Category: General Game Development

As the saying goes, never put all of your eggs in one basket. When I began developing my first game I thought that in a couple of years the game would be completed. As development went on I realized that the game would take many years to create at the rate that we were making it. I then joined a fan-game The 7th Guest III. Later I saw a post on a forum asking for help on a space-fight game and I decided to join that project. 

I had fun working on all of these projects and no I didn’t feel overwhelmed with all of the tasks at hand. The thing is that my original project collapsed because it was too large for an indie-team to create. Also I left the 7th Guest because I disliked the way that the head of the project was leading the team. 

The amazing thing is that it’s the last project that I joined that is actually working and seems like it will be completed. If I had not joined this project I wouldn’t be hear today. I would have thrown years of my life at projects that failed. The likelihood is that if you have multiple projects at least one of them should succeed. Time will tell if The Divine does. It would be great if I could tell though…

Always listen to your users! They are the ones who will support your company from birth till death. Without them your company is worthless. Make sure that you support your community and thank them for their comments.

 Already the users who have commented on my posts have ensured me that this blog is worthwhile. I thank you all for the support!

Sure some feedback can basically be seen as spam but it’s likely that the majority will be very useful in tailoring your game to their liking. After all it makes better business sense to appease the masses rather than yourself.

Yes it’s true, the role of a Producer is really to make sure the production of the game is on track while assisting in Quality Assurance. Bottom line is that having a Producer who is not a hardcore gamer, improves upon the chance that the game will be playable by casual gamers. If the casual Producer does his/her job the game should be much easier to play and accessible to all then if a hardcore Producer oversaw the project. This inreturn means the game can reach more market share AKA more money.

Obviously without programmers there would be no games. No one would be able to write the interactive side of the game and without that you’re left with a bunch of art assets. Sure you could make a great CGI movie but that’s not a game.

That’s why the most successful developers are ones started by programmers. It’s key that if you’re starting a game project, you must have a programmer attached whom knows what they’re doing. While money can be put on art, it can’t be put on code.

Programmers are invaluable.

To Designers,

If you want to be the next Will Wright or Shigeru Miyamoto you must remember that games are GAMES! They should be new experiences that bring excitement and fun!

The best way to get inspirations for games is to constantly look at life in a new light. If you can view life as you did growing up, designing that AAA title will be easy; making it is a whole different problem.

One of the key factors that you’ll notice in this industry is that if your game does not have the right PR behind it, the game won’t sell. Even with the right marketing stragety main-stream websites and magazines may not publish anything about the game.

In the case of EDI’s Morning’s Wrath, our first PR went out near the release of the game October 2005. It wasn’t until I sent Gamespot.com 3 copies of the same PRs that they publish a page about the game in December 2005. Now with Malathedra Gamespot along with other major websites still have yet to publish anything about the title even though it was announced on June 1st 2006.

How are developers supposed to reach the gaming audience when the media doesn’t cover their game?