Category: General Game Development

High Quality is the ONLY Quality

If you are serious and want your game to sell, you have to make a high quality game. Major portals will not accept any game that has poor gameplay or graphics. With a good game, gameplay and graphics go hand in hand. Developers must balance the two.

When designing your game keep this in mind. It’s much easier to make a cartoony looking game rather than something that’s realistic.

When you’re done with your game, go back and look at things that could be polished. There’s no reason why your game shouldn’t be the best that it can be. Spend at least a month tweaking as much as you can. Beta test your game and get feedback!

Mediocrity is not an option in this day and age. There are too many indie games being released every week for your game to get noticed if it looks or plays bad.

Why would you want to waste months to years of your life on a project and not have it sell well?

Don’t be a spammer

You know there’s nothing worse about the internet than spam. It’s the devil in discise.

For game developers it’s actually very easy to spam others, especially when you are in the launch phase. You want websites and distributors to talk about your game as well as sell it. But guess what, if they don’t reply within the first two weeks – they probably don’t care about your title. It is resonable to send them the same PR one more time, but it is better to ask them if they received the original email that you sent.

It’s important to setup a dialogue between you and the person on the other end of the website! Research into the website and don’t bother them if you have a game that doesn’t fit their audience.

Websites receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of emails a day from people just like you. They want their game on that site. Well that’s a shit load of emails to go through! Make it easier on the website and don’t bother them if you don’t need to!

Communication

Look bottom line is that you’re always going to be communicating through email. It’s ruid if you do not answer your emails in a timely fasion. If you are working on a deal and allow for a week to pass before you answer your emails those potential deals will be gone. At a maximum reply to your emails 2-3 days after you receive them. Even if you have to contact someone else before you get the needed answer, write an email to the sender so they know to wait a couple of days.

This is a huge issue no matter what side of the industry you’re in. It costs time and money waiting for people to respond to emails so please be concious of your response time.

The 3rd day is the worst

After all the orientations and move in, I feel like there’s nothing for me to do. Classes aren’t starting till Tuesday. I don’t have anything major to do with my games right now. There was a lot of excitement on the first two days but this morning it’s all waning away.

Much like with game projects I always want to move onto the next thing. At times this can be a problem and with real life it’s something that I have to fix. As I’ve always told myself, enjoy it while it lasts.

There are only so many years that you’ll be an indie developer. There are is only one time I’ll have these college experiences. So enjoy it now and stop nagging.

The leap of faith

I have jumped off the edge of the mountain. Over the weekend I made a deal with United Minds Games to publish their upcoming game Space Renegades: The Series. The deal includes me doing the same things that I do for marketing any game but as a publisher the game will eventually have a recognized name behind it. Names and brands go a long way with consumers. Normally they don’t like to buy things made by a company that they don’t know.

The other great thing about this if Space Renegades becomes popular I can created a boxed version and get the game into retail outlets.

So it is really going to be an interesting ride from here on out. I’ve wanted to publish games for years and now I’m finally here. It took me a while to learn the ropes and gain the knowledge that I needed so now it’s all a wait and see process.

My goal isn’t to grow at a fast rate. College is my first priority so I have to see how that goes and how much I can handle before it becomes too much. 🙁

So what’s next?

I think that was the slogan for GDC 06… and now it’s the title of this entry.

Main thing is that I’m working on something pretty big that is really the only logical step for me to take if I want to grow. Of course what I’m I going to do about college? I’m starting up on August 29th so I don’t know if that will hinder anything, most likely it will.

Bottom line is that I won’t have a lot of time for this blog so I doubt I’ll be writing daily entries but I will still try my best to write something weekly. Maybe that will improve the quality.

As always connecting this situation to game development, as a high school student you really have a hard decision to make. Go to college, go to a game college, or make games full-time. I too went through this and damn it was difficult. With my skills making games full-time at wasn’t such a smart idea. It would be much better if I networked in college and planned my life out more.

So the next question I dealt with was, well game college or regular college? Places like Full Sail and Westwood intrigued me by their fast earning 2 year degree programs but I soon realized, why would I want to limit my high school social life to a bunch of nerds? It’s highly unlikely that there would be many if any hot girls at a game college. This factored in with my curriculum only being about video games bored me. Why spend 2 years only learning about video games? There’s so much else to learn about in the world. Do you really think the best game designers studied games?

So that’s how I decided. Of course that’s not even getting into the issue of what regular college to choose! If you can get into a regular college that still has game degrees, awesome! Sadly I didn’t. Instead I’m going to be studying my other love, film. The major that I’m aiming for is Electronic Media Management so I’ll still be able to deal with computer stuff.

I am happy with where I’m going though, in theory of course. Maybe when I get there I’ll hate it, who knows. cough cough The Shadow knows…

PS – I find it obnoxious when people do that. It’s a part of my life that has been used and abused, but I hold it against you.