Daily thoughts of an Independent Game Developer
Hi,
Our latest game, Rot Gut, has a fantastic music developed by our very own Lawrence Steele, a.k.a. Satsuma Audio, is a fine mixture of Jazz of 1920-30’s era with retro aspects of chiptune! You can now checkout the music and perhaps buy the music from his bandcamp page. I strongly suggest to check out the music as it’s always on loop as we develop the game 😉
For the past two weeks, we put our game to the wild got several feedbacks, some very eye opening ones that we are analyzing and brainstorming over them in order to make our game better.
It’s still very strange to me how people react to some aspects of the game that seem obvious and apparent to us developers that to the players. I didn’t have such experience with my last title as we were pushed to the crunch that we didn’t put much test on it, no matter how hard I wish we did.
To make things more complicated, our game is like 95% completed and it’s kinda dangerous to add features to it, A) I can ruin it rather than making it better and B) It can easily turn us into feature creeps which this game being indie, will make it just a vague memory so we should be edit and add things consciously without setting foot into depths of feature creep, which there is no way out.
As we are doing the finishing touches, we are getting more and more near to the beta build. We were honored to have our game play tested by some of our friends in person so we could record their plays and find our initial bugs and misdirections. I recorded videos of people’s playing and also their voices and then we sat down and watched how people reacted to several important parts of the game and fond out our strengths and weaknesses.
Along doing those, we are doing finishing touches here and there and I’m reading on the business side of flash games. Even though I’m not doing this for the money, it is nice to get some revenue out of it so I can repay the hard work all members went through and as it’s first time I’m doing business side for a game that I work on, there are lots of new things to learn there.
So we mail the the beta build to the subscribed testers in the following days and afterwards, we will move to selling it.
We were about to release our current game in two days from now, as we planned but after we had a few friends coming over and getting their feedbacks and reactions, we now have to apply those and make few changes here and there, mostly about how to teach the player the mechanics of the game, even though we thought they are somewhat clear enough which we were proven otherwise.
All that being said for game design section, our music is almost finished and we may just need few touches, sound fx is getting there, art is doing it’s final parts and we are testing things for HUD and menu and coding, as you probably guessed, is never ending and I’m constantly trying and fixing and polishing and refactoring.
If I don’t feel anymore burnout of this when we release it, I’m planning to write a postmortem about this game, mostly not about technical side but about managing the project as it is/was not a usual one-man-band kind of indie game and managing all these people, especially with no money up front and with some of them being around the world, was/is the most challenging part for me, same thing that happened for Hasan Kachal project and I’m happy I’ve done that before or else I would not have any idea how to manage this since the people involved in this project are grealy more than what we did with Hasan Kachal.
That’s it for now.
-Aidin
So we’ve been real busy in past two weeks with taking our new game to new directions and shaping it up. I’ve been honored enough to work with some of the most passionate and talented people that I know and hopefully we can deliver a game that you will enjoy playing as well as us do while crafting it.
So can’t reveal anything just now but I should be coming back with more info soon enough.
In the mean time, if you want to test our game, drop me an email and I’ll send you the game when we enter testing.
I’ve been a member of BaziCenter.com (translated as Game Center), which is the biggest language gaming forum in Iran, for past 6 years and now their staff were kind enough to review “Hasan Kachal and Secret of Red Apple” and put it on their front page. The review is kind and they favored and gave it 7/10.
You can read the review here or view the screen shots of it after the jump. Continue reading “Hasan Kachal reviewed on biggest Persian gaming website.”
Staff at Game emaG gaming podcast were kind enough to review our latest game, Hasan Kachal and Secret of The Red Apple on their latest podcast. Even though they were not informed much about problems during the project and game being developed with exactly zero project, they favored the game and recommended it to the listeners. Hope we can make better games in future.
You can download the whole podcast here or just listen to the review section of our game here.
If you haven’t played the game, don’t worry, you can get it here.
After more than 20 years of reading ,and recently watching, reviews of other games, it’s such an awesome feeling to have your game reviewed, especially when it’s a good one!
Our friends at Pejdo Game, reviewed “Hasan Kachal and Secret of The Red Apple” and game it a generous 8/10! The review is in Persian and you can read it here!
In case you haven’t already, you can get the game at this link.
Hi,
I made an installer for Hasan Kachal (using NSIS which is great and I recommend it to you to use on your projects and is built by the great guys at Nullsoft who created the only music player that I use for all my life, Winamp) and it’s ready to download.
It’s a side scrolling platformer with theme of fighting with laziness. There is a timer that is constantly decreasing and you have to gain more time by eating proper apples, just like the Persian story. It’s developed on XNA 3.1 and has 10 unique music tracks each fit to each level theme.
So with no more further blabbering, here is the link: Download Link (52 MiB).
(note: If your Windows version is older than Windows 7, you may need to install this too)
This is probably not end of Hasan Kachal as I have some plans to port it on some platforms.
Hope you enjoy it and please leave any feedback in the comments section.
Hi,
For the past few weeks I was mostly thinking rather than writing code and was about to design a good level architecture to support my needs for 100+ levels and 7+ themes that I have in mind for DKP, which incorporates different level objectives for levels. Think of it like Call of Duty multiplayer modes, you can play the same map with different modes, Team Death Match, Free For All, Capture The Flag, etc, all in one map.
So even though I’m not hundred percent satisfied with what I currently have, I’m not gonna waste spend more time on it and go with the current design and later when I have a good reason other than perfection, will re-design it, but I think it will be possibly for the next installment.
After paving the way, I can now put objectives/themes for my levels and decide on how to manage the level based on the objective. I think in AAA games such as Call of Duty, they have some kind of rule set and each time they macth the latest action to that rule set and decide based upon that, at least that’s how I would implement it.
The beautify of it was when after all this time, when I designed and wrote the level architecture, I did one of themes in about a few minutes!