Anawiki Games 2008 resolutions

1 02 2008

Yeah, I know it’s odd to post New Year resolutions in the beginning of February. My thinking is that if you post them so late then actually they are worth anything.

Year 2007 was not a very good one for me. I had great plans in the beginning, but in December I started to wonder why it didn’t happen? The first half of the year wasn’t so bad, but the second one was devastating to all my plans.

  • We released Pony World… and then received request to translate it to 6 different languages. We had a contarct and we couldn’t deny request and each translation took so looong, because Pony World is a complex game with a lot of written and rasterized text. If you ever want to translate your game, make sure it doesn’t use rasterized text or make it data driven. Each menu, caption, buttons, icons should be defined in a file that you can change without the need to recompile the game.
  • We started 2 or 3 game projects and run into cash-flow issues… I didn’t expect that getting money from released game takes so long.

Well, there are other minor things that made it difficult, but 2008 looks much different.

Year is very long… and it’s very difficult to predict in detail so I decided to split my predictions into 3 parts: short term (first quater), medium term (first half of the year) and long term (second part of the year).

My main goal is to improve company efficiency at making games and selling them. Making games is time consuming so when I written down all our projects I was shocked. If I want to finish them as I plan I should release a new game almost every 2-3 weeks. Yep, it’s sounds unbelievable… though we create games in a way that we can easily make add-ons and sequels.

    So here it goes:

  • Pony World Deluxe – should be released in Feb
  • Runes of Avalon 2 – should be released in Feb
  • JigSaw Quest: Avalon – scheduled for release in March
  • Alice Adventures – scheduled for April
  • … and 5 more games to be released in the first half of the year
  • … and 2 more in the second half of the year

Sounds crazy when I look at it… though first four titles on the list are in production or near completion at the moment. We just have to focus on finishing it one by one instead of making little steps in each game. In the second half of the year we will release only two games. If game development is your business, then monetizing comes first and if you have no games to monetize you run out of the business.

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3 responses to “Anawiki Games 2008 resolutions”

10 02 2008
Jake Birkett (19:49:24) :

wow, yeah sounds crazy :-) I’ve jsut spent ages doing the localisation for Fairway Solitaire. Most of the text is in data files, but it still doesn’t mean that it all fits on screen. Plus I needed different date formats. The buttons and lots of in-game graphics were not text file driven so had to be converted by the artist and plugged in by me (and inevitably there were differences/problems). For my next game I may try to make the text on the buttons dynamic rather than fixed…

11 02 2008
Roman Budzowski (14:44:39) :

Translation is a nightmare. It is so uninspiring and takes so much time. Next time I either charge premium for translation (as I would for standard game development) or leave it to publisher (we’re finishing module that will make GUI text file driven).

15 02 2008
Jake Birkett (13:34:03) :

Yeah it’s a real pain and boring. I just want to get on with the next game.