It's "2D Game Development: From Zero to Hero"'s 3rd Birthday!

Another year has passed, let's crunch some numbers about this project and ramble about.

Hello everyone.

Yesterday (May 19th, 2022) was the third birthday of "2D Game Development: From Zero To Hero", yet I didn't make any post! Neither on here, Itch or Twitter.

What happened

Let's be brief: I recognize the fact that I've worked a lot on this project. I've been burned out more than once trying to cram as much content into it as I could, so I could give everyone a chance to dip their toes into game development without having to spend money "sight unseen" on courses and books.

Now imagine that product of all that work taken by someone, without permission and sell it on a major platform for money. How would you feel?

Seeing your work (considering I'm currently the biggest contributor by far), your hours, your burnout taken advantage of, just because you want to give something for free.

And before the thought of "it's a money driven world, someone was bound to do it sooner or later" crosses through anyone's head. I'm not going to allow normalizing this kind of behaviour. The perpetrator has been hit with an Intergalactic Ballistic Copyright Strike, there is no excuse for taking something that is available for free and flip it for a quick buck.

Enough of this.

Time to crunch numbers!

Let's leave the dark angry part in the past and let's talk numbers. The project's numbers are in all honesty quite good, even though my usual self asks the usual question of "why are they not higher?", but that's just a me thing.

Here we go with the numbers (rounded down for sake of clarity)!

Considering how I thought things were going to be when I started this project, I can say I'm quite satisfied.

What's happening now

Lots of things are going on.

I created an organization to manage the future of the project more easily, in case it happens to grow bigger than it is now. Considering the idea of multilingual contributions, this may help managing things.

Also I'm working hard on "lowering the entry bar" for the book, by making less assumptions, adding more basics and just making the language more precise and easier to understand, hopefully extending the glossary will help a lot too.

Many more diagrams, pictures and visual aids are being added, and I'm making an effort to get some serious Quality Assurance done. The next version of the book will probably come out when the PDF reaches about 500 pages and some more things are fixed, but that won't happen for a while.

Conclusions

Not much to say, I would have liked to make it a bigger event but what happened yesterday kinda ruined the mood, and "having a party" a day later doesn't feel the same either.

Let's just keep it simple and tiny. Again thank you everyone for taking a look at the project and downloading it, it really keeps me going, even after those accidents that make me lose faith in people.

Take care everyone and stay safe.

Penaz.