Since late 2024, I've shared five little games on Glorious Trainwrecks, a site I've adored for a long time. The intent was to embrace "sketch gamedev," to slam out tiny games in a few hours a-piece. I've enjoyed many games made in this mode by others. I thought posting on the site, which is all about this spirit of playful experimentation, would help me enter it myself. (Glorious Trainwrecks is also a creative crucible that helped forge many of my all-time favorite freeware devs. In my arrogance, I thought contributing to the site would help my own light shine similarly bright.)
I failed miserably at my goal. I did successfully slam out a couple games in a day or two each. Then the third one took a week. Then the fourth and fifth ones took multiple weeks spread out over several months each. Ah well.
The first game was Broccoli, a tiny RPGMaker 2003 "horror" game. I made it the same way I've continued approaching flash fiction for our local writer's club. I generated ten random words on this site, picked two ("broccoli" and "horror"), then made a game. I got the bulk of it down in 2-3 hours, then polished it up and posted it the next day. I consider this a Success in terms of "embracing sketch dev," and if I'd continued with this approach I'd be writing a different blog post.
A little before Christmas last year, I released Action Sketches on itch. It collects the remaining four games I released on Glorious Trainwrecks, all action games made in Love2d. (My favorite is probably Danse Macabre, made in about a week, but I like all of them.)
If I really wanted to make sketch games, I needed to use easy tools I'm comfy with like RPGMaker, Bitsy, or Twine. I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to coding games from scratch, and making even simple games in Love takes me a long time. I did learn a lot about how I like organizing and building games on the back-end, and I feel much better equipped to tackle other projects in the future. So, still a win ultimately, even if I didn't turn out a whole feast of games like I wanted.
There's one more "problem" that got in the way of me making sketch games. Every single one of these I put out, friends immediately jumped in, live-posted them, and said nice things to me. I have an intensely supportive peer group of artist friends; I want to reward their care and attention with competent, enriching art. That's an extra bit of self-imposed (and obviously optional!) pressure that makes it harder to just throw something together, to not worry endlessly about whether it "works" or not.
I want to keep experimenting with quicker modes of creation (in addition to longer form works, of course). I might try approaching it like I have my flash fiction, mostly keeping it to myself and a few close peers, then releasing a collection of works I particularly like all at once. Or maybe I'll get over myself and post a bunch of art on Glorious Trainwrecks (or elsewhere) again. My friend sraëka has been doing that on itch for the last few months and they're having a lovely time.
It was a good experiment. I've been at this in earnest for thirteen years; I think I'm finally figuring out what I want my art practice to look like, one teeny tiny step at a time.
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