Verisimilitude
I’m in my office, thinking through the steps remaining before we can release our first game into the wild. This is a ton of work, much of which I have no training for or experience doing. Par for the course in indie game development, or any other kind of small business.
By now, when I’ve found the time to finish this post, we’ve had our “soft launch” release out there for a couple of months. This was a release that we didn’t want to advertise, where we expected to find bugs and wanted to get a some feedback. This basically means it was a beta – a very safe, well-tested beta, but still not the high-pressure of a launch.
We’re now getting ready for that launch. We’ll advertise and contact the press, we’ll finally support the big platform player (iOS), and most importantly we’ll give players the option to pay us (I know!) for our game. I’m thinking about all of the things that we’ll need to get right for this game to really work for people and catch on.
A word about the things I’m NOT worried about – and when I say “not worried” I really mean “not able to fit … Read More »
How we Chose Starship Lexicon as our First Game
Victor and I had long discussions about what games we wanted to make together, and like most developers we have created crazy-long list of ideas. But the question of what to make first stumped us. We decided the best thing to do was make a list of what we wanted to accomplish with our first project and then use that list to figure out what characteristics our first game should have. Armed with those characteristics we would be able to filter our ideas.
Really hashing through what mattered for our first game was sometimes a difficult discussion and exposed all sorts of interesting corollary discussions that I hope to post about later. But in the end the goals boiled down to:
Find whether or not we could get along while working together
Gain experience designing and developing for mobile devices
Learn about app store deployment and gotchas
Learn about IAP by implementing some and testing the results
Explore and decide on tools and methods for remote collaboration
Do this all relatively quickly so we could get to the rest of our list
#1 was a particularly interesting goal, and one that I think gets glossed over too often. It’s uncomfortable to say up front, “you know, we like … Read More »
Tap, Tap… Is This Thing On?
We’re live! Welcome to Caper Academy’s blog. We’re an new indie game company aiming to make awesome games that wouldn’t exist if we didn’t just go ahead and make them ourselves. We are going to use this blog to talk about our games, their successes and failures, what motivates us, and what we learn about making games on a shoestring budget with a small team. If you’d like us to write about anything in particular just drop us a note and let us know.
