- Bruce has delivered some amazing box artwork. Can’t wait to show this off.
- Detecting creatures being squished by the environment is a bug that I thought I had resolved, but reappeared when I started making levels using the ice blocks. I spent all morning with this nightmare and it’s still unresolved…
- Heading out of town this weekend which will include showcasing the game to a new group of friends.
- I think I’ve figured out what the story will be. Until now it’s been pretty vague.
Author: Ian
Slightly Different World
This evening was an IGDA-organized “Meet The Press” event at Google campus in Mountain View, which I attended with a few friends. It was an interesting experience because it showed a completely different side of game development, something I only get a glimpse of every so often. This is the side of game development about market share, numbers, percentages, billions, social, mobile, mid-core. For the most part I’m exposed to the indie, creative, artist, nerdy, emo, poverty-stricken side of game development. It’s good to get things from both sides, but I definitely feel more at home with the indies.
Another Two Weeks, Then Another…
There’s this struggle. On one hand, you want to make the best game you can make. On the other hand, you want to actually finish the game. These are the opposing forces that make the creative process so difficult.
There are lots of indie games where I’m playing and thinking, if only they spent another two weeks, they could have bumped it up from a 3.5 to a 3.75. They stopped when they were in arm’s reach of something really polished. There’s some new stuff there, but it wasn’t given enough iteration. Not enough testing. Six months of work to get where they got, and maybe it would have been twice as good with just another two weeks.
Then again, by releasing the game they are able to start working on the next thing.
The problem is that games always seem to offer the most rewards right at the end of the project. You can finally see how things are working, and you’re making awesome strides every day. Just give it another couple weeks, think of how much better it will be!
Knowing how long to spend on the project is one of the most difficult parts of game development for me. I wish I had a formula, or some sort of answer, but I just don’t. There’s something to be said for spending another two weeks, and there’s something to be said for just releasing it even though two more weeks would have improved it.
Owlboy
The production value here is just spectacular. Thanks to Freakin’ Indies for pointing me here.
I really hope this is a smash hit for D-Pad Studio, because the amount of work that went into these sprites and backgrounds is mind-blowing. This really is picking up where the SNES and Neo-Geo left off.