A quick update on what I’ve been working on for Exo One this past couple of weeks, now that Kickstarter is pretty well settled for now:
The new version of the backer preview build should now work for 4k screens/odd resolutions. Check your Humble email/download link if you had issues in the past.
Worked on the story for a couple of days.
Rhys fixed an old, annoying camera bug. In some situations the camera would tilt annoyingly. Still one or two other oddities to fix yet.
Slight ‘wing tip trail’ upgrade on the craft in glider mode.
Partial world streaming tests. Instead of generating terrain in real time, I’ve pre-generated it in a huge area, which results in a big performance gain, and hopefully no frame rate spikes for people without beast CPUs. There’s still plenty to explore, but this would mean no more infinite terrain. With the focus of the game more on the movement and feels, and without a huge amount of ‘content’ to find, I think this is fine. I’m still yet to complete testing this as I have to actually stream the terrain in. Have to see if there’s a framerate spike from that next.
As part of optimization tests, I’ve tested baked lighting as the terrain now exists (pre-generated) before the game starts. This would mean a slight improvement in distant shadows, but unsure if I’ll be using it as I have less control over lighting (afaik, need to spend a little more time) and there would be a huge lightmap generate time for the number of terrains.
Pre-generated, streamed terrain (if they’re as smooth as I hope) will have a number of other advantages visually as well, since I won’t have to try quite so hard to keep frame rates super high to account for frame rate spikes.
Terminus Nominee – best game/design. Pleased to announce Exo One was a close runner up/nominee for Best Game and Best Game Design for TERMINUS this year. Full details: https://terminusevent.squarespace.com/2017-award-winners
Wind air currents. These are nice little atmospheric objects you can find if you look for them. If you manage to get inside the air current, they will give you a speed boost. I may toy with other ideas like having your controls become harder to handle within as well, so you have to ‘wrestle with’ the turbulence/speed.
First Ansel Tests. While this didn’t work in Unity 5.4, now that I’m in 5.6 we are in business. Just need to remove my own camera controls while in Ansel mode to make this work, since now the camera controls are competing with Ansel’s. Below is just a silly retro snap:
New trueSky, MapMagic, material updates. Here’s a screenshot of Sagan4 with the latest versions of these plugins, using MegaSplat for their rather awesome texture clustering (minimizes tiling effects):
AVCON. If you’re in Adelaide and are coming to AVCON, I’ll see you there! Unsure yet whether I’ll be bringing an older or newer version of the game. Might depend on what state the current build is in.
Catch you for the next update, where I hope to have made some solid progress on planet streaming!
I’ve had a little time to decompress, and since then I’ve been doing the following things:
Managing all the rewards/surveys/spreadsheets post-Kickstarter.
Some add-on rewards (the self-print poster) will be sent out shortly. Just trying to minimize the time I spend sending out rewards as new survey results trickle in.
Trying to track down a small number of show-stopper bugs for some players, but not having much luck. This is thankfully only a tiny number of players as far as I know.
Upgrading Unity to 5.6 for its various speed improvements and new plugin versions, which are also offering speed improvements on top.
Experimenting a little with Voxeland, a Voxel terrain plugin for Unity (integration 1000% unconfirmed!) by the creator of Map Magic
Posting a bunch of new bug reports for all the issues I’m running into while upgrading to 5.6
Boring stuff like accounting/tax planning for the Kickstarter money
Next
Moving forward, I’ll be working with Rhys and Tim to plan out the next planets and the music to go with them.
I’ll be completing the Tidal Locked world and optimizing it. Since I created it during the Kickstarter, it was a bit more thrown together than usual, and I’ll likely need to combine all three biomes into one for performance reasons, as all three biomes generate at once due to their close proximity to one another.
I’ll also be integrating fixes from plugin developers as they come in for Unity 5.6.
Plus, I’ll be setting up a pre-order page for Exo One via Humble Bundle too, probably so that pre-order customers get instant access to the backer preview build.
Since survey responses have now slowed to only a couple of responses a day, you can probably expect to receive your Rezzed poster add-on (if you pledged for it) today or tomorrow. Please fill out your survey if you haven’t already!
Polls
I’ll be sending out the first backer-poll very shortly, stay tuned!
Off Topic, Other Games
After an almost games-free Kickstarter month, I’ve finally had downtime to get back to playing a few games. Lately, I’m back on Rocket League, and having a few games of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.
