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I've been chewing on an idea for a few months. It's a bit of a scary idea. Somewhat experimental. Slightly radical. What if everything I make gets released free, open source, and under a permissive license? My games, my videos, my writing, my educational resources, my comics, everything. Just put it out there in the open and see what happens.

The idea scares me a little because it goes against the grain. But is it possible to make a living giving everything one makes away?

I know it happens for visual artists, musicians, and podcasters with platforms like Patreon. So yeah, it's possible! But for projects that take months or years to produce like games, I wonder if it could work.

Why would I want to do this? Well, I want to make my work as accessible as possible. I want it to be available for people to use, enjoy, and learn from. There's a rich history of game developers making and releasing freeware. While one could argue that releasing their work for free devalues it, I've been wondering if it instead allows the work to be more easily shared and thus gets played by more people.

After realizing that the game engine I was using wasn’t quite the right fit for me, I’ve spent the last two months evaluating and experimenting. It’s been a fun and challenging process.

Through this process, the game engine I’ve landed on using is Godot. It’s a free and open source engine that’s been around for many years. I can make all kinds of games in it, even 3D ones! More on that later… I’ve really been digging Godot. Because it’s open source, I was even able to help fix some typos in the official documentation, which I love being able to do.

While the technology my games get made with doesn’t matter much to the people playing the games, I think it’s helpful to share that there’s a real process to finding the right tooling. Games are pretty complex software, and there are so many options out there for making them. For me, I’m viewing this process of evaluating game engines as an investment in myself and my dreams of earning a living making games. So it’s really important to me that I can grow with the game engine I choose and that it can meet the needs of the games I want to make. Godot sure seems like it checks those boxes!

Howdy! I write to you from the couch on a sunny Saturday morning. I come bearing some fun recently released projects.

Slither — Cute Snake

First up is Slither! It's like the old game Snake but with hand-drawn graphics. It's free and you can play it in your browser or on iOS. (I'm still waiting for my Google Developer account to be approved to get it in the Google Play Store. Soon! 🤞)

They're everywhere! It's up to you to stop them in DESTROY ALL GOBLINS.

The little game I've been working on for the last month is done! Destroy All Goblins is a free game for personal computers, and you can download it right now! You can play it with a keyboard or a controller. (And if you're on MacOS, you gotta jump through some hoops in System Preferences to open it since it's not a specially signed program, I'm so sorry!)

Or watch the trailer if playing games isn't your thing:

As I look forward to the year ahead, I’d like to approach it with a fierce determination to finish my personal creative projects. I’m pleased with what I accomplished in 2022, and I’d like to keep that momentum.

My primary focus is going to be making games because I’m enamored with the art form and love how it combines visuals, audio, design, and player interaction.

Here’s what I’m setting out to accomplish in the new year:

1. Release at least 6 small freeware games
2. Be competent and confident with the game engine (the code that powers my games) I’ve chosen
3. Release at least 1 of those games widely on places like the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Steam, GOG, etc. to get experience with that process
4. Share my process here in this newsletter!

I write to you while sipping on peppermint tea, and I hope that you are well. Happy winter, may the light last longer. Let's get right to it. I've got a bunch of projects to share, and I promise I won't let them pile up again.

Projectbook

I've kept a private list of project ideas I'd like to build for years, usually just for learning some new programming language or technology. These ideas aren't so simple as to be boring but not so complex as needing an entire board of directors and no fewer than six investment rounds from the richest people in the Bay Area. As I was adding ideas to the list, I thought... I should just make this public! I present to you, Projectbook! It's a free, online book collecting 100+ ideas for projects to build when learning programming and lacking inspiration. I learn my best when working on projects, especially ones that have a pretty limited scope. So I wrote out what each project could do, added some wireframe designs, and put this gosh dang thing together. I finished Projectbook back in October and people seemed to find it useful, so that was rewarding. If you or someone you know is interested in learning programming and wants ideas for what to make that aren't just weird exercises, maybe it'd be helpful. Check Projectbook out!

Lonely Paddle