Category Archives: Personal Life

Ups and downs

Hay guys.

Haven’t done much game developing lately. Broke up with my girlfriend recently because it wasn’t working out. It was probably for the best, but it happened at a very bad time. It’s the middle of Summer, I’ve got the house to myself, and no one to hang out with. Being single again sucks, and I haven’t been taking it very well. I need high self-esteem to function. D:

On the upside, I’ve done a lot of positive things to distract myself from all that.
I ran 10km for the first time, which is much further than my previous best. I didn’t think I could make it, but after a while the pain just stopped, and I kept running. I was pretty sore the next few days, but for a few hours after the run, I felt invincible. The best part was how badly I smelled. It was the smell of victory!

I also played through Luigi’s Mansion 2, and New Super Mario Bros 2. Pretty fun games, though nothing particularly new or amazing. Gonna try my first Harvest Moon game next.

My chili peppers are doing well. I’ve finally got Scorpion and Ghost peppers coming in. Haven’t tried them yet, but I know that I will regret it when I do.

Another thing that’s been getting me down is that all of my fans really want another Epic Battle Fantasy RPG, and don’t show as much enthusiasm for any other projects I do. I know that bullet hell is kind of a niche genre, and I don’t expect Bullet Heaven 2 to be anywhere near as successful as EBF4, but that still makes it a lot less fun to work on. EBF4 was very lucky with the front-page features it got on Steam, and I’m not confident that BH2 will have the groundswell to do the same. The way things are looking now, BH2 is going to be my second biggest project (bigger than EBF3!), so it’s taking a bit of time, and is looking to be kind of risky.

But whatevs. Hopefully things will pick up a bit when I release the next demo, showing off multiplayer features, and all of the enemies. Maybe everything will be fine. Either way, it’s nice to work on a completely different type of game. jellybomb

Summer Holidays, kind of

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Hay guys! It’s been a while since I’ve done any work on BH2.
I’ve been taking some time off to celebrate EBF4’s success in the Steam Summer sale, and it was also my birthday last week.

I’ve made a lot of progress on my “To Play” list of games. Most of them were indie shoot-em-ups on Steam (Market research! I’ll blog about those soon), and fighting games (For fun mostly. I’ll blog about those later too).

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Some other notable games I’ve played are:
• Child of Light. (pictured) I wanted to play this because I heard that it uses the same art engine as the recent Rayman games, and it was indeed a very beautiful game, visually and musically. Gameplay-wise I didn’t find it particularly engaging, but I’m glad I played it through to the end anyway.
• The Tiny Bang Story. A very accessible point-and-click adventure, that was mostly about finding items. I thought it was pretty relaxing, and some of the puzzles were a lot of fun to figure out. Even got my mum addicted to it.
• To The Moon. Not much of a game, more like an interactive story. Which is fine because I haven’t played a game with a memorable story in a very long time, so this was something different for me. Ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. Lots of feels. Great use of music to set moods.
• TowerFall: Ascension. Great local-multiplayer action game that I played at a party with some buddies. It’s amazing how polished the mechanics are. Everything is well-balanced, the level designs allow interesting strategies, and the controls are flawless. It looks like a simple game, but a lot of thought clearly went into the design.

In terms of other hobbies:
• I have Ghost peppers now! My Ghost pepper plant is finally producing fruit, after I’ve had it for over a year. Haven’t tried one yet, but I’m already dreading the thought.
• Been watching The Wire! Took me a while to get into it, but now I can’t stop. Almost finished Season 2.
• I cycled 62km! That’s my best record so far. Took 4.5 hours, and although I felt super tired afterwards, I recovered very quickly, and felt almost normal the next day. Hurray!
• Climbed a super steep hill! Me and my buddies went hillwalking, and although we didn’t tackle anything massive, the slope was almost as steep as stairs for about 300 meters! Was even steeper on the way down, and we had to slide down on our asses most of the way, for fear of slipping otherwise. 10450807_794453113921098_7266763032288894625_n
For my birthday my family just made a somewhat fancy dinner. It was kind of nice. Especially since my brother’s moved out now, and seeing the whole family together is more of a special occasion.

Anyway, getting back to work now.

Beutiful Legends Deluxe

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Hay guys. I’m sorry that I haven’t been particularly active lately. A lot of distractions popped up at the same time; I’ve been catching up on video games, the weather’s been quite nice, and it was also my girlfriend’s birthday. Gonna try to post some stuff soon though!

Played through Rayman Legends and got 100% on all of the new levels (not doing the Origins levels again!). Fantastic game. The musical levels were amazing, and in general the level designs were even better than in Origins (and I’m quite happy that the game was a bit easier too). I felt that some of the food-themed levels were particularly creative. The graphics and animations are as beautiful as ever, and in my opinion, it might be the best looking game I’ve ever played.

