What happened in 2024

Personal

One thing that happened the past year was that, with my wife and kids, we moved to our own house in Feb 2024. This was a great milestone in our lives and we don’t have to pay for rent anymore.

But a reason that makes it feel more important is that we invested our savings to build the house and there were big problems in the process. In September 2022 we hired a fast building method company that promised us the house done in 3 months but they were delayed and even at some point they went into bankruptcy. We thought we were going to lose our investment and it wasn’t pleasing. But at the end of 2023, in spite of their bad process, they delivered the house, one year later, and we couldn’t be more relieved. We were really lucky , some others were not so much .

Another important thing that happened in the middle of 2024 was that I founded my Game Development company, Pixel Core Games, where I provide consultancy and development services for Cleared Hot and also develop Ship Miner.

And finally, at the end of the year, I was invited to provide my knowledge in Game Development to be part of an evaluation committee for a government grant where I had the opportunity to evaluate interesting projects and learn from that experience.

Cleared Hot

Since I started working on Cleared Hot at the end of 2023, I had the chance to be part of an awesome growth in multiple fronts.

From the wishlists point of view, the game was about 5k wishlists when I joined the team, and we had a couple of moments that made everything explode. The first one was presenting the new trailer, that helped us getting to around 45k wishlists and the second one was when we announced a partnership with Microprose as Publisher with another custom trailer which got us to be around 94k wishlists right now.

From the team point of view, the talented m4ndrill and Vitor Amado joined the team to take care of the Art Direction the Audio Direction, respectively. I also had the chance to recommend my friends Rubén Garat as Game Developer and and Enzo Gaiero as Game Designer, and both were able to join the team as well.

Thanks so much Colin and the rest of the team for letting me have an awesome 2024, I am really happy to be working with you on a promising and technically challenging game like Cleared Hot.

Ship Miner & Pixel Core Games

Around May, I started to transition to be 100% of my working time on Game Development since I was still working on a javascript mobile app. I knew I was going to let that app development go at some point so a couple of months before we hired and trained my friend Valery Nater to take my place at some point, and that worked flawlessly. After leaving the other job, the target time distribution was 70% in Cleared Hot and 30% in Ship Miner, more or less, and I completed that transition a month later.

Almost at the same time, I decided to create a Steam Page for Ship Miner so people could start adding it to their wishlists. While doing so, I wasn’t sure if doing the page as myself or a company instead. Creating a company was something I wanted to do for some time to make things more professional. In ended up deciding to start the company creation process and delay the page until that was done, and that is when Pixel Core Games was born. That process took like a month and a half and at the end of July the Steam Page was ready and published.

For the Steam Page announcement I created a Teaser and shared it on Twitter/X, and other social networks, and I was lucky that my friend penusbmic also shared the announcement on his Instagram. Thanks to that effort, the game was added to 500 wishlists in the first two weeks.

A couple of months later I submitted the game to the Space Exploration Fest which got like another 100 wishlists.

Finally I was able to join a twitter’s trend and that got me like 300 more.

The game has currently around 1.3k wishlists in total.

At the end of the year LevelUY was held, a Uruguayan Game Development SUMMIT, where the Uruguayan Game Development Contest (Concurso Nacional de Videojuegos) is hosted. I decided to submit Ship Miner with almost no expectations of winning and, to my surprise, the game got the 2024 Innovation Award and I couldn’t be more happy about it.

I was happy, I swear, I just couldn't smile so much for the photo xD

In September, I applied for a competitive government grant to help funding Ship Miner development. The grant is a total of around 30k for each selected project and they only select two. That money could make a big difference for the project but I understand there is a lot of competition so my expectations are low for this. However, I am a bit eager to know the results, it’s been more than 3 months already and a lot of developers are waiting for them.

Around that time, I also had the chance to talk with a potential partner/publisher and it was a great experience. They were super nice to me and I learned a lot from that interaction. After talking a couple of times, I decided to delay that conversation for now since I am waiting for the government grant results. But also, because I have to know more specifically what I need from a partner and I don’t have that so clear.

Finally, even though I was very busy working on Ship Miner and Cleared Hot, I decided to participate in a couple of game jams anyways and I am pretty happy with that since I believe it is part of what defines me and Pixel Core Games.

What’s up for 2025

In general terms, I plan to have a Demo of Ship Miner on Steam and define if it makes sense for the game to have an Early Access or not. If true, I want to release it in 2025 as well.

Also, I plan to start defining a new game to maybe prototype and present it for grants and/or to publishers. Why start a new game before knowing how Ship Miner and/or Cleared Hot is going to do? Well, my idea is just to explore a couple of things I have in mind, one of them indirectly related to Ship Miner but how much to explore or not depends on the other projects, of course.

To start the new year, I shared a playable version of Ship Miner with a small group of friends to get feedback. Even though it is an early version and things will change, it helps me to start adjusting the experience, controls and gameplay. I will try to write another blogpost about Ship Miner’s Roadmap to Demo and Early Access to share where the game is right now and what’s missing.

That is what happened in 2024 and my current plan for 2025.

Thanks for reading!