Howdy!
Hey everyone, it’s Mark, the 2 Pence Studios marketing guru, bringing you our September update. September was a pretty good month – with both ups and downs.
I was going to write a few words about our progress this month, but our chief game designer, Matyas Suranyi, decided to turn in a detailed look at how he saw the month go by. Since I couldn’t top this, I think I’ll just let it speak for itself. I’m sure more than a few fellow Indies will empathize with us and know exactly what Matyas is talking about!
Working 60 to 70 hours per week is getting tiresome. I should have taken a holiday during the summer like normal people do. Apart from sleeping and spending like 30 minutes with my family per day, I’m working. Still, I don’t see our deadlines secured, and it’s not because we’re not working hard or that we underestimated the development times.
We did, however, underestimate a lot of the other stuff. Especially legal stuff. Oversee coordination stuff. Legal stuff. Running a company stuff. Legal stuff. Recruitment. Legal stuff. Meetings. Accounting. Legal stuff. Random issues. I feel like a noob.
Another major pain is our internal debates over things we don’t know much about...all the legal and company management stuff with people from half a dozen countries looks like an overly complex, Roguelike accounting game with a single life, zero hints and no saving options... and if you fail, the game will delete itself [there was a C64 game that actually did that, so you were able to play it a maximum of 3 times. Ah, ironman mode, what’s that? Nuts.].
But not everything is bad.
We’ve contracted two graphic artists. They both create cool things, so I’m looking forward to seeing great stuff from them. I’ve also just signed the contract with a developer, to start next week – he previously worked for the oldest and most renowned Hungarian game developer company, Digital Reality [Reunion or Imperium Galactica, anyone?]. Imre hired an accountant. Mark and Emily are about to finalize the music part.
These actions are extremely important because they signal the end of the legal & accounting Hell we’ve in for the past month. With the team reaching it’s final size, at least until the game’s launch, we can turn back to actually creating the game itself, and not worry about the prerequisites of creating the game. It’s a major step forward.
I’ve also recently stepped back to code the Unity client – since the guy we wanted to work with didn’t make it through his trial period – and it’s been fun doing some creative stuff again. I enjoyed it so much inbetween two legal debates that I actually stole Imre’s thunder on the coding tasks. It has also sped things up for releasing the Map Editor – something we’re a little overdue on due to all the other issues.
I can’t wait to have the dev team start building the next build, with feudum management and advanced features. I’ve also succesfully released a development build on Android tabs; more specificly, on an older Nexus 7 (2013). I had concerns about spending too much time on this since Android wasn’t a top priority, but the code worked suprisingly well on this platform. I imagine we could add support for Android tabs even for the Map Editor.
So, its going to be development time again – and honestly it was bloody time. We are indies, not Excel-table champions and legal advisors.
All in all, it was a good month...a little frustrating perhaps...with just a few more months to go!