I also tried Klei’s Oxygen Not Included, which I liked, but perhaps feels just a little too much like work for me to want to spend that much time with it. When I’m working on solving coding puzzles and business problems all day, somehow base-building/management stuff doesn’t appeal as much as driving around whacking a ball in Rocket League!
Oh, I also tried the new dirt tracks on iRacing, really great physics! I had one race and finished 3rd in my (super low skill!) tier :)
Finally, check out this amazing looking game I spotted via all the E3 press:
I could watch this 1000 times! If all I do is press a button to advance the pretty graphics, I’m sold!
Catch you for the next update, hopefully with a screenshot or two from Unity 5.6!
EXO ONE is a momentum-based, exoplanetary exploration game being developed mostly by myself (Jay Weston) in Unity. Players pilot a strange, spherical alien craft that can manipulate the laws of gravity, on mankind’s first ill-fated mission outside the solar system. The gameplay mechanics are inspired by games like Tiny Wings (iOS), Journey (PS3), and Tribes Ascend (PC). Every aspect of the game is laser focussed towards delivering an entrancing, flowing and exhilarating feeling of movement across a range of alien exoplanets.
EXO ONE at EGX Rezzed
After being selected to show the game in the EGX Rezzed: Leftfield Collection in London, EXO ONE received praise from a range of media at the event, going on to be named among the events top games by Eurogamer and The Guardian (among others!).
Edge-y
This month, Edge magazine, in a 2-page preview, said, “Tiny Wings, Journey and Kubrick collide in this sci-fi delight”.
This is a real career highlight for me, I can’t say I ever expected to see my name or my game in its pages. And yes, it’ll be framed on my wall for alllll timmmeee! Now all I have to do is live up to the hype! Eep!
The New Reveal Trailer
You can watch the Reveal Trailer, launching today to coincide with the Kickstarter:
The trailer shows for the first time substantially more gameplay, as well as the future-historian narrator that features throughout the game.
Kickstarter
So after over a year of development on the game, I decided to move forward with the Kickstarter launch to raise the quality bar, and help fund the remaining 8-9 months of development. Myself, along with Rhys Lindsay (our musician) and Tim Mcburnie (artist) will be looking for $35,000 AUD (or $26,000 USD) to complete all 12 planets, record music, develop concept art, record the voice overs and optimize the game. The campaign focuses on almost entirely digital rewards to keep overhead low when fulfilling rewards, with the sole physical reward being a limited run of one of Tim’s posters, signed by the team. The campaign will run until the end of the month.
Here’s the reward grid:
Hyping
A week ago I began sending out preview builds to press in the hopes for some launch day coverage of the campaign. The preview build, which will be similar to the Backer Alpha build reward, contains a quick tutorial scene and 2 planets. I’ve also beamed out a press release, which you can check out here if you’re curious. And I’ll be all over the rest of the internet as well, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc!
Helping
As you perhaps know, the first 48 hrs of a Kickstarter are super important, so if you’re thinking of backing EXO ONE, I’d love if you considered backing it on day one to help drive momentum and help the campaign become a success! Otherwise, I’d be super grateful if you could help out in the following ways!
Forward this email to someone who likes space/sci-fi games or games like Journey, Tiny Wings, Tribes Ascend, or Abzu.
Tell your friends!
After a long crunch period working up to EGX Rezzed, and then without much pause to get this campaign ready, I feel like I have done all I can to try and make the Kickstarter a success. With a little luck and your support, hopefully, the campaign will reach its goal!
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.
I got this idea from Tom Francis of GunPoint and Crate & Crowbar fame, and thought I’d do a recap of every game I’ve worked on. Partially this is an attempt to share my game dev history, partially to make myself feel better about the lack of progress I’ve made in the last couple of years(!).
I’ll start with the oldest games and end with my most recent.
Powerslide
I worked on this game straight out of high school, it was a post apocalyptic racing game that focused a lot on, yes – powersliding physics. I made (if I can recall that far back) 1-3 tracks, I definitely did the majority of the desert track and maybe a lot of the dam and mountain (?) tracks. As my first job, first game and first crew of non-school related co-workers and friends, it was a pretty huge deal and I’ve got a lot of great memories. A Powerslide ‘plaque’ still sits behind me here in my office, which consists of a team photo and signed gold master disc.
Role: 3D artist / Texturing
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: PC
Year: 1998
Dirt Track Racing
When you’ve got a game with nice powersliding physics, dirt oval racing is a pretty logical move. DTR let you race in a career mode that mimicked real life competition, complete with sponsorship, multiple classes and progression. I think I was credited as game designer, but when you’re modeling a real life competition from real racing, the game is practically already designed for you.
