![]() I was able to watch a lot of different people play the game and take notes on improvements to make. In the end I’m still not sure if it had any real effect in promoting the game, but it was a wonderful experience. This was a large chunk of my meagre budget to gamble on the show when I had no way of knowing if it would be effective. The booth, hotel, t-shirts, badges, and food came to nearly £2k. He did a really good job of getting press coverage and I even got to do a cool podcast.Īs part of the run up to release I got a booth at Rezzed, which was a bit expensive. Through my connections with the Brighton indie scene I found someone with good press contacts who could handle this side of promoting. I realised after my Greenlight campaign that I wouldn’t get very far on my own, every time I e-mailed the press and bloggers it was just tumbleweed. Promoting your game is where you will sink or swim and the area where I struggled. This will be the last time I have an ad hoc project. This way I can judge how long the project should take and I will know if it is realistic. There needs to be a record of all the expected tasks broken down and the time and costs recorded. I’d had a vague hope of getting my next project into Greenlight before Steam took the system out behind the tool shed and buried it, but this was unrealistic and soon postponed.Ī project needs to be properly planned, regardless of scale and team size, and I need to do this from the beginning. I expected to be patching in some bug fixes, but beyond that I hadn’t thought about how I would promote the game or any possible updates to it. With everything focused on getting the game over the finishing line, I hadn’t planned for what to do when it was done. This was of course silly, proper organisation isn’t just for big teams, it’s also important for one man teams working from home.Īfter release I found myself a little lost and listless. I made the mistake of thinking that because I was the only person working on the game I would be able to keep track of everything in my head. By not taking the time to plan things, the game had grown out of control. It helped me re-evaluate the scale of Captain Kaon, but not before it had become bloated with half-finished features that shouldn’t have been started in the first place. Whilst the spreadsheet was useful, I should have done it earlier. At this point I realised it was far too big and I needed to start cutting a few things back. It helped me to define the work I still had left to do and properly evaluate the scale of the remaining task. This as an important step in the progression of the project and one that I managed to do before it had spiralled out of control. I used a simple spreadsheet that broke the levels down by sub task and was able to quantify the amount of work I still had left to do. I soon realised I would actually need to keep track of all of my levels and how far along they were. ![]() Through Captain Kaon I’ve been able to find myself again and recapture the joy of game development. I almost became one of the many to leave the industry. Like so many in the development community, years of crunch and grind had left me suffering with anxiety and depression. This helped me maintain a healthy state of mind, which is something I’ve had problems with in the past. As long as I get 8 hours of work done each day it doesn’t matter if I don’t start until lunch time.Īfter this initial wobble I was able to relax into a productive routine. In the end I realised that it was the amount of work I did that was important, not when I did it. ![]() ![]() ![]() In the beginning I would worry about not getting up early enough, the regular 9 to 5 had become completely ingrained. But there’s always the worry you’ll end up watching too much TV and not getting enough work done. When you’re working from home alone you don’t have a producer on your back, which is mostly pretty great. ![]()
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