A Few Things
September 2nd, 2008
I wanted to mention a few things today:
Cliff Harris (who I wrote about in my last post) wrote an article for Spong about having what it takes to become a successful indie developer:
- The Truth Behind Indie Games (www.spong.com)
It’s an interesting read. I think he comes off a little pessimistic about the industry, but maybe that’s OK, maybe that’s just realistic. I know what I’m getting myself into here. I’ve worked in the games industry for nearly 5 years now, so I know how hard it is to make a game, even when you’ve got a large team of people working on it. I also knew all the different roles I would have to play when I set out to do this on my own. So I think I have what it takes to be successful…provided I can get a game done at some point.
I spent this morning doing my bookkeeping for August. I’ve created a giant spreadsheet to track business expenses and income (which I’ll hopefully have someday) and today I went through all my receipts and entered them in. I know this sounds boring, but I love spreadsheets. I’ve always loved numbers. When I was a kid I loved collecting baseball cards mostly so I could study the stats on the back and memorize the data. It’s probably a good thing I became a programmer. I found it funny that I was doing that this morning and then read Cliff’s article about the need to wear many hats when running your own company.
I also briefly wanted to mention this:
- Ottawa Slashes Grants for New Media (www.theglobeandmail.com)
The Canadian Governement will be ceasing its funding for the Canada New Media Fund via Telefilm. The fund allocates $14.5M a year to help develop products in the new media space (i.e. video games, interactive media, internet media). The government has just said it won’t renew its funding as of March 31st, 2009, the start of their fiscal year. The government has said that it is no longer funding these “inefficient” programs and that some may be replaced. However, they haven’t said whether this fund will be replaced with something new or better. At this point, those of us in the “new media” industry need to let the government know that this kind of funding is important for the development of this kind of culture in Canada. I’m trying to find more information on who we need to write to and I’ll post more information once I have it available.
Finally, an update on the prototype. I’ve spent quite a while playing what I have done so far, and I’ll be honest: I’m not entirely happy with it. I still think the idea is solid, but I don’t think the method of play I’ve chosen is going to work. I was trying to do something new with the gameplay that I thought would lend itself well to the game concept, but it’s not really working out.
The problem is this: the game falls into the same pattern every time I play it. In a puzzle game it’s obvious that the game is going to play in a similar way each time, but you need enough variation in the starting conditions that it feels new every time. The problem I’m having is that the game feels the same every time I play it. I had a few friends over to my place on the weekend, and while I was hesitant about showing the prototype in it’s currently (very) ugly aesthetic state, I wanted to watch how they played it. What I found what that they all ended up playing it the same way. While it’s fun for the first two or three times you play the game, after the fourth of fifth time, you realise there’s nothing new to it. At that point, the game becomes boring.
So, like I said, I think that the core game mechanic is good, but the gameplay method needs to change. I’ve got a few ideas I want to try out, but they’re going to involve some pretty major overhauls of the prototype. I’ve banched off the current version in my source control system so that I’ll have it for reference. But now it’s time to scrap a bunch of the code and start reworking the structure of the game. Hooray for prototyping!
Owen