Welcome

Welcome to SdgGames!

Hello! My name is Matthew, and I have a slightly crazy vision for a games studio.

A lot of people out there focus on making games. Some (usually larger) studios focus on making money through games. I am designing a studio around the sole goal of making a difference through games.

I know, that sounds cheesy. But I’m doing my best to ensure that every single detail supports this vision. For that reason, SDG Games (from the Latin “Soli Deo Gloria”) might look a little different from your average Indie Games studio.

First off, I want every game I make to say something important. There are a lot of negative stereotypes around gamers and the games industry, and I want to meet them head-on. I would rather create a game that changes a single person’s life than create a game that sells a million copies (although, I wouldn’t mind if I can do both!)
Second, my games are always Free or PWYW (pay what you want) so everyone can afford to play. Any proceeds I do make will be directly reinvested into charities I believe in or reinvested into the gaming community. I don’t need the money; I already have a day job.
Finally, my games are always Open Sourced, so anyone can contribute. I have a lot of ideas for games that I am, frankly, incapable of making by myself, and I hope that others will get excited and join the cause over time.

I started small and am taking on projects that are at my current skill level. Currently, I am producing Survive The Maze, my second game so far. You can play the latest release of my games below, or read my latest dev (b)log. I publish something new every two weeks, so keep an eye out!

I’m glad that you’re here! You can play my game below.

Play Atonement

Atonement is my first complete game so far. As far as I am aware, this is the first theological exploration game to feature…

About Survive The Maze

Survive The Maze is a head-to-head strategy arcade game drawing inspiration from the ancient myth of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It is also…

Latest Dev-(b)log:

Hey friends, it’s time for another update on my game dev adventure. I didn’t complete an entire game this week, but I did make something that’s still pretty cool (I think). It’s not a game this time, it’s a foundation that I can begin building off of in the next few weeks. For anyone who missed my first update, I recently completed a small game in the Godot engine. I decided that re-building my first game in this engine would actually be easier than fixing the bugs in Unity, so I’ve been on a two-week exploration through some of the more advanced concepts that I would need in order to make this change.

I finished two major things, and ended up with working demos for both. This is a screenshot of my mod loader system. This enables me to easily separate my game into multiple files, and makes it trivially easy for anyone else to contribute if they want. The demo project is just tic-tac-toe, but there are actually three different “skins” for that game that can be loaded from their own texture packs while the game is running. I will be using this tool extensively for Survive the Maze (and future projects), and I am incredibly pleased with how easy it was to implement in Godot. When I did the same in Unity, it required an external library containing around 10 thousand lines of code! This was built directly in to the engine, and I only had to write a couple hundred lines of code in two files. Super nice!

My second major win was the build system. Again, not a lot to look at, but I now have a system that will automatically build and test my games for me. No manual input required! Every single change I make will be tested, and if anything goes wrong, I’ll get a warning right away. This takes a ton of busy work out of my schedule and makes it way easier for me to focus on the real challenge: making great games. For anyone who is technically minded, this project is fully open-source, and you are definitely welcome to take a look around and let me know what you think! (Source code here) I will have a game (or at least some part of a game) built on top of this foundation next time. As always, thank you for being a part of this adventure!