Welcome to the www.onegameamonth.com challenge, year four. 

We are proud to celebrate 36 months of completely free gamedev funtimes!

So what's the point of making games? What is your endgoal? 

This is a hit-driven industry where the vast majority don't really make much money and a few hits make the lion's share. Just like pop music, movies, or pretty much anything awesome like that.

Watching industry trends the last few years you can see that indie game development is as viable a career as being a poet, musician, artist or writer. A dream job. Not impossible, but for most, a hobby.		

You can go pro at indie gamedev, but you probably won't. It hurts to recognize this, at first, but remember why you really decided to make games in the first place. 

It sounded like FUN, right?

Earning money is just the public justification for your pursuit of a passion. It just validates it to your parents. But in truth, we both know it, we make games because we love games. Because we love making them.

That almost sounds more like a hobby... just realizing this makes me wonder. I wonder if it is possible to be a successful HOBBY game developer (happy, popular, well-played, inspired, content with your creative life).

Would having this as your goal give you a happier life? I guess it really depends on what you care about.

Let's take this HOBBY gamedev thought experiment a little further. I'm not saying it's the best way for everyone to life their life - just that it is something that could possibly add a lot more smiling, relaxation, and stress-free creativity in your life, if you're willing to humbly accept a smaller dream?

Imagine if you were unencumbered by the pressure, the design constraints, the demands, the stress, the fear of needing to make an almighty dollar from the next game you design. What if you secure a day job, side gig, whatever, like any self-respecting aspiring actor with dreams of making it on broadway.

What if you had no risk: your life wouldn't be ruined whether your game was a huge hit or a huge flop? Imagine how fun the making of this game would be?

You could fially let go and take a different kind of big risk, like a creative risk! Or you could simply take shortcuts like using clipart and prefabs. 

Freed from the financial burden, your game would simply be the game you wanted to make. The reward would be doing it. It would be done when you felt like being done, like a painting or model or essay or new song.

Sharing it with your friends could be enough of a distribution plan...

Forget about monetization. Enjoy your hobby.

DO IT BECAUSE DOING IT IS FUN.

The January #1GAM theme word is: HOBBY.

Make a game about your favourite hobby. Carving, fishing, sports, building model ships in a bottle, puzzles, board games, reading. Why not make a game about playing videogames, where you control the person on the couch holding a gamepad? Make a game where you just draw, or just skip rocks on a pond.

There needen't be a winner or loser, or even an ending; because a hobby can go on forever. It is self-sustaining. The feedback loop is built into the experience itself. The gamification is the game itself. The achivement is the achievement itself. The experience points are worth less than the experience. 

DO IT BECAUSE DOING IT IS FUN.

- Christer Kaitila aka @McFunkypants
- http://www.onegameamonth.com
- https://twitter.com/McFunkypants

Credits: Made in Photoshop using NFG's arcade font tool and Plane9 audio visualizer. Music credit: Moving Places by Stephen Lu of chibola.com - Used with permission [CC-BY-ATTR]


#1GAM - Keynote - HOBBY

Welcome to the summer holiday 2016 edition of www.onegameamonth.com - I am updating the site LIVE on the server from grandma's house, on a less-than-ideal computer, so wish me luck! =)

This month's optional 250xp theme achievement is: FAR AND WIDE

Whether you are celebrating your country this week, visiting relatives, or adventuring around the world, physically or digitally, imagine the vast expanses between where you are now and the opposite shore of whatever island or continent you're on. Allow your imagination to voyage far and wide, from sea to shining sea, across mountains and over plains, above cities and through the clouds.

This month, design a game that involves travel across vast distances. Take your players on a road trip, or give them a vacation. Send them on a distant mission to exotic lands. Ask them to explore far and wide, whether literally through movement, or metaphorically, in their minds. Soar across the landscapes within your imagination.

Good luck, and happy travels!

#1GAM - Keynote - FAR AND WIDE

Making one game a month is a fun way to get game development experience.
It's all about training your skills and getting better at what you aspire to be great at. 
Making games!

This month's optional 250xp theme word is: levelup

Design an experience point system for your next game.
Devise a way to get better at the skills you want players to enjoy.
Implement a skill tree, or a skill point system, or unlocks based on accumulated experience.

Will you reward players with a juicy popup dialog where three stars explode into fireworks?
Will you activate glowing achievement icons when a threshold is crossed?
Will you let players spin wheels or roll dice for a bonus inventory item?
Will you code a skill tree of new abilities you can unlock in a hierarchy?

Whatever you choose to develop, just remember that in creating
a levelup system for your next game, 
you will also be levelling up your real life 
game developer skill and earning real life experience points. 

