11–20 of 34 posts
Congratulations on shipping! We may be distant cousins, because aside from anything that takes longer than a weekend, I can't ship a side project for the life of me. This will hopefully change soon however, as I have been diligently coding a game spending an hour or two almost every morning since September 1st - and it is very very close to completion, and aside from a couple features is completely playable now. So t…
Congratulations on shipping! We may be distant cousins, because aside from anything that takes longer than a weekend, I can't ship a side project for the life of me. This will hopefully change soon however, as I have been diligently coding a game spending an hour or two almost every morning since September 1st - and it is very very close to completion, and aside from a couple features is completely playable now. So t…
I ended up shipping without Game Center integration and added it in the next version a few months later. It can be done!
So, for those who are into this - for somebody with a little experience in C++ and mostly experience in C# and various dynamic languages, what's the shortest distance between "idea" and "game" in terms of tools? Unity?
Congratulations on shipping! We may be distant cousins, because aside from anything that takes longer than a weekend, I can't ship a side project for the life of me. This will hopefully change soon however, as I have been diligently coding a game spending an hour or two almost every morning since September 1st - and it is very very close to completion, and aside from a couple features is completely playable now. So t…
I know what you mean, so don't rule out actually spending 48 hours or a week on a game. Game jams can provide a huge amount of motivation for finishing a game in short time period. The combination of a tight deadline, knowing others are working in parallel, and a guaranteed minimum amount of exposure are highly motivating.
I had a blast with 7drl this year and probably coded more in that week than I ever have in a similar time period.
I'm guilty of nearly everything you listed at the end - on a single project. I've been working on a WWF/Scrabble type game (with some unique gameplay elements) since early 2012 and it continually gets picked up and put down again. I've ended up building a component-based ui engine behind it, keep adding features, try to pick it up without clear goals or tasks in mind and am probably trying to tackle far more than I s…
I threw together a prototype of the basic gameplay in a weekend but to actually ship something you need user accounts, game history, push notifications, error handling, multiple games per user, game creation, a way to get friends into the app to play with you, screenshots, icons, copy, instructions, game win/loss screens, current game state indicators, transitions, a way to quit a game in progress, a way to nudge a dormant opponent, a massaged dictionary, and that's not even getting to the marketing side of things!
Luckily it's almost ready to go... but along with that comes the anxiety that not only do you need to convince someone to play, you also need them to get a friend to install it as well! (unless you want to program a matchmaking process or AI on top of everything else which comes with its own can of worms).
I'm guilty of nearly everything you listed at the end - on a single project. I've been working on a WWF/Scrabble type game (with some unique gameplay elements) since early 2012 and it continually gets picked up and put down again. I've ended up building a component-based ui engine behind it, keep adding features, try to pick it up without clear goals or tasks in mind and am probably trying to tackle far more than I s…
I've been up to something similar for the last year or so. Man is there a lot of complexity in a simple turn-based word game than I ever imagined. I threw together a prototype of the basic gameplay in a weekend but to actually ship something you need user accounts, game history, push notifications, error handling, multiple games per user, game creation, a way to get friends into the app to play with you, screenshots,…
I'm happy to hear I'm not the only one bumping into reality, though it definitely sounds like you're further along than I. I'd love to check it out once you've shipped.
Do you have any stats on the downloads or user engagement? I just released my game two days ago, and here are the live stats: http://slagalica.tv/drones.php Can you compare yours to this? Am I doing any good? Thanks.
I guess no one is interested in real user engagement figures and I should remove the access.
Also as it turns out pixel art is much harder than I thought.
(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kklop.ghos...)
"Most IT projects fail because of scope-creep, bad estimates and being afraid to ship. Single-developer side-projects are no different."
This is dead on. It's too easy to keep adding more stuff once you start to get momentum, and then your project ends up with such a large surface area of features that it becomes difficult to polish and finish. That's where the fear usually sets in.
Some game feedback: I had a lot of fun playing the first few waves, but the more difficult enemies are really hard to deal with since I'm always flying towards them. If I don't start off on the other side of the screen, I usually die as I fly straight towards them.
Again, congrats on being in the app store!