Role: Game Designer / (artist? so long ago!)
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: PC
Year: 2000
“Next Game”
Looking back, this was probably an overly ambitious title for its time, and the game designs I wrote for it probably didn’t help! The concept would have looked a lot like GTA but in a Mad Max world, complete with FPS and car combat sections, and an in depth story to boot. I recall the original game design by Richard Harrison (part owner of Ratbag) was far more realistic but I had some huge thing for people leaning out of windows and shooting each other rather than ‘copying’ Interstate 76. Anyway, I think this design morphed over time but never saw the light of day.
Somehow, after getting my dream designer role at Ratbag, I just didn’t seem happy at all, in fact it was the opposite, the last year I was there I wasn’t enjoying it at all. I guess I went from making DTR where I had a lot to do, to being someone who sat in front of the game design document all day long. I left Ratbag in the early stages of development, having picked up a copy of Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad Poor Dad” – I had a need to go start my own business.
So here’s where I left and formed Hyperfocal Design (sells HDRI sky maps). After the sort of crazy schedules games demanded, I’d somewhat sworn off returning to developing them.
Here’s a video, which ended up being fairly different gameplay wise from what I’d proposed:
I cringe looking back at how much harder the prototyping process was (I don’t think there was one at all), especially with today’s tools like Unity. Back then I’m sure I’d have realised early on that dudes leaning out of car windows shooting at each other in a big open desert would have been a little boring!
“Concrete”
I managed to secure some early funding from our state government for this one, but at the time, with this concept, it was unrealistic to produce without a large team. Even today I’d say unless it was top down/2d sprite based or something it was another over ambitious title and I didn’t want to form the next Ratbag to do it. I got as far as actually meeting with a couple of venture capital people but didn’t get any interest. The gameplay again was GTA-like but ‘cops and robbers’ where the robbers could mark territory with spray paint and blend into the general population (there were no names hovering above heads). I suppose in hindsight the design is a little like APB (minus the MMO part), which was a spectacular failure.
“Zombie Outbreak Simulator”
I teamed up with Saxon Druce from Ratbag to make this one about 5 years ago. It was step one on the way to releasing the next game, Class 3 Outbreak. ZOS was a sandbox simulation, not really a game at all, where you could adjust various attributes of zombies such as their speed, infection time and so on. We had some success in terms of press coverage because the game ran on Google Maps and it had a big novelty hook.
Role: Game Designer/Artist
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: Web, then iOS, then Android
Year: 2009
“Class 3 Outbreak”
With ZOS ‘complete’, we then released the ‘real game’, which I still felt was quite devoid of features. At least it had a fairly nice core mechanic where you had to use police units to stop the zombies multiplying out of control. Unfortunately, due to Saxon being only part time on the coding side, and due to changes with Google’s APIs, and then some huge screw ups with funding from the government, this never went much further. Eventually Saxon and I went different ways – I was always pushing for more gameplay but he wanted to focus on things like the map editor. We butted heads a bit and eventually I handed over my share of Binary Space to him.
Role: Game Designer/Artist
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: Web
Year: 2010
“Unknown Orbit”
I’m fairly proud of this little title, which I developed in a year and released on the Apple app store. It’s essentially a 3D Tiny Wings/Endless Runner where you orbit around a small planet as a comet. It did pretty average, made maybe $2-3k or so and now sells a copy a day. I think the biggest let downs from this game were that I probably made it too hard and didn’t make enough content, ie other planets to fly around.
Role: All things! No wait, Rhys Lindsay did the music and Saxon helped with some high score code!
Made with: Unity, Playmaker
Platform: iOS
Year: 2013
Enter the ‘prototype years’
Whereby I make lots of prototypes and never finish anything:
“Zombie Games”
I messed around with a number of different designs for zombie games and never quite settled on any.
Status: This one is still simmering in the background, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I tackled a strategic zombie game at some stage in the future.
“Generation Ship”
I then entered a phase where I thought I’d like to make a game with no combat in it. I still feel this is a very noble goal and that potentially there’s a lot of uncovered non-combat stuff out there, but I didn’t do a great job of finding it. I wanted to make a game about a Generation Ship that was trying to survive out in space, you had a galaxy map and a crew, and had to decide where to go, what to do to survive. In the end it was just no fun, there wasn’t much to do, and I’ve since seen other games come out with similar mechanics that I didn’t like much either!
