Players, playtesters, friends and family, people I've worked with and a mix of all of the above: It's done! After roughly 2.5 years of weekend and after-work development, Argebe is finally out.
Releasing a game is a huge milestone for me, as it would be for anyone, I think. I'm really glad that I made it all this way to finally release version 1.1!

Of course that's not the end of it! I'll continue to fix bugs, add new features and consider feedback as it comes in! But for now I'm just glad that it's finally official. I've always made games, it started with little tabletop concepts drawn on paper with rules that I misremembered half the time and sometimes forced my family to play. When I got into programming, the thing that kept making me explore new concepts on my own was game development. My first "game" was a C++ console app that drew each frame of some sort of text art individually. Eventually I moved on to Windows Forms applications with C# and then at some point to Unity. I kept starting things, learning and then leaving them to work on something new.

Argebe was the first game that I fully completed (Next to several game jam entries, of course) and I have to say, that one post that said something like "Nobody told me that when you make a game, you have to make the whole thing" is REALLY accurate.

At some point it goes from adding features and making broad stroke progress to working out some really fine details and being faced with decisions that you've never even considered when starting the development process and that wouldn't matter if the game was meant to be thrown away for something new.

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is:

This is it. This is my first ever game released to the general public and I will do it again.

I already have some ideas for new games and I can't wait to work on them, but before I do that I need to take a bit of a break, get back into making little throwaway projects to learn more about the things I want to make and THEN I'll start a new project that I'll see to completion.

Until then, I want Argebe to be a reminder to myself that I can do it because I have done it. And also I want to play this game with some people every now and then. Because frankly that's also how it started. I wanted to make a multiplayer game and instead of having to send it to people as a zip, it should be available for them to download somewhere more public.

Oh man, I've been rambling again, haven't I?
Time to do some other stuff!

I'll see you around!