I’m working on a new game. A game with new gameplay mechanic. Maybe not the whole new genre, but something that hasn’t been done this way in this genre. The thing is that I am really tired of this experimenting. A lot of indies want to create innovative games and a lot of them blames others for making clones. But if you are just starting your game development career… if you don’t want to get frustrated by trying solutions that for most of the time don’t work… if you don’t have a strong team and faith in your project…
Just don’t do it.
Find a game that you like to play and would like to develop and clone it. Really! It’s so much easier and you’ll get things done so much quickier. And when you’re small, you shouldn’t waste to much time on research. It’s not that you won’t be able to develop new and fun gameplay mechanic, but the chances are minimal… and you’ll either find it on the first try or give up in the middle of the project.
This is my third innovative game (after Runes of Avalon and Pony World). We will make it fun. It’s fun already, but can you imagine how much effort it took to make it fun? How many times I wanted to quit and would quit if my partners didn’t push on me to move further?
Generally, innovative games are too risky… but may be also very rewarding as everything that is risky (have you put your savings in stocks lately?). What’s your take on this?
I haven’t posted for how many days? I don’t even know and don’t want to check. I haven’t for so long that people started to worry…
In the beginning of my blogging experience I decided that I’ll post only when I’ve got something valueable to say. And for couple of days it was the reason I wasn’t posting. You can’t get new results or experiments in just couple of days. But then interesting things started to happen, but I still haven’t posted. Well, after another google dance almost all my websites has been hit with new low Page Rank. For unknown reason this blog went down to 0 (zero!) from 3. ANAWIKI main site went downt to 3 from strong 5. And I was expecting a rise in Page Rank. That really put me off from bloggin for quite a while.
Another thing is that March was really bad in terms of sales at some channels. Not that much in direct sales, but after nice spike in February sales in March were disasterous. I’m happy that March is over because April and May sales look so much better.
It’s about time to start posting again. It’s about time to realese new game… but my current game will not be released for 2-3 months at least. Maybe it’s time to release another freebie.
It’s time to work harder… there’s a beatiful car that I want to buy and it’s easier to buy one when your pocked is full of cash ;-)
I upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 yesterday and installed new plugin that lets readers rate my posts. I may need to play with it a bit more because the stars are not so clearly visible below the post, but it works fine and I would really appreciate if you try it out either on older or new posts.
(Side note for Jake: new WordPress has a word count feature available – almost realtime).
Interview with Jake Birkett was very well received. Thanks. Jake is the black belt in Aikido and hippocoder from the Indie Gamer Forums asked Jake:
…as a black belt, how do you feel fitness or other activities contribute to your success?
And Jake says:
the Aikido I do is not violent, it’s about defense. I took it up 11.5 years ago because I was sitting down at a computer all day and needed to do some exercise. Going and doing a regular exercise or hobby is great for taking your mind off work so you can come back fresh. However the Aikido I do has a big “positive thinking” component which has really helped me in my career and home life. So I would say it was integral to my success so far. Any kind of exercise or activity that pushes you into achieving greater things (by making you leave your comfort zone) should help your work, and also it’s good to get different neurons firing which is why I’ve taken up Tango recently.
If you want to see how martial arts can inspire you or motivate to work harder, watch this movie. Dawson is a visually disabled person who does martial arts, also BLACK BELT.
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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