Getting better at what you love to do feels great.
Embrace that feeling and start coding. Good luck!

- McFunkypants
- http://onegameamonth.com

Music by the awesome NoSoapRadio 

#1GAM - Keynote - LEVELUP

The lure of perfection becons like a siren’s song. It leads game developers to their deaths, promising the impossible. It stands an infinite distance away from wherever you are right now.

The 250xp theme word achievement for this month is: PERFECTION.

In any game project, as you fall in love with what you’re working on, your mental image of the ultimate vision takes shape. The fantasy coalesces in your head. 

This fantasy of the ultimate rendition of that game you hope to make is a valuable mental asset. It provides the direction to move towards. It does not, however, provide the destination of the finish line.

Sure, when someone points at the moon, don’t focus on the finger. That said, don’t aim to land on the moon with your first launch attempt.

Just as it is wise to stow your “wishlist features” deep in the recesses of your beginner’s mind, you don’t want to define your goal as something that is impossible.

Perfection, by definition, is impossible. It is the Aristotlean “image” that one can only hold in their imagination. In the real world, we can hold  things to that ideal. We can celebrate those successes that crept ever closer to perfection. 

We cannot, however, hope to create something that could be described by everyone as the perfect game. Just as opinions subjectively vary, visions of your game’s ideal shape would never be the same between two people.

With this technical impossibility in mind, the futility of striving for it becomes clear. Luckily, perfection still serves a purpose. It is a signpost. A landmark. A beacon. A compass heading.

Set course in the direction of perfection this month, and see how close you can get. Good luck.	

The wonderful music in the background is Aspartame RMX by Maf
https://soundcloud.com/maf464
I was enjoying it so much I forgot to fade it out. Enjoy!

#1GAM - Keynote - PERFECTION

Welcome to month 45 of www.onegameamonth.com - your friendly neighbourhood game jam enthusiast's club and gamedev bootcamp challenge. You can join anytime and there's aren't any rules. Make games, not excuses. Get better at your craft by neverending practise.

This month's optional 250xp theme word is: INK.

Throw splashes of pigment on a page. Scribble and sketch. Outline and paint. Hand-draw your visual novel's art, code some 3d toon shaders, or make a kung-fu game about magic tattoos. Write scrawled tomes full of secret knowledge, or jot down incantations on a scroll. Sign a contract in blood, or prove what's mightier than the sword. This month, use the word INK to inspire your imagination.

Pick up your quills, your markers, your pens, your needles, or your octopi, and lay down some ink for all to enjoy. Good luck!

- McFunkypants

#1GAM - Keynote - INK

#1GAM - Keynote - TABULA RASA

Have there really been 47 months of www.onegameamonth.com already? Time flies when you're having fun and I can say with absolute confidence that it's been fun. I've seen so much mindblowing talent.

This month's new 250xp achievement theme word is: WHY?

In your next game, answer the question WHY about what the player is doing. If you destroy a hundred spaceships, tell the player WHY it was important, or tragic, or heroic. 

WHY are we doing what we are doing?

For the treasure? For love? For fame? As a selfless act of heroism? 

Because your cat MEOWS in the middle of your keynote? 

You might find that answering the question WHY almost always comes down to an emotion. Either that or you decide it's not in pursuit of the end goal so much as an intrinsic enjoyment of the road to get there.

Either way, it comes down to how you feel. Give players interesting or unusual answers to those questions add depth and soul to your next game. Good luck!

#1GAM - Keynote - WHY

Welcome to year FIVE of the www.onegameamonth.com challenge. 

This month's optional 250xp theme word is: FRIENDS.

Make a game with the word "friends" in the title, explore friendship of any form, and tell a story about the bonds that connect us to others. Explore loneliness, or imagine a future where everyone gets along.

If this is your first time here, you may be wondering what the #1GAM challenge is all about. We're all friends here; game developers who aspire to get better at what we do. Join us! Everyone is welcome, whether you're a first-timer or a pro gamedev.

Your quest is to make games, a lot of them, as a way to levelup your gamedev skills. Build a portfolio, and have fun working on small projects by joining game jams. You're also free to simply develop whatever games you wish; you don't have to join a game jam or anything.

There are NO RULES here. You're allowed to team up with people, you're allowed to work on existing projects, you don't have to start from scratch. 

This is simply a gym, where people just like you who make games like to get together and tally their achievements along the way towards getting better at what they want to be good at. Dozens of beginner game deveopers have completed the challenge an then gone on to jobs in the games industry.

This has been a labour of love and is a project I feel really proud of. Thanks everyone for joining me.I am grateful so many people have joined me on this never-ending journey of self-improvement.

Remember: you are officially a game developer
if you are working on a game.
Even by publishing a single finished game you'll have set you apart from a million dreamers without a finished game.

