Monday, May 20, 2013

Still alive and coding!

Title says it all. Had a pretty big personal loss recently and though I haven't been very active on this blog as of late out of mourning and taking care of business...it's time that I turn the engines back to full throttle and get fired up as sanji about pushing through and finishing up Journey to Westshire! Taking the time away from development has opened my eyes to several game play features and issues that I will be implementing and resolving, so I guess it was kind of a good thing. Upon reading an article that for some reason I can't find now to link to you..... I am actually going to cap the game off at about a third of the way into the story and release it as a demo. The article championed the use of demos to build an audience for the game and get people excited to play it, as well as have those people point out things that maybe you want to change or edit in the full title. My full title will be for sale by the way. I'm still debating on a price though. Gotta pay for all that ramen and coffee I've been consuming to make this happen lol Thanks for following the blog, if you have been, and I promise to make weekly updates from here on out. Back to doing the dev thing!

Things I've done since my last blog?
-Finished up the mapping of the entire game
-Finished up the eventing(or placement of events) for the demo
-Started balancing item/gold placement, skills, enemies, and bosses.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Disappointment

I gave it my all but in the end I missed the deadline. Truth be told, I need another 4-5 hours more to get to a point where I'd be content with it. Sucks....I really pushed hard to make this happen. My entire table is full of coffee cups and tiny bottles of five hour energy lol though I am disappointed in myself I will push on and finish up the game anyway. I may not get the attention I was shooting for or whatever secret prizes the contest had(one of which was some love on a popular podcast!! =_( oh well...) I will be posting up a link for download and I'm sure some of the community will throw in some reviews when I post it up on their normal finished project threads. What did I ultimately take away from this experience? 1. With more practice I can design pretty good maps in minutes 2. It's good to stay organized throughout a project, because in those moments when you've had too much coffee and you lose most higher brain functions due to lack of sleep you can still get stuff done without creating too many bugs. 3. I need to work on managing my time better.


Saturday, May 4, 2013

The Contest and The Deadline

So I am down to the last 25 hours before the project, Journey to Westshire, is due. I'm starting to see what all the books I've read up to this point have been talking about when they say that they have to make a lot of sacrifices in the game just to get it out on time. I always thought that that was stupid and that they should always take their time on games, it's done when it's done n' all. Though when important opportunities like contests that'll get your name out in the spotlight appear and you have to finish by a certain time otherwise it won't matter, things change. I started out with this project to test gameplay elements that would come straight out of Blue Grimoire to see what people thought of them. In the end, I took them out because I felt that it made the game too complicated and wasn't going with it's flow. I'm still not finished and I haven't even begun testing for bugs yet. My hope is to finish by midnight tonight, get a few hours of sleep, and debug until the deadline 6pm Sunday. I hope people will see my skills with this and I also hope to get criticized where I need to be criticized so I can grow as a developer. Well, I'm off to go get more coffee. I'll link everything up tomorrow evening ;)