More months have flown by in what seems like an instance and sometimes life can be a total rollercoaster of events and emotions. Last week I fell sick and it knocked me out completely. Mostly I didn’t even think about the game and it was just an excruciating agony with a high fever. I’m doing a bit better now and although I’m still not completely recovered, I got bored of just laying around and decided to get back on the horse. Now I apologize if the last few weeks have cause this article to be a bit more bitter than usual, but I hope you’ll forgive me that I’m not perfect.
Meanwhile the game has already reached and passed 3000 followers on GameJolt. While it’s amazing and I love you all for it, it’s also quite frightening, considering the amount of pressure this puts me under to make a good game, even more so when I’m making this game alone with almost no previous experience making games. Still, I appreciate the support. I really do.
Anyone who’s been trying to keep an eye on the game knows that I’ve not been good at communicating the progress. I’m an introvertive person and talking definitely does not come naturally to me. And maybe I’ve just been looking for excuses, but more often than not, the things I’ve been adding to the game would seem boring (although important for the game) from a consumer point of view. Things like writing code for the AI, buttons, bugfixes, etc., most of which provide no new visuals that I could share in a form of a screenshot or a gif or even a good story. And even though there’s probably people who would gladly even read about that, if the choice comes down to either writing about the game or actually making the game, the latter usually wins in my case.
So the lack of articles here does not mean that I’m not working on the game relentlessly. I always do try to answer most of the questions that I get though.
The one question that I get asked the most by far is “When is it going to be done?”. I’ve thrown around vague dates from time to time, but my illness in the last few weeks is a good example why I don’t feel comfortable doing it. I’m a solo developer, so that means when I’m not working on the game, nobody is and something like a simple break is going to throw the whole schedule out of the window. There’s also a lot of other factors in play here like the budget (I’ve been self-funding everything). So the only truly honest answer I can give is that I’ll do the best I can and it’s done when it’s done. Also from now on I will just refer anyone asking it to this article.
Another question I get a lot is “Is the game going to be free?”. The most probable answer to that is no, although there will be an alpha period when the everyone can download and play the unfinished version for free, no strings attached. During that time I’m also gonna try to get through Steam Greenlight. As there are no quarantees, I have not exactly decided how to proceeed after that, but as long as the full version of the game is as fully featured as I have envisioned, I think it’ll be commercial quality.
Budget has been something I’ve been struggling with since I started with since the start. Contrary to a popular belief, I do keep myself up to date what going on in the market and obviously I’ve at least heard about Kickstarters, Early Accesses, donations and all that other popular stuff. That doesn’t mean that I’m comfortable going down any of those roads quite yet. The thought of taking someone’s money purely on a promise scares me and somehow just feels wrong. I’m more of a fan of the traditional models - exchange a fixed sum of money for a finished product. So instead my way of raising money has been doing freelance work. Mostly web development, because it’s an area I know well. Although the freelance work is unstable and the money runs out fast whenever I stop working and it further delays the work on the game, it’s still a good source of income, because it comes with no additional baggage. I’m free to use that money however I see fit and I don’t owe anyone anything. And that’s a bit comforting. On the other hand, it’s definitely not enough money to hire someone to help with the game either.
I would have never even thought about doing it out of my own initiative, but I’ve been very lucky pretty much since I first announced the game, since I’ve also had some interest from publishers and investors. From one hand, going with a publisher would be a bit easier for me to digest than taking money upfront from random strangers. At least there would be less effected parties when something goes wrong (you know, hope for the best, expect the worst). But I’ve yet to get an offer from a publisher that would actually be benefitial to me, instead of them trying to take advantage of the newbie developer. So it’s not off the table that I’ll come to an agreement with some company in the future, but I’m not counting on it. Either way, this has also been one of the reasons why I don’t like making promises about the game, because a publisher would have it’s own ideas how things should be done.
I’ve been giving more and more testers access to the game lately and I’m glad they were interested in the first place, but it seems that the lack of clear instructions and any form of payment has caused them not to take it too seriously, which is why the higher number of testers has not resulted in more feedback. Thanks to that I’ve thought about not accepting much more testers for now. I somehow need to figure out how to motivate the current bunch first, although I’m not sure how to.
Anyway, to end this all in a more positive note I’ll share some images on how I’ve been making the UI better.
If you have any questions that have not been addressed here or you have any criticism to add, feel free to leave a comment.
Thanks for reading,
Riho
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