What a week!
This week was mostly spent preparing for IndiecadeEU and actually going to IndiecadeEU on Friday and Saturday! I made a (rough) playable version of the Over-The-Top Breakout, and I prepared my talk about helpful limitations in gamedev and then gave that talk!
So it turns out, maybe unsurprisingly, that I’m very conflicted about this project and whether I should keep on working on it or not.
What I did on it this week was mostly to put together the progression system of the game so that you can play a few levels. It works and it even plays pretty smoothly. There’s no game over nor win state, but you can still play for a few minutes to get a feel of what the game’s like.
In the end I only had a few people play it. (I did not set up even a temporary booth or anything like that, I had my laptop with me and settled somewhere if someone asked about it) But while people played it, I realized how much more work there was to be done to make it a more worthwhile game. As it is, it wows people pretty well when they play it for the first time, but then all the features get thrown on-screen and after 10 minutes you’ve seen pretty much everything the game has to offer.
I’m probably being too hard on myself here, but I think I’d need to add an important number of things (like power-ups, more special bricks maybe, other level elements) to make this thing good to sell.
That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if I had more interest in the project but as it is, I’d rather work on something else than a 5$ Breakout-With-A-Twist.
So I’m going to take some time to think about it, see if I can find solutions to my worries or if I’m better off abandoning the project. That would make a lot of games I started but didn’t finish in 2018. Maybe I should think of releasing a ‘2018 Cemetery Pack’ at the end of the year??
The good news is that my talk went really well! So well in fact that I even got a proposition to come do it again somewhere else! (more about that in a future post if it comes through)
The ‘slideshow’ was entirely made with SUGAR of course, with slow-moving psychedelic backgrounds to make the content look more interesting. (it worked)
The content itself was mainly about Pico-8, Minit and SUGAR and also there was a bit about gamejams and another about old tech limitations.
It seemed to get across pretty well and I had quite a few people asking me about SUGAR afterwards, which was really neat! On top of that, multiple people told me they enjoyed the talk and/or found it valuable, which is obviously super cool!
I will be writing a transcription of the talk, this week if all goes well, and it will be available exclusively to my 8$+ Patreon supporters, at least for the time being.
In the meantime, I already generated a bunch of wallpapers (10 in fact) from the backgrounds I engineered for the talk and variants of those and I will be releasing them in small batches, starting with this one! They are available to all my Patreon supporters!
Outside of my talk, Indiecade Europe was very nice! I met a lot of very cool people and had some very interesting chats! I also went to delicious food places, always well-accompanied! All-in-all it felt super good!
As usual I want to thank my Patreon supporters for their continued support because I would be leading a very different life without them! Here are the name of all the 3$+ supporters:
☆Joseph White, ☆Spaceling, ☆Ryan Malm, Anne Le Clech, rotatetranslate, Andreas Bretteville, Austin East, berkfrei, Bitzawolf, Chris McCluskey, Christian Östman, Cole Smith, Dan Lewis, Dan Rees-Jones, Dave Hoffman, Flo Devaux, Giles Graham, HERVAN, HJS, Jearl, Jefff, Joel Jorgensen, Marcin Majewski, Marty Kovach, Meru, Paul Nguyen, Reza Esmaili, Sasha Bilton, slono, Thomas Wright, Tim and Alexandra Swast, Wojciech Rak, Zachary Cook, amy, Andrew Reitano, Brent Werness, Collin Caldwell, Finn Ellis, Giovan, Jakub Wasilewski, Pat LaBine, Qristy Overton, Sam Loeschen, Andrew Reist, hushcoil, Jacel the Thing, Jesse Bergerstock, Max Cahill, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, vaporstack, yunowadidis-musik
This week went actually quite well! The preparation for Indiecade was intense and stressful but rather productive, and the event itself went really well!
This new week, I’m working on a thing to make generating wallpapers easier for me, then I’m transcribing my talk, and then I’m porting a small Pico-8 thing of mine into SUGAR! An idea came to me and I want to check how feasible it is. I’ll let you know more about that next week!
Have a very nice week!
Take care!
TRASEVOL_DOG
* TRASEVOL_DOG * 
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