I've been in the AAA industry for over 10 years and always had side projects. I like them all, but they never materialized into something worth shipping. It seems I had to get in the worst situation possible to make a game… by having a newborn.
I had put my previous project on the shelf, pushed a last build, and wasn’t planning to do any game dev outside work hours for quite some time… But I just can’t fight the impulse: 2 weeks in, baby asleep, I’m playing an incremental game, and the itch starts. “I bet I can make something similar pretty quickly.”
That’s how it started, but my side projects are a special place for me: I need to try new things, learn new tech, and make something I want to play. So, I had to put my own twist on the genre and build the core mechanic of the game around physics-based destruction.
This project ended up being a larger beast than I'd initially thought. In a way, you need to lie to yourself to ever ship anything. But Baby is a great manager: you don’t have time to mess around with a newborn; every minute of game dev needs to move you forward.
So here it is, it’s called The Breaking Room and it just went live on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4487380/The_Breaking_Room/
Anyone else had an unexpected constraint that actually helped them ship?