I just finished up my second quarter of game development and have fresh round of statistics to share with you all. Numbers never lie and the numbers say that while my productivity stayed consistent, less time was spent on programming and more was spent on game design. My marketing efforts stayed about the same and both the blog and Twitter readership grew at a slow and steady rate.

I’m hoping make my game development process transparent as possible, so on a quarterly basis I plan to publish some figures related to productivity, marketing, code count, and anything else that may be relevant to other game developers out there. So without further ado, here are some stats related to my first three months of game development.

I recently bought The App Store Playbook, written by Shane Lee, because Hunters was highlighted and it’s one of my favorite iPad games. Fortunately for me, the other 9 interviews were all solid, and I came away with some good indie game dev tips that I thought I’d share.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks testing out different 2d game development frameworks, and I’ve decided that the Corona SDK is the tool for me. I was hoping there would be a standout framework that could make basic 2d games much better than the others, but I feel they each have pros and cons and they can all make games just fine. What it really comes down to is what makes me comfortable and excited about game development. I’m not qualified to list out the pros and cons of each environment, since I’ve been developing games for all of two weeks, but I can tell you why Corona won my business.

The official winner of this competition (and bragging rights) is going to be the brother whose game makes the most money, but all won’t be lost if I come closer to my end goal of becoming a game developer. Bruce Lee said that, “a goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at”, and here are the targets that I’ve set out to hit.

When Ryan and I decided to hold this competition, the first thing we did was create this blog. It was tempting test game development frameworks, prototype, or do anything actually related to game development, but we know first hand the benefits of blogging on both yourself and your product. Blogging does cut into precious development time, but I believe the benefits outweigh the costs for a number of reasons.

All journeys have beginnings and today is where my journey starts. While I might not be as useless as the n00b MTG card above, I do lack most of the skills required to build a video game. Advancing from beginner to competent game developer will be a difficult task, but I’m hoping that’s where this quest leads.

Hi there, I’m Chris and welcome to my game development blog. In case you came directly to this site and not through the splash page, let me give you a quick intro as to what’s going on.