If you're committed to making a game a week, every week, how do you fit in preparing a talk for GDC Europe in Cologne? You turn that presentation into a game.

That's exactly what Adriel Wallick (better known as MsMinotaur online) decided to do, with her talk in Germany today - a look back at her last 38 weeks and, more importantly, her last 38 games - also doubling as an interactive 2D platformer.

"When I went indie, I left my full time job and I really wanted to find within myself the opportunity to do my dream job," opened Wallick, who was behind the recent Train Jam earlier this year.

"I had a whole lot of time and a whole lot of ideas. I'd work and I'd work and I'd work, I'd wake up in the morning and I'd have all this time and ideas. What did I have to show for myself? It turns out I had a lot of empty Unity projects and internet knowledge – I knew what was happening on Reddit most days. Other than that I really had nothing."

Suggested by Vlambeer's Rami Ismail, Wallick decided to make one game every week, with the idea being to define her new found indie freedom and creativity with some much needed boundaries and goals.

Small packages

"We sort of create this myth in our heads that with enough time and resources that we can, bam, make the next Minecraft or whatever, but you can't just sit down and do that," continued Wallick, playing her 2D platformer-cum-presentation as she spoke.

"These people worked and worked and worked at what they were doing until they could make those games. They tried games for years, they failed, they succeeded, and they had constraints. That was hard to struggle with – this new found knowledge that, 'hey, I don't know what I'm doing'."

And so, Wallick added, she had to give herself "a weekly deadline", which "served as a way to enforce yourself to have a solid, attainable goal."

She continued, "By giving yourself a deadline, you have an answer to how you define what a game is and how you measure if it is successful or not. By the end of the week, I stopped, and as long as I had something, that was it. Deadlines create pressure, but it's a good kind of pressure."

Added pressure comes from releasing each game to the public, with Wallick usually plopping it on her website and pushing it via Twitter.

"This adds an extra sense of accountability. There are always reasons why we don't do things, and by putting those excuses through the lens of an outside entity, you see how silly they are. That's terrifying – it's really really scary to make yourself vulnerable like that," said Wallick.

"That opens the door to feedback, because everyone who plays your game is going to have an opinion on it."

Conclusions

So what has Wallick learned after 38 weeks? Has it been worth it?

"It's kind of easy to want to keep iterating on the same idea over and over again – if only we had more resources and time it would be the best game ever. I spent a few weeks going through the ideas I'd had and, spoiler alert, they weren't very good," she concluded.

"It was a bit of a moral hit, but the good news was I'd cleared out my head and I now had space to be inspired by the world around me. Every few weeks I have bit of a housecleaning run in my head – clean out space.

"Reflect on your work. I write a blog post about each game – kind if a post mortem. I've really enjoyed that because, after a while you start to see recurring problems with design and time management. We are part of a very creative industry, and we're effected by what's going on around us.

"Did it help? I'd have to say yes, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking about it."