Game-A-Week Schedule Juggling

I’ve been doing this Game-A-Week deal for a while now, and the results are pretty well in line with what I was hoping for. I’ve finished a whole bunch of little games, each one reasonably different from all the others, and most of them, I think, have been of comfortably average quality (true — a few have been quick, sloppy, or unsatisfying — and a couple have been better than I expected them to be — but I think “average” is a fair assessment for the lot taken as a whole).

One thing I’m not so pleased with right now, however, is the schedule the games have been landing on. The original intention was to release a game every Friday… then things slipped to Saturdays, then Sundays, and now I’ve found my way into Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and that’s just silly.

So, I’m doing something of a two-step reset of the game-a-week schedule. Here’s the plan:

Step one: “This week’s” game (really, the game for the week ending August 22nd) will be released on Friday. “Next week’s” game (for the week ending, somewhat confusingly by now, on August 29th) will be out on Monday, the 31st… Have you completely lost track yet? If it helps any, those aren’t random dates — they coincide with the beginning and end of the upcoming Ludum Dare competition.

Step two: Take a week off. There won’t be any game coinciding with the first week of September. (That’s not random either — PAX falls on that weekend, and something tells me I won’t have the stamina to crank out a Flash game…)

Hopefully, between the delay of the currently-due game to Friday, the inspiration from the Ludum Dare competition, and the PAX-break, I can get to somewhat regular schedule again by the second week of September.

Going forward, I’m also going to deviate a bit from my original intentions and start including substantial updates in the game-a-week plans. Already, LootMore, The Unfortunate Necromancer 2, and Benevolence have all been seeing significant updates (though the Benevolence update is currently tied up in the last stages of outside approval), but I haven’t been counting them towards the game-a-week goal, and I think the scope and quality of both the updates and the weekly games have suffered from trying to squeeze in so much development at once. By including updates in the game-a-week project, I’m hoping to loosen up the schedule a bit and make room for bigger improvements to the existing games.