Blogs - Derek707

It's been a while since my last post, but in the meantime I've been quite busy, more busy than in my life ever before. We put together the first playable demo version of the game but this time I wasn't responsible only for the code but I had to take my share from everything else around the game (business, finance, marketing) and it has been a quite new experience

Do not misunderstood, it is a very rewarding process. Creating your own game, writing lines after lines with frequent stops while you think through the game mechanics, then seeing it working on your tablet, it is one of the best experience and adventure in my whole life. Art of the Computer Programming at the highest level. It happens on a completely different level than sitting behind an office desk and a computer, writing code for a bank or working for somebody else's business. I dare to say, it is even more rewarding than working on a more simple game that takes not more than a few weeks. Bigger the effort and much bigger the reward at the end. To say the least, I am running out of money and still I get up with a smile every single morning.

Feudums is not finished yet. We are at the second milestone on the road to the fully featured game. We still need to take a few more miles to get to the finish line, but somehow the remaining part seems a bit easier than the one we put behind our back.
Before the game becomes a game it requires a thorough ground work, especially in case of a massively multiplayer online game. The game client in our case is just a thin layer that does not involve any game logic. The server is the engine behind the game and just think on the few thousands of players on a single world. It needs a proper architecture that will be able to cope with every aspect of the game. We are over this part and the architecture is quite solid. We use the Open Game Platform and it did the job for us.
The remaining part is mostly about the game, not the architecture and it seems a bit easier. The path has already made we need "just" walk on it :)

The next big obstacle on our road is getting some spotlight. A major issue for every indie game developer is the lack of experience with the market, how can we approach the players, how can we put our game into the visible light - we just put up the game onto the Steam to get some light (hopefully green). By the way, would you please click on the Yes button for a fellow indie? Also we approached various game sites with our press kit and tried spread the word amongst the players. How will it work, I am not sure yet, but we are full with hope. :)

The last few weeks, rather months were probably the busiest in my life. Once I saw a picture of an iceberg that represented the game development. The top part, above the waves was what everyone can see, the game itself, some marketing material, happy smiles on the team members' face, etc. Below the water level it could be seen everything else that held up the top, game development, design and planning, infrastructure, hiring the team, marketing, PR, finance... everything that needs to be there and working fine to produce a floating game iceberg.

Since we started the work on Feudums, I never felt any stress just the joy of the work. For the first half a year, when we hammered down the cornerstones of the project and started to stretch the technology over the game idea, it was just a game for us. We were players who played to create and build a game for players. Then we hit the first milestone, finishing the alpha version, and it was a big achievement for us. But from the perspective of a player, it was almost an invisible effort.
'Yeah, some guys put some proof of concept together, but can we play with it? Nooo...? Then turn the page, lets see what else is on the news.'

We've been idealists and optimists, we know that the game we are working on is great. We wanted to believe that when we finish the alpha, we could show off enough materials and articles about it that there would be enough people/players around us who could help us through the remaining phases. Oh, yes... so did I already mention that we've been... hmm... idiots too? Obviously, if you open up the Indiedb or a Facebook group dedicated for game developers, you can see a tons of good ideas, all stuck at some level. For example the guy, who wrote:
'I finished the game, it is playable, I have around 200-300 core players testing and playing. Do you know what channels I can use to spread the words and put the game on the top shelf?'

These developers are working through themselves that iceberg, trying to push up their games above the water line, but you can't leave out a stepping stone or avoid the embedded traps, so it is a hard process. Since we started the work we could see other teams stop working on their games, and it is just a sad thing because we exactly know what they were going through, how they could feel.

For us the iceberg looks now a bit lighter. We still have to work hard to lift up the game, but we found solid ground under our feet and developed the muscles too to do the job. And this is why I've went through a lot of new experiences during the last few weeks and months and to be telling the truth, it was not that joyful period than working on the game previously. Talking about theoretical probabilities using legal language with the potential investors and get stuck with tiny weeny things is definitely not something I want to do frequently. Or finding out that there is such thing as tax residency, and we have to calculate with it if we have an international team also belongs to that cloudy and foggy world of accountancy I never wanted to explore. Where to find a good team is also a hard question. Every corner is full with wannabe game developers with no experience with the singleton pattern or who can't create a proper sprite sheet but want to draw for us. (For me this is/was the hardest part and I started wondering that where the hell do the mob bosses find their gang members so easily... on films at least.)

