IRL, I am a Senior Software Engineer, and at my job I use a flavor of Agile Scrum process to get the job done.

At night, I work a little bit most nights on a game. I have a family, so perhaps a couple of hours a day I get a chance to work on something.

So I don’t have the time to dedicate enormous numbers of hours to game development. But by the same token, game development is what drove me to develop the skills that enable me to have my job, and so I never really stop developing games (although I will take a break from time to time).

I’m not an artist either, so I make what I can with the limited graphics I can. Lately, they wind up looking like a ZX Spectrum game.

Here is what I have learned to do and not do on GameJolt:

• DO NOT finish a game completely, upload it to GameJolt and leave it for all to discover and fall in love with with no new articles, screen shots, etc to go with it. They will look at your game for a day, and then wander off to something else.

• DO enter your games into game jams.

• DO NOT post screenshots and news articles on the really cool game that you are working on with absolutely nothing for the player to download and play with.

• DO post a game or demo with some sort of functionality. Even a colored block that you can move around the screen with arrow keys is something.

• DO regularly add new things to show to your game.

• DO post news items and screen shots of new things in your game.

• DO involve what players you get in the direction the game’s development goes. Make players your co-developers. Games are not the product of the mind of a game developer alone. Games are a dance between the developer and the player. It is a collaborative medium.