So back in February, a friend of mine contacted me about an iOS game he was creating. He wanted to pay me to make him some arcade-style minigames as side-content. In addition, I get to keep the rights to all of these games just in case I want to do something with them on my own one day. My deadline for these three games is the middle of May.

What you see above is what I've managed to come up with; the first game, Space King, took about a month and a half to put together, and the second game, Orbit Revolved, is probably around a week old at this point. These are the first 100%, totally original games I’ve ever made. All the sprites are made by me, all the sound effects are made by me… The only thing not made by me is the music, which is provided by my cousin.

I realize there’s a lot of text in that video, but… well, you’re just gonna have to read it, I guess.

I've been making fan games for over ten years now, but now that I'm left to my own devices, it's surprising how difficult it is to create an original game. Not just from a content-generation perspective, but mostly from a game design one. How high can a character jump? How fast can they move? What’s the scoring system like? How fast can you shoot? You have so much freedom that it’s almost kind of crippling, in a way. It’s all up to you. There’s no template you have to follow. Introduce new gameplay systems, remove existing ones, the sky is the limit. But will it be any good?

I’m so far down the rabbit hole I don’t even know anymore, and my deadline means I can’t really think too hard about it. Gotta keep moving forward. Things will sort themselves out, somehow.