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Also played through Kirby: Triple Deluxe, and although it’s a good game, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as some other Kirby games. I felt like the story mode just dragged on a bit too long. The speedrun mode was particularly weak compared to the one in Nightmare in Dream Land; it was just too long and the levels had too many dead ends. I did like the 3D effects though, and the game certainly made good use of them.
Kirby-Triple-Deluxe-insert1 Finally, I played through My Beautiful Katamari. I haven’t played a Katamari game since We <3 Katamari on Playstation 2, but it doesn’t look like the games have changed at all, which is both good and bad. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Katamari is a game series about rolling things up. As you roll, your ball gets bigger and you can pick up larger items. That’s all you do. Most of the fun comes from the humor and variety of items you can roll up. The levels this time felt less inspired than in the previous game, but I think the scale of the final level made up for that. The concept is still great fun.
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So Good They Can’t Ignore You

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Just finished reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, and his career advice mostly lines up with my personal experience.

The book’s advice for finding work that you love is to build up skills through years of *deliberate practice*, until your skills are rare and valuable enough to afford you control over your work. Being good at something and having connections will give you more opportunities and make your work feel more meaningful.

It tries to debunk the idea that boldly following your passions will lead to satisfying work. That approach won’t work if your skills aren’t valuable enough to support you, or earn you enough autonomy to enjoy your work.

“Working right matters more than finding the right work”, as the author puts it. The most interesting and rewarding work lies at the cutting edge of your field, where there’s room for new innovations, and plenty of consumers looking for those innovations. But to get there you need to have a strong knowledge of what you’re building upon, and you’ll need to be able to specialize in a small area that few others do.

Anyone who follows the indie game development scene will know how many new developers fail to make a living off of their passion, because they jump on the bandwagon without enough experience, or with unreasonably high expectations.

In my case, I didn’t consider doing game development full time until I was consistently making good money off of it, and it took me a long time to get there. Before that I spent a lifetime on learning how to draw, 7 years playing around with Flash and animations, and 4 years getting a software engineering degree – and not getting paid for any of that, but instead gaining skills and reputation. At first the effort wasn’t deliberate – game development was only a hobby – but after highschool I became more serious about looking at career options, and started measuring my progress and setting goals.

As I’ve learned recently, the most useful skills were often the ones that were the toughest to learn. I didn’t endure through University because I enjoyed learning about design patterns or project management, or because programming was my “passion”; I did it because I wanted some valuable skills which would make me a better game developer, or at least get me some other job if that path didn’t work out.
(Though I did begin to enjoy University once I gained control over my 4th year projects, which was only allowed because I had plenty of game dev experience by then.)

For a while, I became complacent with developing medium-sized web games, and stopped making an effort to improve my skills, opting to stick to what I knew and what was easy for me. Luckily, the market for web games started to shrink, and I was forced to look at the long-term viability of my career. I started looking at developing games for other platforms, including mobile devices and Steam, and although the process of adapting was difficult, I’ve gained a ton of valuable experience as a result, and feel more confident than ever. I’ve begun to make an effort to network with other game developers, to do more research on current market trends, and read boring textbooks. Most people never see the work that goes on behind the scenes.

Anyway, I think the main message to take away is that if you’re comfortable with the work you’re doing, that means you’re not challenging yourself enough, and you probably won’t get to where the most satisfying jobs are at. You should always take time off from being productive and instead squeeze in some time for research and practice, and concentrate more on what you can offer to the world, rather than what the world can offer to you.

Anyway, enough ranting from me.

Tidying Up After Steam

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Yo, it’s almost been two weeks since EBF4’s Steam launch, and things have been kind of hectic, but they’re calming down now.

Here’s some of the stuff I’ve been up to:

• Dealing with technical problems for customers.
There’s not been very many people with problems, but it only takes a few to become annoying. And there’s still a few issues that I have no idea how to solve. I’d rather give out refunds than deal with this stuff, but Steam doesn’t let me do that personally. D:

That’s another reason why I don’t want to release the game on Mac and Linux. It’s hard enough for me to help out people on Windows! Imagine trying to do tech support for operating systems you’re not familiar with… hah! I’m not going to put myself in that position. Nope. No way.

• Fixing bugs.
There’s not been a lot of serious issues, but there’s still a few things that I’ve had to fix, including one broken achievement. I’ll be updating the game within a day or two with these fixes.

• Giving out free copies.
I’ve given out over 500 free copies of EBF4 already. To YouTubers, Fan artists, reviewers, and people like that. But the biggest chunk went to groups that do game giveaways.

• Reading reviews and watching Let’s Plays.
It’s interesting to see what people think of the new content, especially those playing on Epic difficulty. It was supposed to be incredibly hard, but perfectly managable if you use some strategy. And that seems to be more or less what people are reporting.

• Looking for other distribution platforms.
Good Old Games turned me down because they felt that EBF4 wouldn’t sell well, since there’s already a free version. Fair enough. The Humble Bundle guys seem to be more interested in the game though, and it should show up on the Humble Store sometime soon.

I’ve also been contacted by a few of the lesser known bundles, and I’ll try to stick EBF4 into some of those too.

Anyway, I can’t wait until all of the above is out of the way, and I can finally work on something new.