It’s already December and my 2025 new year’s bingo had “write a gamedev blog post” on it. I’ve been thinking about what to write, but it feels like most of the interesting realizations I’ve had this year came from other gamedevs. Most of these were about maintaining a healthy relationship with my most soul-consuming hobby.
So here’s a list of all of my favorite gamedev blog posts I read this past year and what they each meant to me.
Tyler Glail: “Make and release lots of small games before making a big one”
This post is framed as a recipe for success: something like “here’s how you ship a hit: Ship lots of small non-hits, learn a lot, then try to make a big game”. There are a few marketing gems in here, like:
…games don’t need a reason to make $0. They need a reason to not make $0.
but the meat of the post is about self-discovery and learning. I’ll let you read the post because it’s genuinely great, but there’s one part I really want to highlight.
At the end of the post, Glaiel has a little “but what about X?” section where he preempts common responses to his overall advice of “make lots of 2-4 week projects before you work on your multi-year project”:
“But what if I’m already years into my big project but didn’t do this, are you telling me I’m just supposed to abandon it to make smaller games I don’t care about?”
I mean, no not really. But why not try? 2 weeks ain’t a big time investment right, if you try it and hate it you didn’t lose much. Chances are you won’t hate it tho. If you’re asking me this I assume it’s because you’re having some doubts about your project. Maybe its not as fun as you hoped, or maybe development is feeling like you’re stuck in a quagmire. If that is the case, then yeah I do think it would be immensely valuable to take a break and make a few small things. It could be just what you need to refresh that motivation and become inspired again.
I really love this. It’s a way to protect your creative spirit. Maybe you need a break. Maybe you don’t need to grind. It’s a way to show kindness to yourself.
Farawaytimes: “How To Make Good Small Games”
There are a bunch of gems in this post, like:
I can tell you “scope small uwu”, but if you don’t believe small games can be good in the first place, all you’ll hear is a homework assignment you have to do before you can make the games you really care about. That’s a miserable way to make art, and if you think that’s what “scope small” means, I don’t blame you for getting upset.
I make games that I like. None of them have felt like homework.
Viewing small games as more than just a means to an end, more than just stepping stones, is really meaningful to me. Small games can be beautiful on their own.
The rest of his post is split into a set of twelve ‘manifesto-like’ statements. Things like “a game’s quality is independent from it’s scale” and “good enough is good enough”. A few interesting ones:
- It’s easier for a game to succeed if it makes smaller promises
- Finish your game before releasing it.
Nine times out of ten, when you end your game on a “To be continued…” title card, you are failing to fulfill your promises…
Jon’s post has quite a few sections on how games make ‘promises’ to their players, and much of a game’s success is fulfilling these promises. #5 and #9 together are interesting to me, because I think they can be reversed a little: It’s easier to make smaller promises to yourself, the developer, as well, Releasing a ’to be continued’ game is like violating one of these promises.
When I make a game, the release phase can be pretty taxing. Right as I’m about to release, I always burn myself out a tiny bit, even with small games. This is mostly because I’m trying to get the game out there as quickly as possible so I can just be done with it.
So in a way, when I release a game, I’m making a promise to myself: “I’m finished with this. I promise I will allow myself to explore new ideas after this”. Releasing an unfinished game and forcing myself to keep working on feels like a violation. All that burnout just to release something, and for what? To gain another responsibility?
Small aside: A cool tweet
my contrarian opinion is that doing things you don’t want to do is incredibly bad for you. all the advice that says to grind is bullshit. you just end up teaching yourself that you don’t value your intrinsic motivations, and over time those vanish, leaving you empty
Applying the above to gamedev is something like “only work on stuff when you really want to”. I’m sure there’s some healthy middle-ground, but I love the idea of teaching yourself to “value your intrinsic motivations”. It’s like teaching yourself to love creativity.
localthunk: “The Balatro Timeline”
Localthunk, a guy who liked one of my tweets, also known for developing Balatro, wrote a devlog on Balatro’s release timeline. The post goes through the development process for Balatro month-by-month. The entire post is a great read, but I want to highlight one section that was really meaningful to me:
March 2022
Early March marked an important event in the history of Balatro, and I wanted to describe why things happened the way they did. I stopped working on the project entirely.
I have been making games for about 10 years now and I have been doing visual art projects for much longer, and a very important habit I have developed for creative hobby projects is to stop working on something when I no longer feel the drive. This is for 2 main reasons; first, it allows me to move on to the next idea without totally burning out on the last thing. Second, and more importantly in this case, it allows me to take time off guilt free and possibly come back to the project later on without wrapping it in negative emotions.
I feel a lot of guilt when I don’t finish a project. I’m still really vulnerable to sunk-cost. If I’ve spent more than a few months on something, it feels like cheating to work on anything else.
I’m sure most gamedevs feel this way too. Trying to balance “shiny object syndrome” against genuine burnout leads to these weird extremes of bouncing from one project to another or shackling yourself to a rock for years.
Giving myself the space to take time away from a project “guilt-free” is something I’ve been trying to do more of. Though, it’s tough to not see this break as a means to an end. Taking a break just so you can get back to your main project feels like it’s missing the spirit of what Localthunk is saying:
You need to stop working on it with no intention of returning. Trust that if you are meant to return, you will.
Something a friend said to me
I played guitar for about 18 months during the acute phase of the pandemic. I really loved it. And to my surprise, I got pretty good during that short timeframe. But in 2021, I started my masters part-time while working full-time. I had no time left for the guitar.
After graduating in 2023, I spent a few months trying and failing to get back into it. I’d play for a few months, and then lose interest.
I was talking to one of my friends about this at lunch, about how I felt sad that I’d put all this time into something that was really meaningful to me, but now I’ve given up on it.
I talked about how I felt guilty for leaving this little piece of me behind. About how at this point, it would take so long to “get back into it” that it’s not even worth it anymore. I talked about how busy my life had become, and how I wouldn’t have space for guitar anyway.
In response, she said something along these lines:
I don’t think you’ve lost that piece of you. It’s fine that it’s not a big part of your life right now. But one day, maybe five, ten, even twenty years from now, you might pick up that guitar again. Maybe it’ll just be for 30 minutes, maybe it’ll be for a couple hours. And maybe that’ll be the last time you ever pick it up. But in that moment, it’ll remind you of all of the fun you had with it. It’ll make that one day a little bit brighter.
I think it’s okay to leave pieces of yourself behind. If you’re meant to return, you will.
And if you don’t, that’s okay!
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A while back, I read a tweet (whose source I cannot find) that said something along the lines of: “Curation is also art”.
Not sure if I’d call this blog post “art”, but I really appreciate when the people I follow share the things that have influenced them. I hope you read the blog posts linked above. Those developers are all really insightful and I highly recommend reading more posts by them.
My mailing list has been a little busted, but I’m planning on fixing it soon. So if you want to be notified when I write posts like this or when I release games, consider signing up for my mailing list.