I’m always torn between a bunch of different personal projects. (I’m sure I’m not alone in this.) When looking at each project individually, it’s sometimes hard to see there’s any progress being made. I think games that have code involved are easier for me to see the progress as they progress.

This is almost an aside, but board game projects are more nebulous to me. I generally have a TODO list for all my projects, and work against the list. And with board games, sometimes the next item on the TODO is just… something super nebulous, like “make a prototype”. I have a lot of board game projects in that phase, actually. I didn’t list them below.

Each of these could absolutely get its own blog post, but since I’m writing so infrequently these days, I’ll probably never make the time to do that.

So without further ado, here are the personal projects I am currently more or less actively working on (in no particular order):

A new version of ActionChess Action Chess was my first game for iOS, and my first project of any kind using Xcode. It was my first real game release as well, although I did hardly anything other than push the publish button. (Only a few things that resembled marketing.) Anyway, I was quite sad when it fell out of the iOS App store, and shortly thereafter started a remake in Unity that never got that far. A few months back I was playing with a “cross platform template” (for Apple platforms), and decided to remake this again. Best guess for completion: 3-6 months.

A game in Godot with my friend August My friend August is a “real” game developer. (By which I mean his day job is for a company in the industry that makes actual games with actual budgets that people work on during office hours.) We have made a bunch of games together over the years, and were lamenting that we hadn’t collaborated in a while. This project is much bigger and more ambitious than anything we’ve made before. Best guess for release: 2-3 years.

A new version of Go-Tetris Since this game, my first digital game, was originally made in Flash (specifically in ActionScript 2.0), you can technically still play it, but you have to find & download the .swf, and then plug it into an old version of flash or an emulator like Ruffle. I’ve started a project to re-write it several times over the years, most notably a version in Unity where I renamed it Action Go and commissioned some artwork. I even showed that version at some events a bunch of years back, but never got it far enough along to give it a proper release. I’m re-using some of the assets in a new-ish project made with GateEngine, a game engine built in Swift that should let me build for macOS, Windows, and Linux desktops. I am a bit blocked on this project, and haven’t touched it in months, but still hope to get back to it sooner or later. Best guess for release: 6-months to a year, (at soonest).

A book of Go Boards and Go variants I am somewhat stalled on this project too, but really want to get back to it. Best guess for release: 1-year (But I probably would have said that a year ago, and I was more actively working on it back then. I’d like to start releasing “pages” much earlier than that. I think once I have 2 or 3 finished, they would make for good blog posts.)

Various board game designs At any given time there’s usually 1 or 2 games I’ve designed that I’m most excited about. Right now that’s either a Chess variant or Go variant (depending on how you look at it) that is basically playing Chess and Go at the same time. But there are 2 or 3 others also burning some extra brain CPU cycles. No thoughts on releasing any of those, (although I might do a “make 100” kickstarter for the Chess-&-Go project), mostly I just pitch my designs to publishers as the opportunity presents itself. (I tried to make more of a concerted effort to do that this year, and made very little headway, tbh. I’m not sure if I’ll continue that effort next year or not.)

Transitioning this blog I would like to combine this blog with my other, more personal blog. I rarely write over there, and lately I also rarely write anything here. I think part of the reason for the lack of content is basically just WordPress. I’m pretty sick of it, and in general think these sites should be static content which would be better in many ways. I have managed to port the contents of both blogs to markdown, and had some ambitions to use one of the static site generators built in Swift for this project, but after evaluating some of them (namely Ignite and then Publish), I didn’t love either of the options that were out there. (More recently, I also took a look at Genesis, which actually helped renew my interest in the project, but while I love the ideas behind it, it’s not really full-featured enough – or maybe mature enough – for me to use it just yet.) I have some experience with Jekyll, so that’s where I’m leaning right now. But I kind of hate the nuts and bolts of front-end development, and this project is stalled out in the phase of finding and modifying a template to look like either one of the existing blogs. (Or maybe something else that I don’t hate.)

boardgame.design I stood up this website, https://boardgame.design, in little more than a few hours one afternoon. It’s not really a project so much as a thing I am committed to updating – once a month or so – on an ongoing basis. It’s not much more than a local (Twin Cities, MN) board game design related event listing at the moment, although there are pages for some other local tabletop-related stuff as well. I’m quite proud of getting the domain name, but I have yet to hear anyone say they’re using the site for the event listing stuff, and I might still repurpose it. No idea what I would use it for, though I have some ideas, they all sound like work.