Today I’ve been feeling very nostalgic about the old Flash game scene, where one could make a silly game in a month, slap an ad on it, throw it out there for free, and still somehow make a profit doing that.

I’ve spent the last few weeks making icons, implementing APIs, creating achievements, emailing people, setting up store pages, and it’s soooo mind numbingly boring. And even once that’s done I’ve still gotta deal with unhappy customers indefinitely.

The ratio of time spent making games to time spent shipping and maintaining games is getting very uncomfortable.

Hay guys, it’s been a while since I wrote a blog!

Last few weeks I’ve been slowly publishing Bullet Heaven 2 – getting it up on sites and fixing any problems that pop up. Kongregate and Newgrounds are sorted, next is Armor Games I guess, and after that I can work on the Steam features which hopefully won’t take too long. I’d like to have everything Bullet Heaven 2 related finished by Christmas, and there’s some chance of that happening. The main complaint people have about the game is that it’s not really designed for casuals –  there’s no permanent upgrades, the game won’t really run on old hardware, and the controls are sometimes messed up by browsers. Hopefully these issues will mostly disappear on Steam, but we shall see. But either way, I’ll be happy to finish the game and start putting more time into other things. I think that might even be a bigger reward for me than the game actually being a success, but of course I would like that too.

Besides that, I’ve been drawing sketches for EBF5, reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, looking for co-op games to play with Ronja (Broforce was pretty good!), collecting Amiibos and other figures, going out a bit more than usual (probably more than I want to), and slowly getting ready to move out of my parent’s house! That last thing I keep putting off because it’s just such a low priority for me, compared to everything else I could be working on. I’m really comfortable here and have got lots of efficient processes set up!

I’ve been seeing a financial planner to get advice on pensions and investments. Since I’m self employed I have to think about that unfortunately. But I think for the most part it’s sorted now, I’m somewhat clued up on personal finance, especially compared to a year ago. If you’re a young adult and will need to start managing money soon, I recommend the books Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Reddit recommended them and they’re a good introduction to responsible money habits, like saving, not being in debt, and general financial efficiency.

I’ve been training Ronja to become a pro artist, pressuring her to make accounts on DeviantArt and Newgrounds etc, and to draw more. And she’s making progress, which is cool. She’s studying animation, so her degree isn’t going to be very useful unless she has an awesome portfolio and fanbase.

Anyway, that’s all I got for now. Here’s some figures I got recently. See ya later.