Since I got approved @ Greenlight publishing, I’ve been working on my game most of my spare time.
Right now, the new features will be:
So, the development of blades of the righteous has come to an end some time ago, I’ve stopped actively advertising now and I thought that writing up an overall experience as well as giving more statistics about it could help others in their way of development.
I’ve put the game on Steam Greenlight at around October 15th. Let’s review the visit/vote graph first.
There are two peaks in visits/votes. Unsurprisingly, I got the highest peaks of attention when publishing info about my game. At first, Facebook greatly helped, netting me around 200 “yes” votes. I’ve posted that MY game is being on Greenlight, and then my supportive friends did the rest, sharing the post and inviting other people to vote.
The second peak is when I got my game sold in a bundle on Groupees.com
The current game status is the following:
There was around 4000 bundle copies sold, my game got 800 yes-votes on Greenlight for that. 1:5 conversion, much higher than I’ve expected. What I’ve learned from this:
I’ve tried developing some games before, but I could never get them to an end. This time, it has been a bit different.
What made the difference:
What went wrong:
It happens that I’ve done some final tweaking to the game and put it on itch.io store: http://comrad-gremlin.itch.io/blades-of-the-righteous
I don’t feel that it turned out as I have imagined it. Still, I am proud that I got it this far and this has been an amazing experience. The stuff to do next time:
I will continue fixing critical bugs (if such will be fond) and adjust the game in case I get a lot of feedback.
Here’s the video of level 1 play-through:
I’ve been gradually tweaking the game to become more playable. I feel that there’s still a huge way to go, but I have some progress:
The game got included into Groupees.com bundle. It is observable here: https://groupees.com/bagb14
Some conclusions so far:
I’m at the beginning of my way, but the last month has been very eventful.
Apart from various UI adjustments and newly added units (mage, cyclops, rogue, orc archer), I’ve decided to work on game publicity:
I’ve submitted my game to Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=326962855
Also, I’ve made a game page here, http://vladimirslav.com/blades-of-the-righteous/
I’ll try to make a more detailed summary as soon as there’s something more to add.
When I was younger, working on hobby projects has been a huge problem: laziness combined with loss of enthusiasm both took their toll on my results. Now, however, while being far from perfection, I have found some personal techniques that help me to preserve enthusiasm and allow me to persist through the whole process while managing it more effectively. At one point I have been working 50h/week and studying about 30h and still found four or five hours during the week for my programming hobbies. Here are some technical tools and methods I’m using to keep developing:
This has to be the first point. Based on that, if you cannot build a prototype in 2 week spare time and see how it plays – don’t bother. It would suck to develop the prototype for 2 months during the weekends and after-work hours and then see that it is completely unplayable.
When you get an awesome idea, you feel excited. You see the final product and imagine how great it is going to be. Then, as you start developing, you notice that your “honeymoon phase” has passed, you’re no longer in love with the game you are making and you are now irritated by the time it will take to develop. The image of the final version you had in the beginning now gets blurry: you’ve spent time, you somehow get the idea what do you want to see, but now you feel the lack of enthusiasm to do something: you just feel the weight of responsibility and necessary man-hours required to complete the game. You’re (hopefully) halfway through, but you have no idea how to finish the other half, because you’re feeling so lazy that you’d rather watch a turtle race than write a new code lines.
Here’s what you need to do: as soon as you have the initial vision of the game, start writing down issues, split it into smaller sub-tasks. For example, when I’ve started developing my Blades of the Righteous game, I’ve began using bitbucket’s built-in issue tracker when I had an awesome idea of a feature. That way I’ve made lots of small issues like “Check distance when attacking”, “Add Item System”, “Allow player to inspect objects on game map”. You get the idea. My enthusiasm is almost gone now, but the open tracker issues are what keeps me going: the goal (to publish the game) remains, and I know exactly what I have to do to get to it. Speaking about bitbucket:
If you are a professional software engineer, you’re probably already doing it. It is very important to do so for your hobby projects: not only it allows you to make backups of your projects, enforcing additional level of data safety, it also allows you to revert unnecessary changes / mistakes and see the code changes from the previous versions which saves you time. Speaking about the previous versions: if I ever get discouraged, I just go to my repository logs and see my progress.
Another important thing regarding logs: use meaningful commit messages. I’m pretty sure you won’t remember what did you mean with “Fixed a bug” message. Compare it with “Fixed a bug in combat when attack damaged the friendly unit.” It’s also going to make it easier for you to search for the necessary commit should something go wrong with your new changes.
“It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry.
I’m sure your game will be cooler with all those 200 droppable items. But do you really need them? Unless you are A+ developer working 60+ hours a week on your dream game, try to reduce the content to a minimum. I’m not saying “remove everything”, I’m saying “remove everything that is not of the essence.” Don’t give up on things that you think will be great, but choose your battles carefully.
More than that: don’t bother to make all the features at once. Try to get your game going as soon as possible and then give it to your friends. They will provide you with feedback. Listen to it.
This is all I wanted to tell. Don’t give up on your aspirations: even if in the end you are the only one who plays the game you made, that still means that there IS a game to play. Good luck!
I’ve hit another milestone with my game. Summer is coming to an end, and I wanted to sum up things that have been done since the previous post:
Overally, I’d say that the engine is mostly complete, the effort should be put into content now (adding new units, making a campaign/custom map system), etc.
Credits:
So, I got some spare time during the summer break, therefore I’ve decided to start working on my game. It’s a strategy/rpg game with “global map” where your hero walks around and picks battles. There will be 1+ dark portals on every global map, which spawn enemies. If too many enemies were spawned, the game is lost. The objective is to destroy the portal at the corner of the map.
Game Screenshots from initial development phase:
Language: C++. I’m making the engine open-source. Not sure if it will be useful for any of you, since it’s just basically a one more wrapper around SDL, but it speeds up my development. Here’s the link on github, if anyone’s interested: https://github.com/vladimirslav/gameengine
Right now I’m mostly using freely-available art:
Font: Banana Brick, by artmaker, http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/banana-brick
Font: Averia, by Dan Sayers, http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/gen-light
Small unit icons in battle: http://7soul1.deviantart.com/
Map chars: http://opengameart.org/content/four-characters-my-lpc-entries
When programming my game, I have encountered a following problem and had a bit of a struggle with it:
There are whole 2d tilesheets, available on the internet, the good example is the free tilesheet collection, kindly published by hyptosis:
http://hyptosis.newgrounds.com/news/post/793230
However, what if I want to get the separate tiles from them? (I.e, for my map editor, which takes single tiles). The need to split the whole tilesheet into single tiles arises.
The solution is quite simple:
convert -crop 32x32 source.png tile%d.pngVoila. You have your tiles split into separate images. Now you can separate your spritesheets into smaller frames in the same way.
I did not like to overanalyze literature / works of art when I have been studying in highschool. However, with time, I’ve come to perceive all the possible meanings (even if the author of the work did not mean it), as the greatest personal gift to the reader / viewer / listener. Having that in mind, while watching “Adventure Time” series some time ago, this particular fragment got my attention:
The monologue goes like:
This particular fragment speaks to me in an interesting way. My interpretation is the following:
I found this fragment surprisingly deep for a cartoon that is shown to kids. Anyway, maybe it’s just me, but I really loved the show (even though the first season was somewhat mediocre). Thanks for reading.