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Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: April 14th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 42.5 (current year) = 451.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 35 (current year) = 745 / 1000

I finally managed to fix the major problem I had with Killer Kittens. It wouldn’t run on older systems because it depended on newer GLIBC versions, and it seems that gcc and glibc developers have made it difficult to have a universal binary available.

Well, it wasn’t that difficult. Once again, it was just a matter of learning about something I didn’t know existed before. I can package up my game and send it off to the beta testers who had encountered a GLIBC_2.4 dependency problem. Soon I can release my game to the public.

After I have a finished game out there, I can start worrying about making it better. I have a received a lot of feedback, some of it related to game play and some of it related to technical issues. One issue was that my game runs at 1024×768, but because there was no in-game fullscreen mode option, people with displays at 1024×768 found that the bottom of the window would get cut off by the edge of the desktop. I figure I should change the game to use 800×600 instead, but I should also provide an in-game fullscreen option. You could edit a config file to make it run in fullscreen, but it should be easier to do from within the game itself. And even if I don’t provide the fullscreen mode option, I can move the menu options to the center of the screen so that players can see them even if they do end up with a window that takes up the entire screen and won’t fit.

One concern I keep wrestling with is whether or not I should release the game with the intent to make it better later. The game is long overdue, and so I would love to get it out to the public sooner rather than later. On the other hand, I would rather have a polished game as my first public release. One of the common bits of feedback I got was related to the poor quality graphics, which was just programmer art that I always meant to replace. Still, I wanted to release v1.0 over a month ago, and if I keep finding reasons to delay, won’t it just mean that I’ve never finished this game? A finished game is much better than a game no one ever sees, but if the finished game isn’t of high quality, what does that say about me as the developer?

[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]

2 replies on “Thousander Club Update: April 14th”

It says you can actually finish a project which immediately sets you apart from 99% of the people who start one. I’ve reviewed a number of job applicants and honestly I’m tired of seeing someone send me a link to their list of 20 projects that are somewhere between 10 and 75% done. Documenting your lack of follow through is not impressive. 🙂

If your goal is just to have this be a hobby, then feel free to tinker away indefinitely. As long as it’s interesting than you’re achieving your goal.

If you really want to earn some money at this, then take what you’ve learned and move on the the next project. Make the next project about the same scale as this one (or maybe a little larger) and apply what you learned.

Thanks, Ken. I know I can always make it better later, and I can definitely take what I’ve learned here and apply it to my next project.

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