Holiday Project

After a disheartening break, I’ve resumed my game project alluded to months ago. I’m finally far enough along that, though I’m not certain I’ll hit my desired deadline, I’m certain the project will bear fruit eventually — so I’m ready to talk about it, a little.

Casting about for a minimalist game idea, I finally decided for tongue-in-cheek insider jokes. A “tycoon” type game lets me go with just text and numbers for a first-pass (graphics can follow later if it’s fun), and what better topic for a game than a “game developer” tycoon game? While I’m at it, I’d like to understand the soup-to-nuts process of launching a social game on a platform like Facebook… and so “Social Game Tycoon” was born into the guise of “The Next Biggest Thing.”

There’s not a whole lot to say yet, other than that I’m trying to distill a “build a product, make it earn revenue” experience into a single screen of charts and clickable buttons. But it’s kicked off — hooray! With about 4-5 days left for tinkering, we’ll see if I can get into alpha testing by the time the holidays are over.