{ Alex Itsios: Game Dev & Writer }

Drawing Manga With Guidelines

June 18, 2023

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Rethinking My Indie Game Development Journey: Lessons Learned, Market Realities, and My Next Steps

February 11, 2025

When I sit down and think about the future of indie game development, well... I don’t feel confident, to say the least. I think I massively miscalculated both the state of the market and the potential for making a profit with indie games. As always, I want to clarify what I mean by indie games . I’m not talking about AA titles backed by publishers that are essentially smaller AAA productions. I mean indie games made with little to no budget. If you check my itch.io page, you’ll see that I’ve already published a dozen visual novels and narrative-heavy games, with Spellbound Hearts being the only commercial release. I think only a few of you know the story behind why I decided to make Spellbound Hearts a commercial game. The reason was simple: I enjoyed making it, and I felt it deserved a commercial release. But the most important reason was because I wanted to learn the process of publishing a commercial game on Steam so I’d be better prepared for my future projects. I did almost ...

Should you juggle between multiple game dev projects?

September 22, 2024

I think the majority of indie devs juggle multiple projects, and for good reason. I want to talk about whether this approach is beneficial or not. You often hear people saying you should focus on one thing at a time, but I believe that what's right for one person isn't necessarily right for another. Humans are naturally inclined towards multitasking, not in the sense of doing two things simultaneously, but in the sense of breaking up your day to work on different things. You might spend a couple of hours on one project, then switch to another for a bit, and so on. First, let’s look at the issue of starting too many projects and how it might impact your ability to actually finish a game. A common trap is starting something new, working on it for a few weeks or months, then dropping it for a shiny new idea. I’ll admit, this has happened to me occasionally, but usually for reasons not related to the allure of a new project—sometimes life just gets in the way, and you have to reduc...

Switching from Unreal Engine to Godot: Why I Made the Change

September 05, 2024

It’s been about a month since I wrote a post explaining why I chose Unreal Engine 5 to develop my game. Now, after several frustrating months of trying to overcome engine-specific barriers, I’ve made the difficult decision to switch to Godot. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit this after all the time I spent learning Unreal, but some issues with the engine, particularly with 2D development, made it impossible to continue. I want to clarify that I’ve been learning Unreal Engine for a few months, mostly for 3D game development, which Unreal excels at. There’s no doubt that for 3D, Unreal is one of the best engines out there—if not the best. However, when it comes to 2D games, the situation is entirely different. Unreal Engine has so many issues handling purely 2d games that make the engine impossible to use. Let me try and explainthe roadblocks I’ve faced over the past few months to better understand why I’ve decided to switch. Camera Bounds The biggest challenge I encounte...