The Honest Dan Back Catalogue

The Games section of the website is now up to date!

Documenting your history of games is something I’d highly recommend. Whilst on the surface that may sound highly egotistical.. bare with me!

Game development can be an unrewarding passion at times, with the typical graveyard of abandoned and unfinished games. Documenting, whether it be showcasing your work or writing a post-mortem reflection piece, cements your efforts into history. It doesn’t matter if you couldn’t produce a build, had a bazillion bugs, or couldn’t get the game into a playable state. What matters is the time spent was almost always not wasted. Celebrate it, cement it to history, and look back fondly in years to come.

In the last few years, I developed a habit of recording a Let’s Play video of my game jam entries. This would often be a useful way to share my creation, since its quite a big ask to expect people to download your game and play it (especially when Unreal lacks web builds). That made creating the game pages for recent projects pretty easy. However, it wasn’t so easy to go all the way back to the beginning. I wasn’t recording footage or thinking about the preservation of my creative outlets back then.

The big brain moment to solve the lack of footage of my older games was back in December 2022. I was hosting Honest Jam and fundraising on stream for 9 days. One of the milestone rewards for hitting a fundraising milestone was to “Play the Honest Dan back-catalogue”. Over two evenings, we went through every game I’d ever made! This was super fun, probably more for me than viewers! The trip down memory lane was wonderful, with some viewers also enjoying the nostalgia. Since it was all streamed, I made sure I saved the VODs of the stream so I could one day edit the footage!

It took over a year before I did it, but finally, I went through and cut up the VODs to produce Let’s Play videos of my old games! It was classic Honest Dan lazy editing, meaning – no editing other than finding the start and end point of the content!

So head over to www.honestdan.com/games to check out a brief write up of each of the games I’ve made since starting back in 2017, along with video footage of the game being played. Most games also have a link to the itch page so you can play them for yourself, if you so desire!