LA Game Night was great. My friends were there. Some people really liked my game. Met the indie dev who made Thirty Flights of Loving and Quadrilateral Cowboy and he was cool (and liked Flock of Dogs).
LA Game Night also gave me a clear goal: fix up my demo. Which let me not worry about online multiplayer. Which means now that LA Game Night has passed, what should I do?
How about make a Steam page? https://store.steampowered.com/app/812380/Flock_of_Dogs/
How about make an online store? https://shopofflockofdogs.bigcartel.com/
How about start Instagramming? https://www.instagram.com/flockofdogsgame/
Well, I did that. I ran a 10k. I asked a girl to go hiking with me. I hosted youth gaming all nighter. Time marches on.
However, the trouble with working alone is that when you return to your solo project, it's not like some invisible helper did anything while you were away. Nothing changes without you. Anyway, so I decided to add dog landing/taking off/and extra flying animations. Which I've been posting on social media for your information.
Anyway. The next event I'm doing is Boston Festival of Indie Games on September 29th.
Here's my plan:
- draw a new thorn bush and make the thorn bush block both air and on ground movement, so that players with the new ability to land their dogs on islands, can't skip the opening section of the Flock of Dogs demo
- figure out some kind of visual indicator for 'whale low on water' and 'whale low on health'
- make 'press y to show color' work even if you haven't 'pressed b to wake up'
- redo the solar panel with a solar vacuum backpack thing (think Ghostbusters, except sucking up suns, wait....what is Super Mario Sunshine gameplay like? You shoot water, right? Do you suck up suns? Didn't have that game....waaaitt...what about Luigi's Mansion...I didn't have that game either...what do you do in that game?)
Then do online mulitplayer!
It's beginning to feel like this is dragging on a long time. I mean the whole 'make a video game' deal. At about 2.5 yrs since starting the project. About 9 months since I quit my job. The negative thoughts I have vary between a fear never finishing or fear of not being able to solve certain outstanding technical problems I have and then scared I'm getting lazy. Those bother me more than a fear of poor reception or no sales. Although I think I would feel pretty horrible if I achieve the quality of game I think I can make and then it just is a total commercial flop. I'm still pretty happy working on the game and, honestly, I have this nagging feeling that someone is going to beat me to market and I feel this need to rush. Even though I've felt most satisfied recently by going back through code and fixing up stuff and fixing bugs. And I hate feeling rushed when I do art and animation. I've always hated feeling rushed doing art. I remember at summer camp you had 1 hour each day to get your craft finished and the crafts lady was always shouting at us to get your scissors, get your glue, go go go. Stressful. When I took a painting course in college that was just a Friday studio day, it was lovely. You had 6 hours of studio time, if you wanted. Chill.
