Here’s the complete list of all my games, ranked BEST to WORST – with helpful links if you wanna go check them out! UPDATE: people asked me to say a few words about each game and why it is where it is on the list. I’m going to skip 1-3 because I feel very positively about them and it feels weird to talk them up, but I’ll write some stuff for #4 and down.
#1. Gem Wizards Tactics (2021) (Steam)
#2. Auro: A Monster-Bumping Adventure (2014) (Steam, iOS, Android)
#3. Dragon Bridge (2019) (Tabletop)
#4. 100 Rogues (2010) (iOS, Ouya) – My first published game. It’s a classic Rogue-like with a few twists and asymmetric characters. I think it’s “solid”, and it has a lot of charm. It’s unfortunate that some guy who claims ownership of the game and who has the codebase didn’t care to update it, so it’s pretty hard to get a hold of now. Also that same guy added a lot of bad things (like a potion you could buy for 99 cents that brought you back to life! I fought so hard against this and lost). Honestly this experience overall is probably why I spent so much of the rest of my career working by myself.
#5. Jelly Bomber (2018) (Steam) – A solid Dr. Mario-based game; basically the approach was, “let’s see if we can turn Dr. Mario into a strategy game!” I think the answer is “kind of”, at least so far. This is one, like Auro, that I did with Dinofarm Games, so it has the INCREDIBLE Blake Reynolds pixel art, that’s always nice. But overall I think this game needed at least another 6-9 months probably to cook. We never got the balance quite right, and it could use another mode or two.
#6. Empire: The Deck-Building Strategy Game (2013) (Steam, iOS, Android) – This maybe could have been a solid game with another 9 months or so of development. The game was only in development for 9 months or so which really is not enough for a game like this. I think the concept of a 4X game where you only have 3 cities, and each city’s resources are dwindling and you have to uproot and move, creating this leapfrogging situation, is very cool. You also kinda ruin the world as you move through it, which is also neat. The “second-screen” combat system wasn’t great, and in general a lot of the systems just weren’t balanced, so it only ever “kinda” worked.
#7. Escape the Omnochronom (2017) (Steam) – This game, supposed to be a mix of Rogue-like and DotA-like, I probably have the most “ugh” feelings about, because I worked so hard on it (there were five distinct versions over the years) and just couldn’t get it to work. At the end I think I realized, ok, this needs to be real time actually. And I think if I made it real time, and added a bunch more content, it’d probably work alright. But ugh! I worked so hard on it and it just really didn’t end up working. I guess the one thing I’m proud of is that a game like this, really PROVES that my game designs are experiments in theory: you should expect some, or most experiments to fail, if you’re really experimenting.
#8. Chess Mix (2019) (itch.io) – This is a good example of, don’t dive hard into a game development process before you have any idea how the thing you’re making is supposed to be fun at all. I was kinda in a weird place maybe when I was making this, not sure exactly what was going on. I think, after ETO I wanted to make something quick and simple and short. I had also gotten better at Unity. So I think a lot of this was just me practicing programming and game development in general. But it really was never fun, and I don’t really think I have a clue how to even begin to try to make it fun. I think this was my most *doomed* design from the get-go. But I like the music at least! 🙂
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