberate and regular about playing games, though, because there are obvious benefits of learning from existing games but also because when I do play games I tend to play them obsessively for days or weeks, pushing out other things I need to do. Unfortunately I never did figure out a regular game playing schedule, and so I once again had spikes of play between many long lulls throughout the year.

There was more going on that I won’t recount here, both in terms of challenges at the day job and family health issues and a major death, but suffice it to say that it was a difficult year to feel motivated and inspired.

I think the theme last year was questioning whether or not the path my past self had set me on was still serving me, and in the absence of finding a new path, I stopped traversing it to give myself time and space to eventually figure out where I wanted to go next. Apparently I needed a lot more time and space than I expected.

I also found myself struggling with the fact that I was still a very, very part-time indie, that the day job takes up such a large chunk of my waking hours that I would love to put towards a variety of other activities, so I feel like I have to prioritize what’s left over, and I’m unsatisfied with this situation.

Goals for 2023

My goals for last year were not supposed to be overly challenging. I figured that all I had to do was make a concentrated effort to easily meet them. All I had to do was convince one person to buy a game in any given month. I should similarly be able to get one person interested enough to subscribe to my newsletter each month. If I could do it, I imagined that the next customers wouldn’t be far behind.

Maybe the hardest goal would be publishing two games in a year, but I imagined that it would have come down to project management, prioritization, and limiting scope. So, doable.

I normally would right-size my goals based on the previous year’s results, but I think last year was an off-year for me. I think those goals are still doable despite the fact that I didn’t get them done.

So, I’m keeping them as my goals for 2023:

• Release at least 2 Freshly Squeezed Entertainment games by December 31st
• Increase my newsletter audience from 25 to at least 37 subscribers by December 31st
• Earn at least 1 sale per month by December 31st

That’s at least one new subscriber and at least one new sale each month, and I’ll need to focus on shipping as quickly as possible to get two games out.

My current strategy is that my free games will drive newsletter subscribers who eventually become paying customers, but I of course also have to deal with the fact that my games are quite obscure and off the radar of almost all potential players.

One major focus will be on actual creation and development, things I’ve done before and understand. I have demonstrated that I can design, plan, create, and publish a game, and I just need to put in the hours.

But another major focus will be solving my obscurity problem, to figure out how to get my games in front of more people, something I have long recognized as a problem but have yet to put in a similar amount of effort to solve. While I believe the kind of games I make aren’t meant for the kinds of players found on Steam (and so most typical and accessible indie game marketing literature is irrelevant), I don’t have a solid idea of just who my target players are, and I haven’t defined them for years despite recognizing this need.

I need to actually answer these questions rather than merely ask them like I do each time I think about marketing and sales: Where do they live? How do they spend their time? How specifically do I let them know about my game when they are looking for new games?

But not in a creepy, data-harvesting, privacy-violating kind of way. Just in a “you are clearly looking for the kind of family-friendly, privacy-respecting entertainment that I provide” kind of way.

My goal isn’t to try to make a random hit game. My goal is to grow an audience who cares about what I make. I’ve done a poor job of finding such an audience all these years, and so my work in the coming months is to figure out how.

Outside of my major goals, there are a few other areas of my life I focus on.

I want to make my physical health a bigger priority. For years, I’ve been doing just enough to keep my body flexible and capable. My morning exercise and stretching routine takes mere minutes, and while I do get benefits from it, I’m not satisfied. This past year showed me that just enough isn’t enough, that my body needs to be more capable of handling day to day life as well as the occasional heavy duty chore. I need to move more and challenge myself physically, while also not overdoing it and hurting myself.

I have been fairly happy with investing time and money into learning. Whether it is my daily habit of reading in the morning, paying for books and courses, or going to conferences, I don’t see changing much. For years, my goal has been to read a book per week, but when I stopped listening to audiobooks in my car in favor of listening to podcasts, my total book count dropped. And working from home, I don’t drive as much anyway, but if I take up daily walking or running, I could watch presentations on a TV or listen to audiobooks or podcasts more while also getting the mental benefits that come from cardio. I recently acquired a number of books on game design, plus I have a number of ebooks I never make time for, so I have plenty of content. It’s just a matter of prioritizing quality reading as opposed to allowing myself to jump into social media multiple times a day.

And I want to make sure I give myself time to play. Not just games, although getting back into hosting a monthly board game night or enjoying the occasional computer game in my collection would be good, but I want to give myself permission to not need to be accomplishing or completing or checking-off something. I want to do something for the sake of doing, for exploring, for wondering, and not worrying that I’m supposed to be doing something else to be productive. I want to get some quality work done, but I also want to enjoy the process more.

I hope you have a safe, healthy, curious, and playful 2023! Happy New Year!