Day 161: Today, I’m cheating a bit. It’s not really a day. It’s more of a collection of stuff done sporadically. I’m still going all out on C++, so I’m not out of hiatus yet. But I still had to go to the conference in Lyon, and show the game. This naturally led to having some work done. Hence today’s entry.

Daily interesting stuff: (not much just this article I was just reading)

• Article about how we only hear about the person in indie game dev. That’s because nobody cares about failures and they don’t get invited to conferences.

Tasks done:

• Implemented an email subscription. Okay let’s put things in order. Last friday, the day before the expo, I thought that it was stupid to just show the game and not get anything (except of course feedbacks). And so I did a small menu where people could put their email address to be notified when the final version of the game will be out. It automatically pops up when you die for the first time. It’s not the best code I ever wrote but it’s rather self contained and gets the job done. When I did this feature, I thought that I shouldn’t ask for the email more than once. But it turned out to be a bad decision. Like when people get a game from an existing save, or when they don’t want to give it the first time but might want it the second.

• Had an interview with Ubisoft. It was the third interview. This time I talked with a lead gameplay programmer, from a totally different studio. It was really a good interview. No “whiteboard” tricky bullshit. Just an honest down to earth talk. We talked about my projects, methods I implemented to solve AI problems, different teams roles and how much I liked them, and other stuff like that. I was really stressed about it, but went really well all things considered. Oh, but I still don’t think I’ll get the job, I’m honestly surprised to still be around on this stage of the recruitment process. I should have an answer by friday. So more news then.

• Went to that conference, I’m talking about for days. It was stressful, tiring, and complicated. I almost didn’t eat anything during these two days, only two packs of biscuits. Upon arrival at the conf, there was no table, no chairs, and no electric plugs for the PCs. It was a big mess. But we managed to find solutions, and the booth was set up on time. But I gotta say that waking at 4 am and take one train, two buses, and three tramways, all that with all my gear, wasn’t the most pleasing experience. Okay, now that I did all this grumpy ranting, let’s get to the good things. It was amazing to see people play the game and have fun. I had a lot of good feedbacks, the adaptive difficulty enabled everyone to play. There wasn’t many bugs. Oh and a lot of kids played. Even kids around 6 managed to have a lot of fun. That was so cool to watch! So in summary exhausting, but rewarding.

• Uploaded the demo build to itch. I didn’t want people to play the outdated version, so I decided to upload the build I had with me. I did that from the wifi in the air bnb on Saturday night. I also enabled the optional payments. No one bought it yet, but I got a few downloads. I just regret not removing the email asking. Because, you see, it just saves the email in a local text file. So people might think I’ll get their address mail while it will just sit around on their computer…