🚀I released my First Game 3 Years Ago

Lessons learnt from launching my first commercial game at 14. We'll dive into how you can design your games with future you in mind and why you should iterate faster in the creative process.

This is Cosmos, my first commercial game and proudest achievement. To celebrate this three year anniversary, I'd like to share my thoughts and advice on how I made it happen

Looking back, I can’t believe I — a then 14 year old — stuck to a project for over a year. This has become increasingly important to me as I now find myself struggling to finish projects and enjoying the creative process less and less.

So, here are my tips to starting and publishing a great project.

Cosmos is a super simple platformer. You ascend vertical levels, and shoot enemies. That’s it: no story, no skill tree, no boss fights.

The game focuses on speed. You can run up walls and have full 360 degree control of your aim. Crucially, the rest of the game only serves to facilitate this speedrunning fantasy, with simple graphics, level layouts and enemies.

Scoping small, enabled me to quickly prototype the core game (more on this soon) and focus nearly all of development on content and polish. Of course, would additional ideas make the game better? Hell yeah. But by keeping the scope small, I was able to quickly prototype the core game, instead allocating most of my time to content and polishing the experience.

Limiting scope not only makes development simpler, but down the line helps you avoid the issues of increasing complexity whilst creating a project that’s more understandable and likely easier to market. (Take a look at A Short Hike (a game by Adam Robinson-Yu))

My initial aim with Cosmos was to work on a small project outside the constraints of a game jam. Over the two years prior, I’d submitted projects to a ton of short jams. And before this got a grasp of programming thanks to Scratch.

Working on loads of small projects, forces you to constantly try techniques and ideas, letting you get a feel for what works. This quickly brought me to the artistic and coding skill needed to work on a simple game like Cosmos. As a result, I could spend the rest of development on design as well as the many additional hurdles that come when working on a long-term project.

Building on that rapid feedback is key here. To improve try new ideas, get feedback and go again. Game Jams provide a fantastic environment for this. The combined rise of game development on YouTube and frequent online jams, created the perfect place to improve rapidly.

Since Cosmos, I’ve struggled to stick these lessons. It’s difficult to limit your scope when you want to make unique, exciting experiences. It’s hard to do game jams if you’re questioning if you’ll be proud of what you finally produce. So, this is for me as much as you. Just keep creating, learning and trying new stuff. Publish as much of your crappy experiments as possible. Eventually you’ll find something that sticks, you’ve got this!

Have a great week 🎉

Adam

---

Thumbnail Credits: Rocket icons created by Freepik, available at flaticon.com