Day 77: Today it’s Monday. I spent the weekend on Factorio. That game is really awesome. I planned to not play it until the 1.0 version. But I just couldn’t resist. It’s incredible on time flies when you play that game. I even forgot to eat. Oh and since this afternoon I have a headache. It’s annoying. I hope it’ll disappear soon.

Daily interesting links: I have a lot of interesting links today. Because I spent some time looking at indie game publishers.

• Reddit post about piracy of videos games. I thought this kind of subject might make some noise. But it was really soft. Three or four long comments all saying pretty much the same thing.

• Marketing monday on reddit. Didn’t read all. Sometimes there’s usefull advices there.

• Reddit post. Again some “How to get into making games?” question. I guess I read those to reassure myself. And the only three comment on this really made me feel good. Because it was “no matter what you use, just make game to prove you can make games”. Which is what I’m doing, and hoping that it’ll work.

• Reddit post. A simple “how to do achievements” question. What’s surprising is that there’s a LOT of responses. All of them pretty much say to use the observer pattern and/or events. But it doesn’t prevent people from posting slightly different sentences and even pseudo code.

• French article about getting a job in video games. It’s really long but it’s also quite complete. From CV to portfolios without forgetting cover letters and emails.

• http://indiegamedevelopers.org/. Site for the numerous things of this group. I heard about it through reddit that linked to the facebook page, that in turned linked to the website. I requested to join the facebook group.

• Article about indie game publishers. It paints a pretty large picture of the different roles indie publishers fulfill nowadays. I started by thinking on how I could recruit an artist for my game. Then I looked at reddit gamedev classified which is for recruiting. Then I realized I would fit in the “hobby” category. Since I didn’t like that, I looked at publisher. Because having one would give me either money to pay an artist or an argument for a revenue share recruitment. And of course it’ll be an invaluable help on marketing.

• How to find the right publisher for you. What was cool about this article is that it’s a summary of what indie publishers said. Even if sometimes it was confusing of who said what.

• Advice on how to pitch your game to a publisher (or anyone). The article was informative and well written.

Tasks done:

• Did some research on publishers (as you may have noticed). I’m definitely going to email some once I reach alpha. Without one I’m not sure I can even pass successfully through greenlight. I’m confident I can make a make. But I really can’t rely on my PR skills. I was never able to federate people around anything I do. Even finding teams at jams/projects was hard. Knowing that I count on someone else to do that would be a huge relief. I don’t really care if they take a cut of the profits since, as I’m not expecting any. I’m making this game to get better at making games (and get a job). But if I have a publisher I’ll be in a much better position to find a graphist. And that would be a HUGE plus for the game.

• Planned the sprint. It’s the “Upgrade sprint” and it’ll last until friday. I’m trying to go back to smaller sprints. Big one doesn’t seems to do me well. Planning it was actually simple. But I took this as an occasion to check on my global planning and finances. The later is good, my expenses are smaller than what I expected. And in the same time the stock I have from my previous job had a big raise. With the former however. It definitely took more time to get where I am than I planned. But since I added extra time just in case of that, I should be able to make it in time for the alpha deadline.

• Started working on the upgrades. As always, the problem is not to find a solution, but to find a good one. I layed down on my bed and reviewed all the ideas I had by “talking” to myself. It worked well. I usually do this while looking at the code I already have. But debating about higher level concepts like this really helped me speed things up. In the end I think I going to have a BaseUpgrade class. That includes the basic informations needed (title, description, price, etc.) and abstract equip/unequip methods. Then I have different upgrades classes that inherits those. Where it gets interesting is that I’ll also have a Unity prefab by upgrade. And it would be instantiated as a child of the item in the shop. That way if I need to customize the object more, I can. Where I’m not sure at all is for the persistent data. Because I need to know which upgrades has been bought how many times, and stuff like that. I already have a save file. So I’ll do what I already for the ships stock. I have a list of all the ships in the game data. And a list in the save data, the indexes of that list correspond to the ships with the same index in the game data list. I’m not a fan of this, because it’s implicit complexity. But it works well