Blogs - doppl3r

I have no idea how people do this for a living. It has become very clear to me that the people who are successful at this market, truly are gifted in too many ways. The best thing about this community is that we get to witness people like this on a daily basis.

I don't have much else to say, but if you are struggling to make a like-able game, look for inspiration and design concepts from those indie pros. They aren't prodigies that we might make them out to be; rather, they were gifted with the ability to start AND finish a great idea. Start simple, end simple :D

Here's a background I made for a tetris clone me and some friends are making. It was inspired by Makoto Shinkai's art style (You might have seen his work in 5 Centimeters Per Second):

I look forward to making more backgrounds like this in the future. After I figured out how Photoshop's brushes worked, things were much more simple to design. Thanks for check this out!

Summer is officially over and college is back in business. I had a great time programming and I met a lot of friends throughout the process.

So what now? It's kind of hard to say. In a perfect world, I see myself working on minor programming projects as a hobby while maintaining a healthy scholarly status. It's been one week of classes and I've made multiple attempts to join programming groups. In fact, I was able to join an Android App project that I hope does very well...so stoked!

How about Flack? I decided that Flack is basically finished...well, I made that decision long ago and it still kept growing. Now that all possible features have reached their limit, hopefully development can move on to bigger and better things. I had fun working on this game, seriously LOTS of fun. The feed-back was always helpful and interesting. Thank you to those who posted or pm'ed me!

If Flack has critical issues that need to be addressed, by all means, I'll be sure to get those fixed. Time for me to do other stuff! Thanks for reading!

I haven't written a blog for this page yet, so I figured I might as well talk about things such as my development plan for the summer.

As we speak, I'm doing something most college kids would never think of doing: Not job searching! Crazy, I know. I decide a month prior to summer break that I would go full time game development. Since this is the first time doing this, I'm gambling a lot of time towards potential rent money. After-all, if my game 'Flack' doesn't sell very well, then the only thing I've gained is new ways of marketing and programming...which isn't the number one thing I need right now.

That being said, I really do believe Flack will be a success, especially for a newbie indie developer such as myself. Let me first establish what I mean by 'success': Selling the game, and making enough money for rent. I believe it will be profitable because it not only looks reasonably good, but it also has a fun mechanics system that I think people will enjoy. On top of that, it also opens doors for community based creativity now that the level maker is implemented. I personally think it's a fun game, so that should count towards something.

Out of all honesty, this has been an extremely fun project to work on. I learned a lot about the powerful tools Java has to offer. Constantly, I hear java is a terrible language for games, yet most people fail to recognize the potential it can offer for 2D games. On top of that, the community is relatively large and has helped me many times over the past year. If you're interested in designing your own game, I would totally recommend new users to play with Java libraries. (Speaking of Java Libraries, I really need to start using Slick! Holy cow is that a brilliant 2D graphics pusher! I might even consider re-writing my code to use Slick)

Thanks for reading! I might post blogs more often if people are interested.