I built and published 40 videogames from September 24th, 2010 to May 10th, 2013. When I finally threw in the towel in September of 2015, overwhelmed by failure, I deleted everything. Years of work: scripts, audio and video assets, design documentation, source and compiled code, precious blog entries. All gone.
Or so I thought.
I missed a Dropbox folder. You used to be able to host web browser versions of Unity games on Dropbox. It was a convenient way to publish games, and of course they ended up shutting down the function. Even if they'd kept it going, the Unity webplayer plug-in that my games used has long since broken. Fortunately, there is a solution: Gameload. If you've got a .unity3d file lying around, this app can open it.
Not all of my games were in that folder. 7 projects are missing, including everything from my first year of development. I think I may have published those to my old website, and those files are certainly gone. Still, enough remains for a retrospective analysis.
I'd been a full-time solo indie for 416 days when I published this. After 2 years of school, 3 large-ish projects, and 3 Ludum Dare 48 challenges, I started making a new "game" every week just to feel like I was doing something.
I started a project that I would later collect in a folder named "DARKADE". I built my own versions of classic arcade games. It was (and still is) excellent practice, and an exercise I'd recommend to any fledgling game developer. I learned so much about what makes for basic engagement, and how much is "enough" when it comes to design. For a lot of these efforts, it was not.