Level Up Tasmania is an exciting event for game makers and players, coming up soon here in Tasmania. The games industry has been fortunate to receive some very healthy funding from the government to support this event, and the lovely folks at Screen Tas have been working on this to make it happen. My game, Gravity Flux will be on display for the general public to play. This is a very positive development for the games industry in Tasmania, which should send waves in the game making community to perhaps encourage people and teams to make (and importantly ship) more games while living here in Tasmania. I have heard that there are others outside of Tasmania making the trek down here to participate as well. For all my Tasmanian friends, your attendance would be helping “send waves” in the industry to help game makers like myself continue to make and release games. I’ve got some merch made (to give away for free), and I will set up a PC with controllers to play my game. Being a local multiplayer game, the public will be able to play it. I’m also curious to see what other games that Tasmanians have made! Hopefully I will get a break to check them out.

My long term goal is to make games and earn passive income from it, because the fixed hours life can be a bit mentally exhausting and more than anything I enjoy the flexibility to context switch between my interests, to keep progressing my projects and skills, including game development and my other interests. So I’m jumping on to the recent healthy developments in the games industry in Tasmania to support my long term goals. It would be nice if some of my other interests (such as electronics) could be supported, but it seems that’s unlikely. So I shall have fun focusing on making games going forward!

In my gamedev developments since my last blog post, I participated in TasJam 2024 and made FPS Fanatic, a first person game where you follow the main character around and score points based on how well you capture the gameplay. Screenshots below:

I really like to just have fun at game jams, I’m not trying to make the next Sim City, I just want to make something I can laugh at or help me develop new skills I can use in future.

I am aiming to complete and ship Wizards with Rockets on Steam in the next 12 months or so. To do this I have been battling against the universe to find time to work on the game. So far my plan is to use my spare time, such as Tuesdays at Hobart Makers, and Fridays at the end of my working week, when I don’t have other client work. Managing my schedule is tricky but I have been slowly improving it. I will also have to severely limit the scope of the game. I had some creative ideas to add a fleshed out singleplayer campaign with story, or to make a battlefield-style game where you have to capture the enemy base(s). But to get this game done before I start growing grey hairs, I will make a fairly simple game where you just progress through some different themed levels, just kill the bad guys to get to the end. There will be some dialogue and perhaps simple animations, but nothing too fancy.

The games I make after Wizards with Rockets are the games I intend to focus more on graphics, animation, sound, music, story, game mechanics etc. Using likely Godot engine for everything because I’m quite familiar with it now. I have been talking with an old friend of mine about making a science fiction/fantasy first person shooter/puzzle game set in the 60’s-70’s where there are wizards. I still want to make a 3rd person stealth action game where you play as a sentient robot. And I would really like to ship some kind of mobile game for the sake of having something on mobile to show off.

Overall, my game development “journey” is continuing on as before, I just need to find more time to work on things. A lot of things are competing for my time, such as social events, paying work, and my other interests. I might apply for a grant to support my game development but I will have to give that idea more thought. Luckily there are grants available now! with Screen Tas.