Making Concoction

Concoction is the second game I have published. While I've made many other games, my goal for this year has been to actually get them published and out the door, where people can play them, rather than letting them collect dust on my hard drive.

Initially, I had wanted to build the game in about a week. As with my first game, I quickly realized that wasn't going to happen. I ended up spending about a month on the game, and then right at the finish line, work (my full-time employment) went crazy and demanded lots and lots of overtime. So most of the development for the game happened in May, but I'm only now (July) getting back to finishing it up. Overall, it was probably about a month of spare time development, though I've managed to get even upwards of 40 hours a week into my spare time, if things go well.

Earlier in the year, I had spent a lot of time learning Adobe Illustrator. With a graphics program like that, you spend a lot of time "mixing" colors. This game idea came from spending a lot of time mixing colors, and a question: "Will I eventually get faster or better at this, if I do it enough?" To that end, I have often called this game a gamified color picker. I think it's an apt description. I hope there's an aspiring artist that might play this game and find it a slightly more interesting way to get better at color spaces and color picking.

I chose to use MonoGame for this project primarily because it is what I'm most familiar with. While I've dabbled with other frameworks and engines, MonoGame gives me the flexibility I want, while still giving me a good, meaningful, powerful library to build upon. MonoGame is missing some features that other engines are not. One big one is a UI. I think every MonoGame developer eventually says, "I could go build a UI framework and make it available on NuGet.org!" There are a ton of them out there, and even a few that I think are probably worth using. But I extended the UI I had begun building in my previous game and augmented it greatly. It is quickly becoming a powerful GUI system, and I'm generally happy with it.

There's always more you wish you could do with a game, and this one is no exception. But I'm planning on moving on to the next game tomorrow. Having said that, I'm more than happy to fix bugs in it (at least for a little while) so if you find a change you think would improve the game, please reach out!