Showcase Season
First off- I originally intended to post back in February, and I even had 2 gigantic paragraphs typed out, but things became so busy at my day job which led to all of my indie game production work getting pushed back by a lot. Anyway, I'm keeping this one short in hopes that I can publish it today and get back on track with all the fun stuff I wanted to rant about earlier.
Showcases!
Yes it's that time of year again where Jeff Keegle's SumGumFum kicks off and all the big shows happen and your eyeballs are bombarded by a million ads. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this, but I'm actually very happy to see more indie game showcases happening this year, filling the gaps of other shows from the last ~4 years that may or may not have a showing later in the year.
I swear I'm still looking forward to some game releases and not just getting more jaded as the years march on.
That said, I'm certainly not watching everything, and continuing to not watch SGF not out of spite, but probably just because my time is so limited this week and I'm still trying desperately to complete the projects I keep making for myself.
Segue to Personal Projects
I started making this arcade machine thing that I had intended to take to multiple conventions this year in hopes of showing people some indie games on it, but it quickly ended up becoming more of a hassle than I could handle and now I'm stuck repairing broken parts on it and wrestling with PS/2-to-USB connections, bad drivers from 2004, and all the fun stuff that comes with trying to get ancient hardware working on modern PCs.
I'm still hopeful that I'll get it working in some form this month, but I'm pretty bummed out that it's already June and I haven't been able to approach event organizers with it.
I've also still been collaborating on other projects with various people, which I will probably end up talking about in another post after I complete this one.
Final Thoughts
So much stuff has happened and we're almost half-way through 2025. It's hard to believe things have still not improved and are seemingly getting harder for a lot of us in and out of the game industry. There are so many things I want to say and thoughts on multiple topics here, esp. about the influence of money in games, but I'll leave that for another time.
I do still have faith that we (not so much me, but a lot of the larger indie groups) will find a way to not just survive but thrive in the challenging modern environment of indie game production. I recently accepted another pro bono advisory role position with an art streamer and gaming group who I'm helping to plan a fund for other similar streamers, so that's fun and I hope I can talk more about that soon too.
Do it for the love of the medium! -slime