From a Creative coding challenge to a game concept 💡

It's been months (years) that I'm working on quite big projects for my clients and I recently realized that I lost something in the way.

When I remember my first years as Creative Developer, I was a big fan of daily challenges like Codevember or 36 days of type (most of them are still alive on CodePen or Github). It was terribly satisfying to just push in a day (plus night) a simple concept just for fun. 

No big goal nor expectation of being rich with NTF.  Just go with the flow, write some dirty code, and have an interesting visual to showcase to friends.

From Creative dev to Game dev

Years pass, work took space and I'm slowly shifting on more and more gamified projects. I always been a big casual gamer with my Switch in my bag so it feels quite natural to move in this direction.

And I of course started to work on my first game called Passage! It will be a puzzle game and it's a super exiting project! 

The long term fatigue

But Passage make me fell those days that I'm in a tunnel who never ends. There are only two of us, it's our first game and we want the same quality as our professional projects in agency. 

I really needed something refreshing.  So when I discovered the weekly chalenge created by Sableraph  I had a reveal. Ideas comes really quick and I wanted to jump in it right away. It literally called me! And since the challenge is only one week I decided to join.

Challenge accepted !

Of course, my ideas were too ambitious for just few days of work. I had tons of game design ideas and mechanics on paper already. But the main point of those challenges is to deliver on time. So I needed to distill my ideas to their essence.

That's what I've being focus on the visual first : 

 And then just add a short gameplay to progress in second : 

Challenge completed  !

Of course the interaction is very poor and the game boring . But the core concept I wanted is here and I'm very happy to have delivered! It's honestly the refresh I needed to reconnect with what I love about my job and to prove to myself that I'm still moving forward. 

I would love to comeback to this project later. Mostly to test some real gameplay. But I need to refocus on Passage first.