Game making is a hobby for me. I started with Game Maker Studio around 2016, then moved to Godot, then to Unity. I've tried and failed a few times to finish and release a game, but it wasn't until Playdate that I actually did it with Grimoire. I think the limitations of the console really suit individual creators well. It's also a fun console to play with, so building and play testing is fun.

In, like, physical time it took me roughly six months to complete Tex'em working on it part time when I felt the desire. That included the game design, programming, art, and marketing materials. The character designs and art for Dax, Father Misty, and Reggie were done by my pal Brad Slavin, and the 3D model and environment used in the marketing materials by my good friend Tyson Kallberg. Music and sound effects were from various online sources.

There were a few large breaks in that six month time. Around the end it became a slog working on the thing, so I worked on a few other projects instead. Life gets in the way as well, ya know.

A few of the lessons I learned in making Tex'em:

• Know when to rewrite a thing
• Make it easy and fun to debug
• Prototype the entire game loop from the start

There are a few things I think I did well in the making of Tex'em. The fact that I released it at all is testament to that. And now I can apply these learnings to the next game I make, so that's good.

Know when to rewrite a thing

I won't go in to the entirety of how I built Tex'em, as it's actually super gnarly and not that great. I kind of just started without a plan and built what I needed to as I needed it. A few times I would step back, sketch out a flow, and implement from scratch a mechanic or system, and honestly I should have done that more often. The way cards and hands are analyzed and compared with each other has been a major source of bugs throughout the development, and I should have just scrapped it and started anew many times. But, oh well.

I do think the build as needed method works a lot of the time, though. As long as the code isn't super critical, used everywhere and the like. It got me moving quickly.

Make it easy and fun to debug

The largest source of my pain — testing and debugging.

There was a time I honestly thought, like, screw it — too many bugs, too much of a mess. I should just scrap the thing. I had a few ways of hard coding card values that made debugging hands and edge cases a bit easier, but it was pretty limited and meant that if I needed to test out, say, how two flushes compare against each other when one player goes all in I would have to play the game for a bit in order to do it.

I got so tired of playing poker, and it only occurred to me around the end that I should have built some tools to help me out. A menu to easily cheat at the game and input values I needed so I could test things out on device without using the console would have been incredibly useful.

Prototype the entire game loop from the start

The gameplay in Tex'em  was kept relatively simple and straightforward — it's just poker, essentially. When I was initially conceptualizing the game, though, I came up with a bunch of wild ideas on how to make it a bit more interesting. Like, when Nintendo wants to make a tennis game they don't just make Tennis, they make Mario Tennis. I wanted something similar.

A few of those ideas:

• Cheating — give players the chance to pull an ace out of their sleeve and switch it with one of their cards. Maybe it's an item they unlock, and playing it gives a chance of getting caught?
• High noon showdown — when it's down to the last opponent, give the player the option to shoot it out in some sort of reaction mini game.
• Stamina — opponents get a stamina trait that either increases or decreases depending on how they do. If they loose a bunch of hands in a row they get more timid. If they win a bunch they get more cocky.
• Bluffing — honestly, not quite sure how it would work. I just want the ability to, like, make the AI opponents think I have a better hand than I do. It'd have to be some sort of mini game, and you could use it strategically to get out of a nasty no-win scenario.

Maybe some day I'll get around to implementing 'em, as I still think they're pretty cool. But ya, I should have included at least one of them in my prototype so at least it was there, and then maybe I would have been more inclined to build it out. Stub in the entire game loop at the start of the project, then flesh it out along with everything else.

Release

It's still a bit early for any kind of metrics to really matter, I'll update this when it's been more time, but so far Tex'em is looking to outpace Grimoire in terms of downloads: Grimoire's first week was about 50, while Tex'em's first week has had just over 200. There are definitely way more Playdates in peoples hands compared to last October when I released Grimoire, but I also tried a few new things that I think have helped in getting Tex'em off and running.

A few things I did well:

• The marketing material was unique — Tex'em really stands out in the browse page when you compare it with other Playdate games on Itch.io.
• Posting to r/PlaydateConsole — When I released Grimoire, I had it posted to some other indie game developer subreddit. It didn't really take off there at all. So far, though, my post on r/PlaydateConsole is leading in terms of view referrals just a bit ahead of the Playdate browse page on Itch.io.
• Being "on call" — I did this for Grimoire as well, but I spent the day at home on release day. It turned out I missed something super critical that I only found out as quickly as I did because of a post on the subreddit. I was able to get a fix out within a couple of hours.
• Polish — I released Grimoire in a bit of a rough state, visually. I later updated it to something more to my liking, but with Tex'em a lot of the comments I'm getting seem to be surprise — surprise that it looks and feels so good. I'm sure a gameplay video that I could post along with screenshots could have helped convey this a bit more, but ya.

Pricing

Something I'm hearing a lot is "I'd pay for this!", which is super kind. I follow SquidGod's videos and Twitter, and having seen his (super helpful) monthly metrics I gotta say there really isn't that much money in this. Which is fine for me; I'm cool just keeping this a hobby, and would much rather have the download count. I did some back of the napkin math to figure out how much money I could make if I did charge, and using the numbers from Grimoire it's about $70 all time earnings if I charged $1. Tex'em's looking like it'll be a bit more popular, but still.

What's next?

Well, I'm going to keep an eye on any bugs that come in and keep updating as needed. I'm a bit sick of the game right now, to be honest, so don't expect anything major. Maybe in a few months I'll come back and want to work on one of those ideas I didn't get to before, just like how I came back and did a big update for Grimoire.

But for now I want to work on something new. I think I want to try to make a game that has more of a progression to it, not just an arcade style thing. Something with RPG elements to it. I've had this idea inspired by Lucas Pope for a sort of made up sport mini game type of thing, and I thought it could be neat for players to have a team they have to push through a season. Sort of like Tecmo Bowl meets Mario Party meets Papers Please.