These last 2 weeks have been a large detour, I don't think I got anything finished that I wanted to. I've also had the flu for a week, so not much got done over Christmas. However, I got some great design suggestions from an artist friend (Thanks Peter) . I'll probably do a before/after analysis on where I went wrong on design next week!!
Things I have learned:
- Design is important. My friend gave me tons of design ideas that seem obvious now, but I completely missed, such as:
Show what is unlockable so that the player knows what to aim for (the game currently only shows a new skin once you've unlocked it)
Make the play button more obvious and bigger than the other buttons (like settings)
Show the player what the end goal is. I focused so much on the main game loop that I had forgotten to show the player why the hell they are playing the main game loop.
Keep consistent on the art style of the game. I need to fix some buttons so that they retain the same style as the rest of the art for the game.
Making promotional trailers sucks, I dislike it a lot. I don't know what I'm doing, and there's very few newbie-friendly trailer making programs that exist on Linux/PC. I'm much better at programming, so I ended up just coding the behavior I wanted to show off into my game (such as making a hand follow my mouse), then I did a screen recording of that. I'm not done yet, but I think I have all the clips I need recorded.
Steemit can be rewarding! I haven't bought any steem, but my last post made a little money! I got some help from a whale or two, but it's amazing to think that I was noticed enough to get a bunch of upvotes! I started this blog to document the trek to releasing my first game. I couldn't find anyone else who documented that journey and I know there's lots to learn that the gamedev veterans would forget to teach the newbies.
The expression "Fake it till you make it" is seemingly true! I don't have high hopes for the success of my game, after all, I'm new at this. But I really have no idea what I'm doing, I'm probably making tons of mistakes that I'll learn from on game release #2. Yet I'm closer than ever to releasing this thing!
Todos:
- Implement some design suggestions.
- Get better acquainted with the analytics I'm using
- Get twitter and facebook group updated with the game description text and images
- Generate a bunch of levels for the game (I am about 30% done this, just requires leaving my computer on for a few days)
- Figure out good keywords for the play store.
- Investigate Imgur - apparently it's a good way to make waves. I will put some promo images on there, as well as my gif.
- Incorporate
Last Time's Goals:
- Acquire 5 new followers [2/5 Failure]
- Start on making a trailer [Failure, work in progress]
- Get analytics working [Failure- I'm starting to regret choosing flurry, for some reason some analytics requests are ignored]
- Make some animated GIFs to post about my game. [Fail]
Next Week's Goals:
- Implement some of the design suggestions I got over Christmas.
- Really brainstorm for keywords
- Post at least once on twitter, facebook, and imgur.
- 10 new followers (on any social media)