dislekcia
This is the part that nobody writes home about.
I just looked at the website (due to the scary amount of traffic we’ve been getting recently – mostly thanks to a mention from Team Meat, who have totally owned the SMM, obviously) and had a minor crisis. This isn’t what the mouthpiece of an interesting indie dev should look like! It’s all boring and stuff! Where are the entertaining screeds about beards or the witty Youtube videos of us being ironic?
I think as an indie you almost feel like you have to be constantly entertaining in order to keep people interested: You get more attention than you’re used to and all of a sudden you’re a proverbial dancing monkey… Or you feel you should be. Which is what makes the reality of getting up every day, coding, forgetting to eat and then going back to sleep feel completely boring by comparison.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the heck out of working on DD full time personally, but there are a grand total of three people who get excited by the neat little event-driven system that DD now runs off. And I’ve told all of them about it already. Multiple times.
My dad called the other day. He always asks how it’s going, being interested in his son’s start-up company and all, but I feel like I don’t have anything to tell him. To tell anyone, really. I keep joking that this is the part that will be left out of the postmortem: We’re doing the noses to the grindstone stuff that needs to happen in the early phases of a game. There are no showstopping bugs or major problems that need to be dealt with, no scary deadlines pushing people to forgo sleep or pull their hair out. We’re just… Working. Every day. Making things a little better in small increments, just like everyone else that’s trying to do something cool that they believe in.
Right now we’re pushing to get the next freeware version out so that we can submit it to the PAX 10 by the 15th (so I guess this is a stealth announcement that the new version of DD will be coming next week, +10 points and an achievement popup for finding it) and designing what the Kingdom gameplay will be like.
And, y’know, worrying that we’re not interesting enough…
June 9th, 2010 at 2:44 am
I bet you’d be surprised by the number of people who find the nuts and bolts type details interesting and/or useful, especially people with aspirations of creating their own projects.
June 10th, 2010 at 1:26 am
I’ll try to remember that for future blog posts 🙂 Maybe we’re not that boring after all…
June 11th, 2010 at 12:13 am
1.- You heard of Unity Web Player and the future all-new Chrome Application SHop rite?
2.- Ninjaport of free version for Korean Konsoles like Gp2x/Wiz/Dingoo would be kool. They work on SDL mosly, just in case…
June 11th, 2010 at 1:20 am
pakoito: Yup, that’s one of the reasons we picked Unity for the full version. I’d love to have the game running on something like the Gp2x (man I loved that thing) but the freeware is built in Game Maker, so porting it would be a ton of work. I haven’t seen a stable GM framework for anything portable yet 🙁
June 29th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
dislekcia – are you doing the coding for DD in Unity or do you have another team member doing this?
(If yes) How have you found the transition from GM to Unity?
June 29th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
spot: We’re all coding in Unity at the moment. The transition has meant we can build the game on a more robust and extensible event-driven framework, which will make changes to gameplay much faster in future. I haven’t had many problems, but I reckon you’re asking from the perspective of GM being the first environment you’re used to? We’re coming at this as experienced coders, so it’s more a question of “Ok, how does Unity do X” because we already know what we need…
For someone coming to Unity after learning their way in GM, I’d say it’s a step up in possible complexity, but not an overwhelming one. Do the tutorials, getting to grips with the systems Unity offers isn’t that different to how you need to think in order to structure a solution in GM. Unity’s just got a much better code editing solution – can’t go wrong with Visual Studio 😉
June 30th, 2010 at 2:04 am
Thanks for the info!!