Status: Now ‘reborn’ (below)
“Fighter Tactics”
Obviously here I’ve totally given up on that theory and decided to do a turn based space combat game. This was probably my most promising prototype, which I abandoned when I saw the Oculus Rift.
Status: Also reborn (below)
“The Station”
This was an Oculus Rift prototype that also got quite far along. I wrote an entire script for it, characters, made a prototype… The only gameplay consisted of this kind of ‘dimensional tuning’, controlled by head movement, that never really seemed to resonate with people. Also I realised if I was going to make this game, I’d become a full time 3D artist again, which didn’t appeal to me.
At this stage I’m realising how lucky I am to have Hyperfocal Design paying my bills.
Status: I may come back to this one day, I’m not sure – I liked the story and concept but just didn’t want to make it I suppose. Its also a pretty big commercial gamble having no idea how Rift games would sell.
“Generation Fleet”
This idea didn’t seem to leave me, and I thought, why the hell didn’t I try combining the two ideas of the Generation Ship and Fighter Tactics? I was thinking a lot about Battlestar Galactica as well, and Star Trek Voyager’s Year of Hell episode. In terms of games, FTL is an obvious inspiration, as is XCom, and I really liked SteamBirds and Hero Generations. So that’s where I stand right now – the Generation Fleet/Fighter Tactics game is in prototype phase, I like the game play and I’m just trying some variants to make sure the turn based space combat is as fun and strategically deep as possible. The Generation Fleet story/world surrounding it will form a kind of XCom style meta game.
The last blog I posted, I outlined how Unknown Orbit had dropped to around a sale a day, and that my next step would be to try setting UO to be free for a day or two.
Soon after, I was contacted by a new free app company called 3 Magic Shots, who claim to “… find top rated apps and get the developers under our spell to have them make it free for you.” I hadn’t really looked into any other free app a day services after hearing how expensive they were, and these guys sent me a professional, hand crafted email with a very professional looking website and app to go with it. So I said, sure why not! They had only launched a few weeks ago, and I was able to use the service for free, whereas it sounds likely to one day become a paid service.
I ended up giving them a bunch of marketing, text and image resources, some review quotes, that sort of thing, and then a week or so later I set UO to be free. On that day, 3 Magic Shots featured my game on their website, app and twitter. I got a push notification saying that it was available, and UO did look really nice within 3MS’s app interface on my phone. The game was also featured on a few other free app sites, and it ended up getting downloaded 26,000 times that day, tailing off to a few hundred 4-5 days later.
Overall the free version was downloaded over 45,000 times, and when it returned to a 99c app, sales were up to 10-15 a day, where they still are now. It will remain to be seen if I can stay at that level or not, but it would be nicer pocket money than $365 a year! I’d like to say a big thanks to 3 Magic Shots for providing a hassle free and very professional promotion service, their staff are great and my game was featured in the best light possible. A 10x sales increase is quite good (though of course, my sales were miniscule to begin with!), and perhaps with an app that was a bit stickier or more fun, I’d have seen even better results. I highly suggest you contact them if you’re considering some kind of free period for your game.
Surprisingly, while I was fully expecting to get a deluge of poor reviews from free users, reviews stayed at mostly 5 stars in the USA and Australia. Not many people appear to like it in the UK, however!
In terms of how UO has gone in general, on the one hand I feel like I did really well to get a highly rated and reviewed game out there, in front of all the big sites, yet it has been a fairly standard app store flop. On the other hand, I do understand that the game has its shortcomings, and I certainly don’t have any kind of feeling that I deserved to do better from it. I think if I did have this feeling, I would perhaps be doing more updates and trying to promote it further. I did my best with the skills and time I had, and decided to release when the game was ‘good enough’, while not spending too long on such a simple game.
In the mean time I’ve been prototyping a couple of games with the composer of Unknown Orbit and Class 3 Outbreak/Zombie Outbreak Simulator, Rhys Lindsay. This has mostly taken the form of board game mockups which have been really enjoyable. Despite apparently being a game designer, I had never done this before and it was really illuminating. It gives me much greater confidence to begin creating a computer prototype, knowing that I’ve almost played through the finished game a few times. If all goes well I hope to begin sharing details on that next game soon.
January 22, 2013 / Jay / Comments Off on Unknown Orbit, 1 Month On + 2012 Wrap Up.
