The Graveyard of Unfinished Projects

I love writing games. Every so often, I'll get excited about an idea for a game and spend a lot of my free time writing code and drawing art for it. But I always seem to gradually lose interest and start procrastinating until I come up with a new idea and start the cycle over again. Over the years I've ended up accumulating an embarrassingly large collection of incomplete and broken games and now my personal project directory resembles the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

While procrastinating on my latest project, I remembered the "One Game a Month" challenge. Even though the original website is now sadly defunct, I think the idea of practising finishing games on a regular basis will be good for me.

So I'm going to do just that - write and publish a game each month and post a series of articles about the process to try to keep myself honest. The evidence of this very website shows I'm unlikely to keep up with this, but I'm not setting any goals on numbers or genres of games - just the one game a month and "don't break the chain"¹. Hopefully I'll finally clear out some of the cobwebs in my project directory and maybe even develop some new skills along the way.

I have a list of games that I think might be good candidates for this challenge, kicking off with some really simple games so that I don't fall at the first hurdle and give up. I won't publish the list, because I'll probably change my mind as I go along, but I will set myself a few simple rules:

1. One Game a Month. Each game must be completed and published by the end of the month. Only one game at a time!

2. Games must be published. Published means publicly available and playable in a web browser.

3. All code will be open source. The complete code and assets for each game will be available on GitHub.

The first game will be Pong. How hard can that be?