So this is it. The challenge you need to get over the learning curve. To level up your game development skills and learn the tools you need to really make a go of game deveopment as something serious.

Welcome to the training dojo. Get ready to work out repeatedly, habitually, and with discipline. This is what it will take for your to get to the finish line. You can do it. So go for it. We're here for the long run - because it's fun!

Keep on submitting games, levelling up, and earning achievements. Keep on joining game jams and talking about the art of game development with your friends.

Making games, whether professionally or as a hobby, is the good life. Be grateful you are able to spend time doing something so fun. Don't worry so much about the end product - focus on the next step and take action. 

Good luck, my friend.

#1GAM - Keynote - FRIENDS

Thank you for joining us in the 50th www.onegameamonth.com challenge.

There's revolution in the air. Resistence. Rebellion. The music of change is all around us! What an amazing time for PUNK music to inspire change. For FOLK music to remind us of our hearts. For METAL music to fight our anger, BLUES to ease our sorrow, and DANCE music can heal all wounds. 

Music defines a cultural moment, and music also affects gameplay.

This month's 250xp theme word achievement is: ANTHEM

Make a game about countries and borders, or social upheaval. Embrace the punk mentality and smash the state and stick it to the man. Drop out and join the party and pump up your favourite jams like there's no tomorrow. Embrace your dreams and memories and give peace a chance with a crowd chating songs of peace, or turn it to eleven and burn the city down in a heavy metal armageddon.

Try choosing some MUSIC FIRST, and then make a game about how it makes you feel. While developing, let that song play and it will influence your design decisions. Let the music affect your game's pacing and vibe. Let music fill your game, affect your decisions, and change your heart.

Get the crowd chanting, or try to make some small difference in the world. Craft an anthem for the masses or a poem for our age. Join the drum circle or beat the drums of war. Start marching, start moshing, start dancing, or start jamming, and create a game about how you FEEL, you wonderful punks you.

So this month, make your game about a song. Make this song the theme, the melody, the anthem of the world you hope to see in the future. 

Never give up, never back down, and turn up the volume!

Good luck!

- @McFunkypants

#1GAM - Keynote - ANTHEM

Welcome to month 51 of www.onegameamonth.com where we make small games every month as a personal challenge to levelup our gamedev skills.

This month's optional 250xp theme word is: WRITE

Make a game about prose, about ink, about poetry, about scrolls. Write a story, craft some dialogue, or type out an adventure. Put some books filled with lore into your game. Make a text adventure, some interactive fiction, or a visual novel. 

Pacing, plot beats, character development, backstory, climax, resolution; these are the things you should embrace this month as your enjoy being creative. Write something, and use it in a game. 

Good luck!

#1GAM - Keynote - WRITE

http://onegameamonth.com is very proud to celebrate 5 full years of monthly game development funtimes! 

This is the 60th month of the one game a month challenge, and we just got our 11,111th game submission. So awesome. Thank you.

This month's optional theme word is: JAM

The word jam can be used in many ways. In addition to being a delicious berry preserve, a jam can mean an improvised musical collaboration. Think of a blues jam; you and some friends get together, pick up their instruments and simply begin playing a song.

You pick notes based on feel, at the moment, but usually stay constrained to the limitations of tempo and chord progression. You bounce idea off your friends, and give them space to explore when the time is right. You have to go by feel. You're making it all up as you go along.

A game jam is much the same. Solo or in a small group, you'll pick up your tools and simply rocket forward, with limited time and a theme to provide inspiration, racing full steam ahead to destinations unknown.

In sports, say you're playing basketball, a jam is the culmination of improvised team collaboration as well, with time constraints and the interplay of moves made up at the moment, complete with the occasional mistake and lots of pivoting. You can't plan what's going to happen moment to moment, but you do HAVE A PLAN.

So set forth this month, on a game development jam, and incorporate such concepts as fruit, berries, toast, biscuits, musical instruments, collaborations, time constraints, themes, teams, balls, nets, and a whole lot of improvisation.

Fly by the seat of your pants and just go with the flow. If you mess up, you have to keep going; the song can't suddenly end if you flub one note of your guitar solo, so you accept the whole project as a sort of LIVE PERFORMANCE, a realtime made-up creative experiment. 

Power through to the very end, and when the buzzer sounds and the crowd roars, when the last note has been played and the final build uploaded, take a ig drink of water and rest, for you made it. You improvised. You had a plan. And you executed on it. You made some errors, but the performance as a whole will be something you will always remember.

Make games. Not excuses. That's my jam.

- Christer @McFunkypants Kaitila

#1GAM - Keynote - HOBBY

#1GAM

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