Small Arcade Games?

General Discussions
#1

I’ve finished a couple small arcade games (this and this) but wonder about some things.

For one thing, I like them, and think others could enjoy them, but not sure about distributing them. I doubt I could get actual money for them, at least on PC, but if others might enjoy them I’d like for them to be out there. I did look into porting them to Android (where perhaps they might have more success), but it seems the little framework I dreamed up is not very portable. On the other hand, I’ve also wondered if I shouldn’t even bother – they’re so small and kind-of beginner projects, maybe they don’t really belong here next to games that some people might try to seriously market.

Does anyone have any advice or feedback on this?

#2

Short answer: Put together a portfolio site, put your games there, and keep adding games as you make them.

You’re right that you’re probably not going to become rich and famous from the first game you make. But that doesn’t mean it was a complete waste of time. Keep in mind that most professional developers published dozens of smaller games before making it “big” in the industry.

So, put together a portfolio site that shows all the games you’ve created. Use it as a timeline to show how far you’ve come, and keep adding games there as you create new ones.

You might also consider putting your games up on itch.io and Game Jolt, but again: don’t expect to make it big with your first game (or first ten games). Move on to the next project, take the lessons you learned with you, and make your next game just a little bit better than your last one. Good luck.

#3

Thanks. I might look into some of these sites. I’d actually started thinking of just making both open source (one is already), make .deb and .rpm files and seeing if they could be distributed with Ubuntu and/or Fedora. But I’ll take a look at these sites. I don’t expect to make a lot of money from them – at first I didn’t plan on making any from these, but if arcade fans could enjoy them or if I could say they were out there and some circulation I’d be very happy.