Happy 2013 everyone! Hope you all enjoyed the festivities of yesterday, and are ready to dive into the new year full of energy and renewed motivation. That is certainly the case for me, and so I would like to close my “2012 in game dev” series of posts with one that has an eye set on the past year, but the other firmly turned towards the future.

Thus, the final topic of this series will be… GSM Productions.

GSM Productions, a logo that still has to be attached to a full game.

For those of you with a keen eye, you will have seen that this blog is hosted on the GSM Productions domain. Yet, if you head to the main website, what you will find is a semi-dead, quite empty website. Something about a small indie team from Belgium and stuff, but nothing more (if you do not count the endless ‘a release is coming soon!’ posts).

So, as a quick recap: GSM Productions is the name of the team me and two friends – another programmer, and an artist/web developer – formed a couple of years ago after deciding to try our hand at making video games. Due to several reasons, which I will not delve into too much here, we only released a couple of semi-finished games that are not even listed on the new wordpress-based website, but nothing more tangible. Even then, we have been working on several projects all this time, and we feel ready to get things to the next level.

If you are also full of motivation, or if you need some. INDIE HIGH FIVE!

The end of the year is always a time for reminiscing about and assessing what you have done in the past months, and we took that opportunity to put everything we had going on the plate and discussed what we need to do in 2013 to not only finally release our first ‘full’ game, but through that taking steps towards making sure we would have a shot at someday making game dev our ‘real’ job. It may be a far-fetched dream, but it is one we are ready to pursue nonetheless.

So, after many game jams, prototypes and noodling around with various technologies, both me and Thomas (the other coder) have decided to sign in to the One Game A Month challenge, to help us hone our skills in a more regular fashion. And in parallel, we have actually decided to go back to one of our game jam games and improve/polish it to release it as our first game.

If you read our team blog archives, you will see that we had an ‘almost done’ tower defence game, Alun Hevel. While we are not abandoning it per se, we decided to keep it as a ‘background’ project, because to be honest, there is not much in that game’s design or execution that excites us. We realise that we need to aim low at first, but that game asks for not only a great deal of content, it demands an even greater amount of balancing. And that is something we will do on a longer period of time, but the very slow development pace, coupled with a very big loss of interest in the game, drove us to this decision. Hopefully in a couple of months we will look back on it and feel confident that it was the right choice.

Alun Hevel, in its first playable version.

So there you have it. 2012 has come and gone, and I personally feel deeply grateful for everyone that has crossed my path in so many different ways. From close friends working with me on projects to famous devs inspiring me with their work or their words. From film-makers that made me smile to studios giving a glimpse of what it could be like to work on games for a living. For all the tweets, all the +1’s, all the comments, the unexpected replies or gifts…

For everything. Thank you.

And let us all blast through 2013 with brilliance!

(And to keep in line with the tradition, you can follow me on Twitter, Google+, or subscribe to this blog, or follow our team on Twitter or Google+! Thanks for stopping by 🙂 )