So yes, it was a busy part of this job, but I see the end of the tunnel. It has happened this week that I was able to work on the code. Fingers crossed that it will happen more frequently and these rounds we had to run will speed up the development. Anyway, we have a strict deadline now and we carved it in stone. Maybe one of the marketing guys will let you know :)

Those, who follow the birth of Feudums may wonder about our sometime hectic updating cycle of the articles. It is not all about us, our diligence or laziness. There is a quite strange filter between us and our fans, followers, you guys. The staff of IndieDB.

First of all IndieDB is quite OK. It offers a port on the web where people with similar interest can meet, see the news about the games, can share techniques, methods, ideas, opinions. Also a great option to start building your community, if you are one of the game developers, who want to find its players. But IndieDB is edited, and it means, they do not let us to decide how we want to present our games or even ourselves, but somebody behind the curtains will form the policy of who can go up and who will be let down. And it is anything but a fair process.

Being on the main page of IndieDB as one of the latest articles is a big thing. An article with this option can reach 1000 people easily. The same article published on SlideDB's main page, or being archived immediately - meaning you will never see it anywhere else, just on our article list, which is the same as if we put it into the bin directly - will bring in a few tens of people only.

Let see in details. We put up an article: Creating a map. It was a quite short article, a few paragraphs indeed, but it has a video about how the map editor is working. It has been published and stayed on the top of the articles' list on the IndieDB's home page. It immediately brought in hundreds of people, although the topic itself is not that interesting. Changing the element of the map... is not more than talking about, how we put lego blocks together to build a flat surface. But yes, it is spectacular... in a way.

Then we put up an article about the monetisation strategy of the game. If you ask me which article is the most important then this would be one of them. We were writing about how the game is going to work, what the players should pay for and why Feudums is genuinely free against other F2P titled games which is marketing bullshit most of the time. IndieDB did not give a chance to present our ideas properly, simply pushed the article to SlideDB with the explanation that Feudums is not a game, but an app and the content is not sexy enough, _there_is_no_video_ in it for example.

Well, IndieDB can decide what they put up onto their homepage. At the same time, if you think through, without a careful consideration of their own editorial principals (if there is any and it is not just the result of a more or less subjective decision process) IndieDB not just distorts the image of a game development and the presentation of the games, as they let through the sexy content and not the important ones, but also makes our game creator slice of life unbearable.

How should we present our articles in the future to make sure, we get the chance to reach and talk to you? Lets stuff the articles up with videos and animated gifs for the sake of the editors, even if these are not even slightly related with the content? May I ask after all, that they read the articles at all or just simply count the number of these media elements, then choose the fate of something they do not even understand?

We spent hours to produce the article, carefully considering the content, sometimes even the words, the presentation, the images, everything. May I ask whether the editor has spent at least 60 seconds to make the decision where it will be ending?

Feudums is a multi-platform game, where a big, strong server holds the game logic and the game clients working on different platforms talking back to it. These clients are going to sit on desktops, tablets and mobiles. So is it really an app my fellow players?

Every article has to go through this authorisation process and it is everything but an effective and fair process. The editors do not do a good job here and I can't realise what is the point of this at all.

IndieDB should change this process and start trust us, game developers more. I know the best what is an article and I am not a kid. I understand that pre-filtering the content might be necessary when the whole internet is on the other side of the dam, but after all the articles, content, game materials we put down the table, I do not understand why we need to be controlled in this way, why IndieDB do not trust us and why they persecute us with this. IndieDB in the present form is a not very comfortable incubator. Quite surely it will not be the home where a game can grow up, where a game can be launched from.

Lets hear us and change this unfair process!