A Blog About the Other Side of Game Development

This site documents what it takes to code a game and then publish the App.  I started it when I found a ton of articles on how to code a game, but very few on how produce a game. – Yes these are different.

Everyone knows that it (usually) takes code to write a game.  But what about all of the other tasks that go into game development?  There seem to be a lot less for the other tasks that have to be completed to launch a App.  This site documents those efforts as well.  Specifically, I a Pixel Art game to be published on Google Play using freely available software (libGdx, GitLab, and Android Studio).

  • Why not Apple too? – I am not discounting it, but I currently do not own Apple Dev Hardware and wanted to see what I could do without investing much capital.
  • Why Pixel Art? – It is something I am comfortable working with and assets are generally available for reasonable costs. I even joined Pixel Art Acadamy.
  • Why free software? – Not everyone can afford Photoshop, and I am a strong believer in abiding by the software licenses. Microsoft would be please to know that I have a valid copy of Windows and a subscription to Office. Everything else, I will first try to create, then find, or lastly purchase.
  • Why so simple? – There is so much that goes into getting the first game out, that I did not want to make it more complex by adding additional platforms or extensive game-play requirements. Believe me when I say “producing a game is not simple.

Remember, this blog is about all the other stuff that goes into releasing a piece of software in today’s market, not just software development.  The smaller the App, the more I can concentrate on the other tasks:

  • Funding the development using Android Studio and libGDX
  • Bringing up a server on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS).
  • Testing and release strategies.
  • How to publish this on Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
  • Other game development topics.

This site started as a way for me to document all of the activities, not just development, that go into publishing an App.  I want others to benefit from my start-to-finish documentation so that this process can be replicated by people just starting out in App development.

I have tagged the posts by categories so those readers who only want to read about bringing up an AWS WordPress server can look at just those posts, while others can read about Pixel Art, GitLab, or even how I developed a Quality Management System (QMS) for a one man team.

Thanks for visiting!