Sometime during 2016, I helped my friend Liam Twose found the hashtag #30DayDev and push it to become of the most widely used game development hashtags on Twitter with a huge number of people actively taking part and even more people seeing the content being developed by the hashtags ever-increasing reach. However, throughout 2017 activity wained as algorithms on hashtags were changed and focus was directed elsewhere into other endeavours. We decided it would be a good thing for the game development community at large to try and revive the hashtag going into the new year and this is what this post will cover, my plan of action for the first #30DayDev of 2018.

This month will be the first month I’ve gone into with a solid plan of how to tackle #30DayDev pretty much since its inception. I’m not solely focusing on game development this month with some time being dedicated to trying to help revive the hashtag as well. I’m essentially splitting my 30 days into 3 tasks; Twitter Bot, Super Blasty Blasty V2 and knowledge sharing. Between these 3 tasks, I think I should be able to learn a fair few new things as well as produce some quality content.

Twitter Bot

In order to help the #30DayDev revival I think it’ll need to have some form of cross-polination from other hashtags (#GameDev, #IndieDev, etc). This cross-polination will help it reach the maximum number of eyes and help improve the audience reach. Having a dedicate twitter bot that will retweet and spread content across other relevent hashtags would be a great help.

I’m planning on writing the bot in Python using Tweepy because I think its the language and library that bests suits the rapid development required to get a project done and deployed in a short time. It’ll also be a chance to write some Python which is a language I don’t often get to write in my personal or professional work.

Super Blasty Blasty V2

This project will probably occupy the most of my 30 days as it is by far the most ambitious. I plan on totally ripping the mechanics out of the original Super Blasty Blasty and utilizing the new Microcosm Framework to enhance the original game.

Knowledge Sharing

Over time I’ve amassed a huge set of bookmarked articles and videos on game development topics and I’m planning on sharing at least one or two of these every day on Twitter to help spread the knowledge. This won’t take a great deal of time but I feel it could benefit the community a lot. If enough people got involved it could really create a wealth of knowledge being shared using the hashtag.