April 21, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on New EXO ONE trailer and Kickstarter campaign coming soon!
Very excited to be taking EXO ONE to Kickstarter to complete the game, and at a higher standard than would be possible on my own.
I’d really appreciate if you’re a fan of the game, to help me spread the word, whether that’s simply hitting Like on social media, Re-Tweeting, or just telling friends. You can follow Exbleative’s Kickstarter profile page here, and when the campaign goes live, you’ll be notified immediately.
Here are some other ways you can track the project and keep up to date:
At the same time, I’ll be revealing a shiny new trailer that will be featuring in the Kickstarter. Here’s a taste!
I’ve been really working hard to get this all out since I returned from Rezzed a couple of weeks ago (hi again if I met you there!), and look forward to sharing the Kickstarter URL and trailer with you all very shortly.
Earlier this year I got a rather excellent email notifying me that I’d been selected to show EXO ONE in EGX Rezzed’s Leftfield collection, a curated selection of indie games. I had set my expectations and hopes for Rezzed to go something like this:
Have some fun at the event
Meet some cool new people
Hopefully appear in at least 1 or 2 articles
See old friends and family
All of those things happened + more!
The things as they happened
Day 0
The day before Rezzed, things started off super rocky. As I arrived to set up and test the game, it was rendering with a pure black sky. I had backup builds, but this appeared to be more a bug or incompatibility with a graphics card. Luckily, I checked the build logs and pasted the error line into Google and one other person reported the same issue, solved by downloading the 2010 Direct X SDK.
The phew’ing was deafening. Almost paid $1500 for a ticket to Rezzed to look at some other people’s games! Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. I’d of had to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.
Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. It’d be awkward to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.
I put my poster up, chatted with a few people from Leftfield and grabbed food with Jai from FINIFUGU.
Here’s the poster at my station, drawn by Tim McBurnie:
Day 1
Used my London coffee app to find ONLY THE BEST coffee, in this case, the closest was LMNH Kitchen (look mum no hands). Truly an important step that cannot be overlooked!
Bumped into Andreas of Promoter app fame, who thought I was the event organizer, David Hayward (this seemed to happen to numerous, different people throughout the event, which was odd). Andreas was also showing his game, Future Unfolding. I had some really amazing moments after playing it for just 10 minutes. His description goes like, “Future Unfolding is an action adventure that is all about exploration. Your goal is to unfold the mysteries and solve the puzzles hidden in the beautiful landscapes around you. There are no tutorials, and no one is telling you what to do.” I definitely advise not to look at trailers or anything before playing.
We had breakfast/coffee here on all three days and I really enjoyed chatting game dev, promoter app/biz stuff and events in general. It was nice to start each day at Rezzed with such great food, coffee and company! Andreas is a real dude, and his app looks quite good too, I’ll probably try it on the lead up to EXO ONE’s release.
This was just one of many real-dude encounters I had during the show. I’m not sure what it was about all the people in Leftfield, but I seemed to get along really well with everyone. In particular, since they shared my wall/opposite wall, I got to chat a lot with Jai, the guys from Alpixels (A Place for the Unwilling) , Joe from Four Last Things, Richard Boeser from Chalo Chalo , the PjamaLlamians who are making Flotsam, and the girls from Oniri Islands. Some of these peeps I felt an instant connection with, and it makes me kinda sad they’re now on the opposite side of the world.
This first day was kinda quiet, and there was occasionally some down time, but it was nice to be able to ease into things.
I had one press meeting that went well and resulted in me appearing in this:
After the first day I went and met an old Londonian friend for drinks, but I was so dead from not taking a break all day that I had to return to home base and eat, immediately followed by sleep. Didn’t seem to get much in the way of jet lag, luckily.
Day 2
This was a little busier than Day 1, got lots of good feedback, ideas, etc, all of which I wrote down during the day. Had another press meet up today which resulted in EXO ONE being included in this article, which painted the game in quite a glowing light!
This is the Outside Xtra trio who came and hooked up their gear to do a bit of an impromptu Let’s Play of the game. The video isn’t out yet (and there was some sound technical issues) but I can’t wait to see it. Outside Xtra have quite a fan following, and during a ‘meet’ event at Rezzed I heard they had a line that stretched half of the building.
After the day was over, there was the The Rock Paper Shotgun drinks night, and a bunch of the Leftfieldians went out for dinner beforehand, which was at an old pub overlooking the Thames. Then I met and hung out with another old friend from when I used to live in London, who introduced me to some cool people. I didn’t do much in the way of networking with press, though. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m trying to befriend them partly to improve my chances of them writing about my game. Maybe a missed opportunity, I dunno. I seemed to do fine regardless.
Day 3
This was the busiest day, and I’d often be standing a couple rows deep behind my game. I’m still told Rezzed is a pretty quiet event in the scheme of things. Again, nice to just ease into my first big event instead of DIVE in the deep end.
Met up with and hung out with a couple more friends and contacts on this day as well. Despite the larger numbers of people, I possibly talked to players less because I was just pushed back (or wanted to get out the way so others could watch). So it wasn’t manic or anything.
Had dinner after with some Leftfielders again then I was convinced to attend the after party, which was good fun with yet more games in every room. Checked out some of the retro games and played a bit of Joe Bain’s new game, Yucatan, which was super madness fun! There was some crowd based game in another room I think, but didn’t get to see it!
Press
I think my press strategy was pretty ‘normal’. I suppose I often thought I needed to be doing some secret tricks or ‘know people’ or something special to really get noticed and stand out, etc. But now that the event is over and I got basically the best response I could have ever hoped for, I guess the basics worked pretty well.
Before the event, I made the following Rezzed trailer that I pinned to my Twitter, saying I’d be at Rezzed, along with my email address (no it wasn’t even spammed):
I emailed around 20 writers/game sites/YouTubers with somewhat personalized emails (more so if I knew more about them) saying essentially, “come play EXO ONE at Rezzed Leftfield”, and included the above, very short video. Got 2 solid meeting times, maybe 2-3 “I’ll come over at some point, whenevzies” and a bunch of ignores. Some ignores ended up turning up regardless, but I don’t know whether that was from my email or just because they happened to be in Leftfield. I talked to a handful of other developers in Leftfield about their press outreach efforts, and most did nothing at all, so if that was common within Leftfield or Rezzed in general, then contacting the press potentially puts you a step ahead just by pressing send.
I ordered 3 t-shirts online which I could have spent too much time on, but ended up just using my EXO ONE logo on the front and back, with “developer” written on the back, so if anyone was looking to chat with the developer, they could easily spot me.
Press Stealth Abilities
Something I noticed about press at the event was that almost all of them (unless I’d set up a meeting) liked to fly in under the radar and play without me spotting/recognizing them. That worked for a few people who I saw write/tweet about the game afterward, but otherwise, if I recognized someone I just said so. Otherwise, I’d risk being weird (sorry, person I was totally weird to!). I imagine this is done so the developer doesn’t bug them too much or affect their play experience any more than it should. Generally, I just said something like, “the tutorial is kinda bad right now, so if you need any help lemme know”, then I left them to it.
I definitely felt that fan-boy factor a little with some people I met, but I had some great chats with press, gamers and devs alike. For the most part, with press, they’d come play the game, ask between 0 and a dozen questions then take off pretty quickly. Wasn’t overly hard, and while I practiced a bunch of practice answers to questions, many never came up.
After the event, I wrote and thanked anyone who wrote about EXO ONE, if I had their email address/Twitter.
Tweets ‘n Articles
Here’s most of the press/tweets I got during the event and after:
Rezzed people. If you've not seen Exo One, go see Exo One.
Damn it, I didn’t meet Terry! Terry is one of these darned people who don’t use a photo on their Twitter profile, I didn’t recognise him! I do recall seeing he was showing his game before flying over, but slipped my mind once I was there. I may have met him or Ruari as I recall one of the State Machine (his game) devs chatting to me. Tried to go play before open one day but someone was on it. Huge fan of Super Hexagon, so would have liked to have gone and been a weird fanboy/say hi briefly :P
Ordered about 500 and used a quarter of them, mostly taken by gamers. I put a screenshot on the front and some words (game name, my name, contact details) on the back.
Newsletter
One small error perhaps I could have improved would have been some way to sign people up to the newsletter at the event. The Flotsam guys had some kinda small iPad with a sign-up form on it, others went for the handwritten method. I guess the handwritten way stands out as being a mailing list quite obviously due to the email addresses on it, while the iPad kinda requires prompting (“hey you, sign up for our newsletter?”).
I’m not sure how many people went home then signed up for the EXO ONE mailing list, but over the entire event I added about 80 people to my list. Really don’t know if this is “good” or not.
Before the event, I asked everyone I knew for advice, including some people I didn’t know. This resulted in a couple of meetings that might not have otherwise happened, various tips/tricks for events, who to look out for (I hadn’t heard of OutsideXtra for example), introductions to press, how to keep my expectations realistic for a single, small-ish event and more.
What did I learn about EXO ONE?
The biggest stand out problem with the game was the first tutorial level, which is going to be getting some major love and redesigning soon. The camera I’m using hates the kinds of movement you can do in the starting level, and I throw a bunch of controls at the player and pray they remember (they never do). So this resulted in many players not ‘getting’ the game as they were missing pieces of the puzzle. Most people that I helped out ended up getting the hang of it, and luckily all press did too.
I got mixed feedback on the story, but I’d say fairly overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the story as-is, but also some very convincing “you should make it less literal” arguments.
Also received a handful of comments that there were too many controls. Mentioned this to some other Leftfielders and of course heard the opposite, “I had no problem with the controls”. Simpler is definitely better, but I feel like I might be able to remove at least one control combo (like holding two things to glide up for example).
Thankfully most of the feedback hit exactly the mark I was going for, with comments like:
That was super relaxing
It was mesmerizing
The sense of speed and feeling you get when you reach the clouds is amazing
I could just watch it all day
Like the Adelaide games event before (AVCON), people sat to play and didn’t want to get off. I should have forced an end timer on the demo as people had to wait ages to play in some cases. I was lucky the musician, Rhys, told me to shorten the first level, since even after doing so, people sometimes asked me if they could ever reach the transport structures in the distance. A classic example of the game developer being too good (fast) at their own game.
Quick Notes on Other Games
Since this post is getting long… Quick bullets on other games (I mentioned Future Unfolding above) that were near me and I played in Leftfield.
Great multiplayer iPad game that uses physical chess-like pieces (cute little figures) to move characters around on screen. Great for playing with kids.
Intriguing ‘mini-society’ and village full of characters whom you interact with and have influence over/effects on during ‘end times’. Great spooky vibes!
Those rolling quadrupeds… I saw some really, really weird stuff happen in this game during the event! I jumped on for 2 minutes, but think I need to have a proper go and hear the narration/music to really get into it.
Special Thanks
…to David Hayward for organizing the event, it went off without a hitch! And thanks to SEGA for sponsoring Leftfield.
It really was an amazing event, surrounded by awesome people and great games! With any luck, I’ll bump into some of my new friends again at another games event… *sniff*!
Edge
I’ve left the best till last! I’m wildly excited to announce that next month (May) EXO ONE is getting a 2-page preview in Edge magazine! So pumped! I’m not a huge games magazine reader, but whenever I do pick one up, it’s always Edge!
Next – Kickstarter
I’ve increasingly gone from ‘maybe doing a Kickstarter’ to ‘probably doing one’ to ‘doing one’ to ‘most likely doing one in May’. It takes time to build up the courage, you see. I’m going to get some advice on exact dates, but that’s my current thoughts. I’ll be announcing an exact date soon, so if this is something you’re interested in, you can sign up to my newsletter below:
Since I’ve got a build done for Indiecade, pressure is off a bit for Rezzed, as even if the game dies often, I’ll be there to restart it etc. My biggest fear is I’ll be overseas without my PC and unable to fix any issues that occur. I’m most concerned that there could be some kind of graphics card incompatibility or some other thing that causes the game to run badly or fail, but I’ve tested the game on a number of friends computers with no issues so far.
I took Monday and half of Tuesday off to recover from working most of the weekend into an all-nighter. Now:
Final Rezzed Tasks
Monday
Ensure my build shortcuts work so we can just load planets from wherever we are. ~30 mins
Fine tune camera some more ~30 mins
Script energy spheres so they’re closer to the ground for new players to pick up more easily. Couldn’t get a handle on what my dumb code was doing, gonna bail on this for now at least ~30mins
Try to get level restarting working again ~3 hrs :(
I wasn’t looking close enough at my debug logs ordering or my if else logic!
Improve timing on navigation icon hint animation ~15 mins
Tuesday
More camera fine tuning ~30 mins
Improve planet 2 ~4 hours
Hanging out probably a bit too much on William Chyr’s excellent Manifold Garden stream :P Highly recommended occasionally though, especially if you’re a solo dev. ~2 hrs
Wednesday
New creature stuff for 2nd planet ~ 3 hrs
Integration with MapMagic ~30 mins
Directional vector UI stuff ~2 hrs
Bug fixing above! ~30 mins
Thursday
Further creature improvements ~1hr
Profiling above. Oops it runs like hell :/ ~30 mins
Improving planet 2 biomes, variation. ~2 hrs
Testing ~30 mins
Rezzed prep work ~1 hr
Build testing/uploading ~30 mins
Friday
Not really going to add anything of substance from here on, it’s Friday, I’m leaving Monday for 1 1/2 weeks, so I’m going to make sure it works properly then pack tomorrow and chill out before the hell that is international flying on Monday.
Air particlezzz! I’m embarrassed to say ~3 hrs (it’s hard to get these just right!)
Tweaking both planets ~3hrs
Tweaking lighting ~1 hr
Rezzed prep ~30 mins
Saturday
Final testing has picked up a bug with the wormhole sequence where the screen goes black (but game continues afterward). So this will be my last task before flying off. If anyone going to Rezzed is reading this, I’ll cya there, hopefully without a buggy game on my hands!
My main priority this week (or the first day or two) will be completing my wormhole upgrade, complete with smoother transitions and loading. With any luck it’ll just be a few hours, but I seem to have introduced some new bugs at the same time.
Then I’m back onto a bit of story related stuff, and after that I might reassess what to do next for this Rezzed build.
Monday
Smooth wormhole transitions ~6 hrs
Fixing new WH related bugs ~2 hrs
“Pro” coding tip and OMGTHX to Mr Rhys Lindsay, our EXO ONE musician:
If you start a coroutine from one script on another, ie “StartCoroutine(AnotherScript.instance.thing())” and then destroy your scipt/unload the scene, your coroutine will be destroyed, and you will wonder for HOURS why the helllll said coroutine fails to continue…!
Cleaning up from yesterday. Wormholes mostly working as intended now. Didn’t really get the nice super smooth transitions I wanted by loading the next level in the wormhole, but I think that is perhaps a much bigger task than I realised.
Wormhole clean up completed, bugs removed ~3 hrs
Fixing up overlays a bit when wormhole camera comes on, but still a very average solution. Think I might need some kinda ‘overlay’ camera that handles all my post processing! ~1hr
Fixed random sound loss on first planet ~30 mins
Tutorial tweaks ~30 mins
A whole bunch of other tweaks, now that everything is working again! ~2 hrs
Profiling/fixing some resource hogs
Fixed wrong ground contact sound in tutorial
Added wormhole exit effects to 2nd planet
etc
So, happy to report game is buildable and pretty much bug free.
Wednesday
Going to profile the game a bit and see how the frame rate is, if there’s any easy wins to make it smoother. Noticed some frame hiccups near monoliths, for example…
Sole remaining bugs:
Null ref on some sounds. ~30mins
Somehow at some point, the ParticlePlayground (plugin) manager disappeared from the wormhole scene, which meant I couldn’t turn it back on… Took me ages to realise this! ~2hrs…!
Then I wrestled unsuccessfully with why, in editor, the wormhole transition looks fine, but colors break in the build… ~2hrs
Similar to above where the entire game start screen was broken in build but not editor… ~1hr
Sucky day!
Thursday
Wasted another day in town waiting for my car to be re-repaired (they didn’t fix it the first time…)
Now I need to hunt down why there’s issues with my build, but not the editor. Checking:
Player log for any errors. Went in and fixed some warnings just in case.
Noticed maybe we weren’t in the right quality setting… That wasn’t it.
Logs pointed to my scene loading stuff, realised the intro scene wasn’t loading. Put in a million debug lines.
Tracked it down to (I guess due to load speeds between build and editor) the wormhole scene not finishing loading in time and messing up a coroutine sequence
2 hrs
Perhaps not overly wise (I don’t know?) I updated the camera system to reduce the amount of cliff/ground staring you can do sometimes! Still needs fine tuning but liking the result ~2hrs.
Friday
Indiecade E3 deadline is tomorrow, and I’m wondering whether to submit to that or not.
Pros:
Might have less competition with other submissions because it’s the earliest submission date
Could send it and ‘forget it’/not spend more time on event/award submissions for a while.
Cons:
Potentially lower my chances of being selected because I have less time to improve the game
Barely enough time right now to test the build
I’m going to work assuming I’ll submit for the e3 deadline, then see where I get up to and make a decision tonight/tomorrow morning.
Tasks for tonight’s deadline
Restarting levels/game is a bit broken. Perhaps not a massive problem, especially if I make a note to restart the exe instead, I dunno. Not a great foot to put forward… “my game is broke so don’t press THIS button”.
Had a huge amount of trouble getting this to work in wormholes as I was async loading the next level in the wormhole, and you can’t cancel async operations… Gave up on pause in wormhole! ~3 hrs wasted
Checking normal pause/restart stuff working ~1 hr
Perhaps minor color bug when we enter a wormhole in the tutorial. Ignoring!
Decide whether to fix or remove some new ‘story-like’ feature in the 2nd world (don’t want to spoil) which isn’t 100% working. Fixed this, took ages ~3 hrs
Fine tune new camera stuff or just use old one?
Had a play and had the new stuff working quite fast so sticking with new ~30 mins
Not obvious enough ‘objective arrow’. Use some combination of:
Text/blinking text (at least at start/level load, then turn off). “Energy signature”.
Start the arrow size large/blinking then quickly reduce size.
~1 hr (still not obvious enough!)
Final testing
Picked up lots of restart level/restart game issues. Restart level I removed completely as I was stumped and had no time left. ~2 hrs
Numerous other tweaks to planets, UI, sound, etc, etc. ~2 hrs
Profiling for frame rate issues ~1 hr
Playing through the entire build many many times ~2 hrs.
I ended up pulling an all-nighter to get this finished before the deadline. I still had ~4 hours before the deadline, but I opted to work all night just in case it came down to the wire.
Also quite badly underestimated how much work was required for the Indiecade submission in terms of text. They needed ~300 word answers to a bunch of questions, and that was rather hard at 5-6 am. Took me another hour or two.
Now going to take a day or two off to recharge before Rezzed!
March 13, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on 3 Weeks Until Rezzed Countdown
Last week I created a fully playable build that I submitted to Amaze and Momocon that I could take with me to Rezzed. So on the one hand, I could decide to use that and focus more on long-term tasks, but at the same time there’s not much downside if I work on some stuff and either don’t complete them or the build breaks at the last minute or whatever.
Rezzed build tasks this week
The current weak points I’m thinking of trying to bring up are:
Loading between scenes/wormholes is a bit janky still.
Harsh cut-off in audio between scene loads
No fading in/out (need to develop a system that can be used in many situations)
Kinda two different wormhole effects, need to adjust the old to match the new
3rd person camera not handling non-terrain objects at all. Don’t like my chances of fixing this but will have a go for a day at least.
Still unsure if I should change up the tutorial level.
Occasional performance issues
In terms of just adding more stuff, I find it a little hard to prioritize. Maybe:
Story related stuff (won’t elaborate cos spoilers)
Third planet
Wot I Gone Got Done On Mon
Added story stuff and system for unique cutscenes on each planet ~2 hrs
Removed ability to endlessly jump in clouds ~15mins
Rezzed trailer changes based on feedback ~1 hr
Fixed lightning sounds in clouds ~15 mins
Tuesday
Zero done – had car problems, needed to take to the service shop for the day.
Wednesday
Trailer Mk2 ~2hrs
Story sequence stuff ~2 hrs
Emailing journalists and YouTubers for Rezzed ~4 hrs
Here’s the teaser for Rezzed. This went over pretty well and is looking to soon have over 100 likes and 20 RTs:
Thursday
Fixed crappy tutorial camera. Made it follow faster (easier to keep track of where we are) and fixed the collision with walls. You used to be able to see through walls…! 1hr
Better wormhole transitions (required a bit of reworking of a bunch of stuff) ~2hrs
Improved tutorial sequence so it’s more focused. All text/directions are just top center without the fluff/distraction text on the left. ~30 mins
Had a great meeting with Adelaide’s Emilia Chignola (IGDA/Two Lives Left) and Carmine Fantarella (Icebox/Games of Edan) about my game, plans, Rezzed plans, PR/marketing stuff, etc. Two of the most helpful and nicest peeps I’ve met! ~2.5hrs
Friday
Noticed the earliest IndieCade deadline is rolling around in a week… Can’t believe it’s almost been a year since I submitted last! I’ll definitely put something together, but not sure which deadline.
Completing wormhole transitions. This was a far bigger task than anticipated, needed to rework how all the level loading worked…! About 95% the way to finished, though. Took all day!
March 3, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on Weekly EXO ONE Dev Log 3-3-2017
So the big completed tasks last week were the story (for Rezzed anyway), voice acting, wormhole art, flights booked for Rezzed and accommodation sorted. Inserting the narration should be pretty straightforward, my biggest task will just be getting the wormholes integrated properly. This might take a couple hours or a couple days!
Planned Tasks This Week
Wormhole transitions ~1 day
PR leading up to Rezzed ~2 days
Integrating new voice over narration ~ 1 day
Submit game to some upcoming game events/competitions
More tweaks to second planet ~ 1 day
Monday
Engage crunch mode for 30th March event submissions :/
Wormhole transitions completed ~3 hrs
Wormhole narration based on current progression, complete ~30 mins
New demo end point complete ~30 mins
Testing latest build ~30 mins
shared with musician, Rhys Lindsay for second planet music score
Planet 2 ~ 2hrs
Unique intro
Optimizing biomes
New music added
New narration in ~2 hrs
Build testing ~1hr
Pretty great day!
Tuesday
Final push before submission to Amaze and Momocon
Changed music from endless looping to play, then silence, then play once more 2 minutes later. Also removed music from tutorial.
Tweaks to planet 2 as it was somewhat repetitive and flat
Shortened both levels for Rezzed and event submissions. Unsure how long to have each planet go for! I think ‘good’ players will knock off a level in 5 minutes, while maybe new players will take 2x that.
Testing ~2 hrs
Various other tweaks… all day :P
Submitted to both events
Wednesday
Boring tax hell ~3 hrs
PR stuff ~4 hrs
In gross hot weather. Worst day ever!
Thursday
More PR stuff!
Some poster planning for Rezzed
Redoing higher rez logo
Updated presskit
Friday
PR… …. stuff! (not my favorite week ever) ~2 hrs
New, short trailer for Rezzed ~3 hrs (just gotta think about when to time release on this)
Returning to work on the Rezzed build ~2 hrs
Kinda boring week in general with so much time spent just emailing people, organising Rezzed, tax, etc. And the Amaze/Monocon applications kinda killed me as I stayed up really late finishing them. Would have been nice to have a new screenshot or gif to share at least! Hopefully next week I’ll have that poster or trailer or new music to share.
Some news – I’m flying to Rezzed in London, boom! With some help from a very gracious family member, I’ll be heading over for the event and will be making the most of it while I’m there, and hope to meet some new friends, players, developers and press. I lived in London for a year (a few years back) and kinda only made a couple of contacts, but it’s amazing how much help just a couple of people can be. Especially when they have some experience under their belt.
Well, after a slow one last week, my weekly task list isn’t dissimilar to last!
Planned Tasks
Schedule out Rezzed, buy flights, book accommodation, contact people I’ll be meeting over there. 1 day.
Finishing touches to story. Might actually add a day to this to get some final feedback. 1 day.
Send story off to voice actor.
Wormhole transitions. This will take as long as I kinda want it to… So far there’s just a super simple wormhole effect, and for time’s sake I might keep it this way for now and just make sure it works 100%. Currently it is quite janky. 1 day.
Contacting some games press pre-Rezzed.
If all goes well, finishing Planet 2 (art/level design) 2 days.
T-Shirt time wasting I mean design (I did some stuff I didn’t like then just went with the EXO ONE logo…) ~1.5hrs
More wormhole sounds ~30mins
Integrating wormholes into level transitions ~1hr
Rezzed related planning took up a bit of my head space this week but made some decent progress. My nerves leading up to Rezzed will be calmed just as soon as you can play the game through to the second planet, wormholes, narration and all. Hoping this week will be the week, then I can just tweak things!
I’m going to work towards making this blog more interesting for people to read, which means:
a) less updates (some days not much happens, or boring things!)
b) more in each post, with the fluff cut out. Or, all the same fluff in, but perhaps I’ll reduce the text/bullet size or make it expandable if you care.
c) more time spent editing/crafting less posts = a better read.
I’ll therefore edit this post as I go from Monday morning and it’ll come out near the end of the week.
Pre-Rezzed Goalz
My terrible stand-in voice to be replaced with a voice actor’s (2-3 days of back and forths perhaps)
Some story/narrative tweaks (2-3 days). Will see if I can get any ‘quick wins’. Story will most likely change more after Rezzed so I’m not going to go crazy with this now.
Improve tutorial level somewhat. Probably greatly increase its size so it more closely matches the planets (right now it’s one small room). Add a skip tutorial button, incase people wanna get on with it. 3-4 days.
Finish Planet 2. 4-5 days.
Planet 1 to Planet 2 transition (wormhole). 3-4 days.
Sort out what I’ll be doing for PR for Rezzed Leftfield. Shouldn’t be a huge amount of my time… 1-2 days?
Final testing. 2-3 days.
This all comes out to about 4-5 weeks. Rezzed is in 9 weeks, which lets me do the classic doubling of my time estimates ‘because game development’. The weakest point of the game (my voice over) will be brought wayyy up, and the second planet introduced, which are the two main things. If I get the rest done, that’s a bonus.
This week’s EXO ONE Goalz
I’ve been lining up meetings with some PR people/companies and will be chatting with them this/next week.
I’ve also seen a couple of publishers who I think might be a good fit. However, I’m not totally sold on the concept of having one, but I think I need to chat with them and see if they can change my mind. So I’ll try and line up chats with them.
Since I’ll be working with a voice actor, I’ll work first on the story/lines of dialog (2 days) before handing those over. Then, while I wait to get the audio back (and maybe revisions) I can carry on with:
Planet 1 to 2 transition. Since I’d be happy-ish showing Planet 2 in its current state, I’ll first make sure the planet 1 to 2 wormhole works. That might take me the rest of the week, interspersed with the above + pr related stuff. If I get it done quickly, then I improve Planet 2.
Mid Week Progress
Talking Rezzed
I haven’t been super productive with a whole lot of uncertainty surrounding if/how I’ll be going to Rezzed. I’ve ended up contacting not only a couple of existing contacts in the UK, but also PR and other people who have been to Rezzed in the past, to try and get their thoughts. A sampling of advice I’ve received and things I’ve learned:
Don’t go to events if it’s a huge chunk of your budget, but
It’s super important for building relationships with press, developers and publishers.
You’ll never make a return on investment by going to events.
There’s far less chance your game will be covered if you aren’t there and you aren’t lining up meetings.
Press probably won’t talk or meet with you if you haven’t built relationships with them already.
You can just pull in press who walk by!
OMG PR is so expensive.
PR was totally worth it
PR did nothing for us
Advice is super conflicting :)
EXO ONE Story
In between emailing people, I’ve been looking at the story and trying not to rewrite it ‘completely’ and just tweak some stuff. I’m not a super experienced writer, and I have a good idea what kinda story I want, but feel a bit of a gap between where the story is and where I want it to be. I’ve gone two days over schedule already working on this, so I definitely have to move on tomorrow.
I’ve had some interesting new ideas, which is good. Also tightened up and fixed a bunch of stuff which was far more obvious after having time away.
End of Week Wrap
Well, this week was unfortunately not among my most productive. Again as I’m not a writer, I wonder how normal it is to spend long amounts of time just in thought, not actively doing much, just thinking/trying to come up with stuff. The story for EXO ONE is highly restrictive in some ways but unlimited in others, and I find it hard to reach good solutions for certain problems. Having said that, I feel like I’ve just come up with some decent stuff this Friday afternoon. A re-read tomorrow/Monday will determine if I still like it, though.
Didn’t even start on the wormhole/planet transition stuff as I’m still not quite happy with the story. If I like it on Monday, I’ll polish it a little more and send it to my voice actor, then move onto wormholes for realz!
February 10, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on EXO ONE end of week update – 10 Feb 2017
Have been scrambling about doing all sorts of stuff this week after hearing EXO ONE would be at Rezzed. Partially getting over excited maybe, but also wanting to maximize the opportunity and make the game look its best for the end of March. So to that effect I’ve been:
Sweating in the 40C heat here in Adelaide with no air con in my office
Improving both planets
Finalizing the height map for Planet 2
Working on final details/grass/rocks etc for Planet 2
Had a ‘breakthrough’ realisation of how we can more easily see through clouds and keep our bearings at the same time
Emailing a swathe of people I know in game dev, generally asking for their thoughts about the whole Rezzed thing and how I should handle it (since I probably won’t be flying over)
Turning up my PR/Marketing efforts. Mostly feels like to no effect whatsoever, lol. Either I’m bad at it or it just takes a far bigger, longer concerted effort than I think! Made me think of Jacob Leichty’s (from Astroneer)Tweet:
Twitter is for deleting the notion in your mind of "I wonder if anyone cares"
I’m pretty sure people care about your game Jacob, stop complaining, omggg!! :)
For my marketing troubles last week (I probably spent almost 2 solid days doing nothing but…) I gained 3 newsletter subscribers and a handful of Twitter followers. Boom! It also seems that Reddit somehow dislikes me about as much as I dislike it…! I’m joking, I love Reddit, I just hate posting anything to it, because I get downvoted and comments like this:
Somehow nothing I ever post there gets any love at all. I feel like Reddit is like this:
“You did something great? You’re personally telling us about it? Go away!!”
However… if…
“My friend did this and now that happened and OMG isn’t that amazing?!” Upvote!!!
Ok, end of rant. Back to work. I officially abandon all Reddit hope lol.
February 8, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on EXO ONE Selected for EGX Rezzed Leftfield!
Super stoked to announce that last week I was notified that EXO ONE has been selected to be shown at EGX Rezzed, a London games event, as part of their Leftfield indie games collection. EXO ONE was chosen from a record number of submissions and will be featured alongside 17 other games. Check them all out here.
The event will take place on March 30-April 1 and if you happen to be in London, you’ll be able to go play it, complete with the 2nd, and maybe 3rd planets.
This will be the second event EXO ONE has shown at, after debuting at AVCON last year.
I actually attended Rezzed 5 years ago when I lived in London, and met some really cool people, including Chris England from the indie hit Xenonauts. I’d love to attend again with EXO ONE, but the cost may be a bit prohibitive. Spending money on international flights is a slight luxury right now! I’ll be looking into who might be able to take my place so to speak, but if all else fails, it sounds like the Leftfield guys have everyone covered with a bunch of their own people that will be there to troubleshoot/take photos/generally help out.
Crossing my fingers (and beginning some actual planning) for some good coverage of the game. Will see what comes of it! Can’t wait!
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