Archive for January, 2009
Breaking my Own Rules
Monday, January 19th, 2009
Back at the end of November I posted about some new rules I had made for my work-life. Basically, I had said that I wasn’t going to do work, or read work emails after 7:00 PM each night. I had also decided that I wasn’t going to work on weekends. All of that went out the window last week.
As I get closer to submission I’m working more and more. Last week I did several nights of working late and I worked a half day on Saturday, and a few hours on Sunday. I’m already paying for it. I haven’t been sleeping well again. The problem is that when I work late, I can’t stop thinking about work, even when I’m supposed to be sleeping. I end up lying awake at night going over things in my head instead of falling asleep. So I’m not really sure what to do. On the one hand, I need to be putting in this extra time right now, but on the other hand, I do like to get some sleep.
The good news is that by working a bit on the weekend I was able to wrap up the Timed Mode for the game. I managed to put in a bunch of new animations including: a countdown animation when you start a timed game, some beeping sounds when your time’s running out (that get more frantic as you get closer to “time’s up”), and a new Game Over animation that differentiates between losing because there were no more moves and because you ran out of time.
I’m quite pleased with how the Timed Mode turned out and I’m also pleased with how long it took to implement it. It took about 3.5 full days of coding to get it all in and working, with all the new animations, UI, etc.
Yesterday I started planning out the 2-Player mode that I want to add this week. The biggest problem I’m running into is the screen layout. The screen is pretty tight in single-player modes for displaying critical information, but now I need to display info for 2 players. So yesterday I spent a few hours mucking around in image editing software playing with the layout. I think I’ve got something that should work. Now I’ve just got to build it and see.
I’ve given myself until the end of the week (i.e. Sunday) to implement this new mode. That’s about as long as I can afford to take and not risk delaying the project significantly. It feels like I should be able to do it. Here’s hoping I’m right.
Owen
Who Knew?
Friday, January 16th, 2009
Who knew the marketing side of things would be so difficult? That was said, tongue firmly in cheek, by the way. I knew this part of the game cycle would probably be the most challenging to me, but I’m also finding it quite exciting.
Today I wanted to share some data on what getting that announcement in FingerGaming did for the site and the trailer video:
In the day and a half since the Dapple announcement went up on FingerGaming, I have received 19 visits to the site directly from that story and approx 80 views of the trailer on YouTube. Clearly these numbers aren’t mind-blowing, but that’s still at least 20 people who now know about my game who didn’t before. Not only that, but 20 people who were interested enough in what they saw to click through to my site.
It’s hard to say how many people read the post on FG, as I don’t know what their site stats are like. I think the most important thing at this point is that I’m getting the Dapple name out there. Hopefully it will be enough to spark recognition in people’s minds when they read a review of the game when it launches.
I think the biggest take-away from this is that getting the word out about the game is going to be challenging.
In other PR news, I did an interview with a newspaper yesterday about Streaming Colour and Dapple. It was the first interview I’ve done with the press, so I was a little nervous. I hope I didn’t say anything stupid. I’m not sure if it will actually get published, but if it does, I’ll try to find a link to it.
As for Dapple, I got most of the new Timed Mode fully implemented by the end of yesterday. I need to put in some bells and whistles (some SFX and animations need to be added), but functionality-wise and UI-wise, it’s done.
It was in building this mode that I finally appreciated the extra effort I had put into building out a UI Framework earlier in the project; it made building the new menus so much easier. It also made me glad that I’d made my game logic class API’s extensible, as it made it much easier to change some of the core behaviour of the game without touching too many things. Hooray for the Model-View-Controller pattern!
Today I’m going to add those SFX and animations and hopefully have time to get started on the final game mode of the project.
Owen
First Official Press!
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Looks like some of the press release work I’ve done has already paid off. FingerGaming was nice enough to post about Dapple today:
- Streaming Colour Announces iPhone Debut Dapple (www.fingergaming.com)
Hooray!
Owen
Press Releases and Maximum Risk Factor
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
I spent all morning sending out press releases now that I’ve got the trailer up for Dapple. This time I drew up a proper press release (all the correct formatting, etc) and had several people who know about this kind of thing read it over. I also sent personalized emails to each place I sent it to. I figured I had a better chance of someone reading it if I wrote each person individually. It was a lot more work doing it this way, but hopefully it’ll be worth it.
It’s funny, I posted in my look back on 2008 note that I had learned that you need to find people to do the stuff you’re not very good at. I’m new to all this PR/marketing stuff, so maybe I should be taking my own advice. The problem is, I just don’t have money left in the budget to hire a PR firm to handle this for me. Maybe it’s something I can look into once I’ve sold a few copies of the game, but for now, I’m actually kind of enjoying learning how to do this.
As for the reference to “maximum risk factor” in the subject, that’s with regard to what I started coding yesterday. Right now Dapple contains one game mode that is very well fleshed out. It’s what I’ve been working on the whole time. The plan was always to get that main game mode to a level of polish that I could ship it on its own, then try to add a few more game modes before ship. I honestly don’t think I thought I’d get to the other game modes. But here I am. And yesterday I started coding up the second game mode.
This is turning out to be easier than I had thought, mostly because I designed the code and API’s around being able to handle multiple game modes. The core logic is all the same, it’s just how the player interacts with it that changes. For instance, the base game mode I’ve already implemented (Classic Mode) is turn-based. There’s no rush to play, you can take your time thinking out your moves (think Hexic). What I started implementing yesterday is a new Timed Mode. This has the same gameplay, except now you’re playing against the clock. The clock is always ticking down and you need to make matches to bump it back up.
Changing the gameplay turned out to be fairly easy, and it turns out that the most work comes on the UI side of things. It means some new menus, some new popups, and storing new high scores in the player save data (as well as modifying the high score screen to show a list for each game mode).
I was laughing about this last night, because when I worked for larger companies it used to drive me crazy when game designers would ask for major feature implementations a month before shipping. I guess I finally understand that a little better now.
Ultimately, I think having more than one game mode will really help to convince people that it’s worth the cost of buying the game. I’m hoping to wrap up Timed Mode in the next day or two and then I’m going to see how much work is involved in putting a 2-player local play version of the game in. That one makes me a bit more nervous as it will mean some lower level game logic changes, but it feels like I can do it. Wish me luck!
Owen
Newgameitis
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
First of all: I mailed my forms to the US today (turns out they go to Texas, not California, like I had previously thought). I sent them ExpressPost to get them there as fast as I could, which turned out to be quite expensive. Oh well, if it lets me release my game on time, it’s worth it.
Today I’m suffering badly from “Newgameitis”. I’ve been noodling around with a game concept for my next game for once I finish Dapple. I’ve been writing down notes as I think of things and I’ve been deliberately avoiding writing any code; I need to concentrate on finishing Dapple right now. However, today it’s all I can think about. I’m trying to write Dapple code, but I keep switching over to my notes document to jot down little ideas. I don’t want to lose these ideas, but I need to concentrate on Dapple too.
I think this is one of the biggest challenges you face as an indie developer working (basically) alone: there’s no boss to tell you to get back on track or check up on your task status. It requires a lot of discipline, which I usually don’t have a problem with. The toughest part making a game is actually finishing it. I’m at a part of the project that doesn’t involve a lot of giant steps forward; it’s mostly hard work to fix bugs and polish things up. I need to keep that part of my brain that’s screaming, “Hey! Let’s work on this new idea, it’s be way more fun!” in check.
Owen