Developing a game in 30 Days, Releasing it in hopefully less than 60 Days — A transparent story (aka a Tale of self-induced Burnout) #2
Overview
Part 1: The first Week
Part 2: The Second Week
Part 3: The Third Week
Part 4: The Fourth Week
Part 5: The Fifth Week
Part 6: Week Six & Seven
Day 6 & 7 (First weekend)
I took a few days off due to weekend. Dennis did not. He kept working on the game and live streaming the development. On Sunday he streamed for 11 hours. Oh. My. God. We definitely need to calculate the working hours in the end to share that as well.
The first thing he did was coming up with an asset workflow which allows him to create assets faster for new stages. Now he can just re-use the ground blocks in every other future stage as well and just put a new texture on them. And he also finished all the assets for the first two stages of Act 1.
After that he completed the UI on the same day. For those of you who love to collect letters hidden in levels (we heared a lot of Platforms do this, right?) you can now also collect the letters H-A-N-A (the Tanukis name) in each stage. Well. In the first stage. As this is the only one being complete for now. But the letters will be part of all the levels later on as well. You get the idea.
Teflora from the CrossCode team joined his Sunday stream and helped out a bit with sound effects while Dennis did work on Post-Processing (He switched to ACES from the Unity standard for Tonemapping. That allows better color grading). Also a few new animations for Hana were created (Damage, Death, Win). And Stage 1 is completed asset wise.
Day 8
Tried to catch up with everything that happend. Re-wrote the steam description. Dennis took a few screenshots for the Steam page. And in the evening he fixed a lot of bugs. Not the most productive day but sometimes you just need a little small cooldown phase.
In his lunch break Dennis also included a photo mode for taking screenshots. He tried to blame me for not having a lunch break that way, calling me out on Stream and Twitter. Thank’s Dennis. And a pause menu he also included somehow.
On Stream he promised to start working on enemies. But he lied. Instead he worked on UI-logic. Also to allow different levels to load. Finally. In the end, a menu existed. A working one. More or less.
Also: Dear Chat (I’m looking at you “serenetiv”, “xPateco”, “Poringossa” (I also heard that involving the community by calling them out can be Marketing as well)), if Dennis would have told me the German word for Tanuki (which is Marderhund) I would have understood. But on Low-Poly and with big eyes, honestly, Hana reminded me of a fox in first place. Besides: Technically a Tanuki is a fox-like. Also let that be a warning: I am watching those streams.
Day 9
Good Day everyone! Just some thoughts of mine about the marketing perspective. Obviously, getting some attention without any major assets in first place and without involving the press, it is very hard to spread the word. For Eversleep we knew that if we wanted to make it a success, we’d need to come up with a special idea. Something unique.
If you think about marketing your game, always ask yourself: What can you do to get some attention, something to kick things off. For some games it can be the visuals cause you found a very specific style. Or maybe you have some humor in your approach (can work as well, although I should add that while humor can help spreading the word, it might be only that in the end: a good meme, some joke. And people will have a good laugh but forget about you again or maybe they don’t care about the game but did enjoy the pun). Or maybe your gameplay is unique. Maybe you get an exclusive story in a major outlet.
In our case, with just 30 days in advance and without any assets we only had the option to just document everything regarding the development and marketing process. And it started out quite okayish so far:
Besides fixing the menus in the morning, Dennis took a break in the evening. A much needed break.
Day 10
Planned for this evening: Assets. And maybe a Logo so we can get the Steampage live asap.
What did happen instead: Enemy AI. Well. Thanks. I need a Logo Dennis! And the keyart!
Day 11
Dennis spent most of the time with working on the enemy AI. And in the meantime he was preparing a release for the next day for another game.
Day 12
Nothing major happend due to a release Dennis had to handle (Check out Vesper). And that took some time. But he managed to finish the main menu off stream.
Day 13 & 14 (Second weekend)
Weekend. Oh lovely weekend. After two semi productive days magic happened. Real magic. Dennis finished nearly all the assets needed for the game. Within one day. And suddenly he also fully finished the main menu. With a logo for the game. Which means that on Monday I can start working on the steampage again and hopefully submit it right away.
Interesting: Dennis tweeted for Screenshot Saturday his main menu. And that kinda took off already. Well. It did not went bad:
