August already? How is this possible! Is time accelerating? July’s update saw a bunch of forging ahead on Imaginal and getting to show it, and August was more of the forging. Time moves so fast that I can’t keep up! I’m currently back in Kentucky, trying to rest after an arduous PAX. But anyway, here’s what I did in August:

1. A bit of a carry-over since this happened at just the beginning of August, but we did the second part of my class stream on Yoshi’s Woolly World. Lots of great insights still! Interestingly enough, when I continued playing after finishing the stream I discovered that the world 2 levels were not as elegant as the world 1 levels. Alas! We’ll see how world 3 handles things.

2. I submitted Imaginal and Lisa vs. the Tornado to a bunch of different festivals and continue to do so. The festival submission process is a great way to hone the rough edges on how you talk about and present your game, and it’s provided a number of great learning experiences along the way.

3. I taught in a group weekend Skype workshop themed on jumpstarting aspiring developers to the basics of game development. I taught two workshops, one on an introduction to game design framed around isolating and changing individual rules to see the outcome, and one on methods and tips for fast prototyping. They got great feedback but were super exhausting!

4. August is Ludum Dare month, so a number of dev streams were themed as such. I did warmup weekend in a number of different engines, intending to show how it’s a challenge for anyone to go back to an engine they used to use after not having touched it for several months. In a way i think this is more difficult than learning an entirely new engine, because you have to deal with self-worth issues on top of remembering everything. It was an extensive stream with lots of special guests. I also did some long-form dev streaming of some of Ludum Dare weekend, showing a bit of paper prototyping for the card game I was making as well as some implementation steps.

5. Speaking of Ludum Dare, I had to cut my weekend short because of health woes, but still put up a playable version of something. It is not themed and wound up being a really hard version of solitaire, but I’m happy I finished something and got to play around with a few interesting seeds of a game idea.

6. Frustrations from health were a big theme this month, and I wrote some thoughts on that.

7. PAX was this month! It was exhausting but delightful! Working the Hyperlight Drifter booth each day, I got to meet tons of enthusiastic gamers who were really excited about the game. Everyone was extremely positive and genuinely kind, and it really made me happy. I also got to catch up with industry friends, but had to spend a lot of time resting and conserving energy.

I feel like I did a bit better of a job at taking things at a more reasonable pace in August, but I could always be doing better. Imaginal is going to be out in September! I’m working on finding some help with the launch, but the game itself is finished! As such, the theme of September is gonna be “launch!”

Thanks again to everyone who has been supporting me this summer. If you would like to help, please support my patreon.

Thank you and see you next month!