The genesis of the tradition

This is the first post of a series I'm writing about the various games I've made for my 2 brothers' birthdays. Starting in 2017, I thought it'd be fun to try and make a hobby game to give to one of my brother's for their birthday in tandem with whatever present I had picked out for them. I, and the rest of the family, seemed to get a big enough kick out of it that I proceeded to do it for my other brother's birthday a couple months later.

This has ended up with me mentally carving out the few months surrounding their birthdays (thankfully they are just a couple months apart) as my "hackathon" months where I crunch on a new game concept that I can work into a hopefully amusing project to give to them with their actual birthday present. 3 years later I'm now working on my 8th "Birthday Game" and it is really fun being able to look back to see how far they've come!

The general flow of these posts will give some context around when/how the game was given to them and then I will try my best to explain some of the inside jokes around each of them.