If you didn’t catch my first post-release wrap up, you can read it here. In a nutshell, the release of Unknown Orbit went well, and I got reviewed by a lot of big sites, but sales didn’t launch in a big way.
So how’s it all going now that things are well and truly settled? Here’s the sales graph by week:
Things started out alright, and sales haven’t been a total embarrassment, but now I’m down to around 1-5 sales a day, its just pocket money. I’m going to try offering the game free for a day or four to promote the game a bit more soon, but this is probably where I leave it for now. I was seriously considering doing an update, but its just not worth it for the sales and initial reaction I got. I’m getting more and more eager to begin work on something with some more depth and meaning.
Despite the rather average sales, I felt like the game was well worth my time and effort. I learnt a lot in 2012 about Unity, Playmaker (the visual state editor that I use instead of programming) and met some great people in London. Also got an article published in Gamasutra, so I’m overall quite pleased and ready to move on to the next game.
I’ve just moved back to my home town of Adelaide, so I’m using this opportunity to think, ponder and dream about next game possibilities while I get setup. I’m also going to take this chance to study some more game design, and branch out some more creatively. I’ve been reading Mastery by Robert Green, Art of Game Design, and I’m generally just trying to shake things up a bit more by doing some more drawing, guitar, and reading before I decide on the next game. I’m also going to commit to a more constant study process, whether that’s specific game design books, philosophy, psychology, art, design, etc. I’ll also be continuing to practice and flesh out my skills in Unity and Playmaker so I can prototype and build the next game even faster.
I’m also going to be thinking about partnering up with someone for the next game, perhaps once I’ve gotten a ways into the prototype development, game design, etc. Making UO on my own was fun, but if I want to develop something more in depth, then I shouldn’t fool myself that I can do it solo!
The only thing I can say almost for sure about the next game is that it will be about people. Something I’m very interested in is getting players attached to characters, so I will see what I can do to turn this effect up in my next game as much as possible. I’ve got a few great ideas I’m throwing around at the moment, its just a matter of choosing one!
Stay tuned for future updates, looking forward to sharing my next game.
Unknown Orbit went live 1 week ago, and my trigger finger is sore from pressing refresh on AppFigures, Twitter, and Google. I’ve gone from being very disheartened on release day, with none of my planned reviews going live, to unbelievably stoked that I got a video review by the one and only Touch Arcade! The video was mixed but mostly positive, and it was a shame that the guy playing it wasn’t the greatest at it, but seeing that video was one of the biggest professional thrills of my career. Its amazing how much importance I (developers in general?) place on these reviews. I could pretty much die happy after seeing it! If I ever got featured by Apple, I think I would explode! Having gotten that review plus one on 148 and AppAdvice, I’m now pretty happy that I’ve gone almost as far as I possibly can with promoting the game. Hopefully I’ll see a few more reviews spawn from the TA/148/AppAdvice ones, but chances are this is probably as good as it gets.
The 3 reviews, plus a prmac press release, some twitter, reddit and facebook managed to keep UO around the 125 ranking mark in the app store (for iPad/iPhone Arcade/Action) for the whole week, and sales have been ok, but nothing to shout about. If this is my initial sales spike, and I’m about to fall off a cliff, I’ll be making $1 a day soon :) I’ll post a graph maybe in a week or so, so that there’s some decent data to look at. Even getting reviewed by all the big sites doesn’t seem to have that big an effect, but my greatest hope now is that because I’ve gotten on those sites, I now may get noticed and featured by Apple in some way. I’m prepping my Featured artwork now, just in case!
Unknown Orbit Response/Feedback
Feedback on the game itself has mostly been mixed, and I’d summarize that most people think that the concept, visuals, sound, music, and atmosphere are good/great, but the game lacks a little something in terms of goals, fun, progression and content. Namely more planets, which is one of the hardest things for me to add due to the hardware/loading times. I’m now thinking about what I can do in this regard, and whether its even possible to do an update where I remove support for older phones (as load times for the planet on 3gs/iPhone 4 is a huge 35-40secs). I’m going to look into potentially procedurally generating planets/systems as well – I like the idea of having a different system each time, but procedural generation can be quite tricky. I spent a long time hand making this one planet, however I did begin with mostly random perlin noise type setups, which played well too. This would be quite a task, so I’d have to decide whether the game is really doing well enough to justify it.
UO Release Date
I chose to release UO on the Tuesday for a couple of reasons, a) because I figured most developers like Thursday, and I didn’t want to compete with them at this time of year, and b) Press have more time to get onto the game, and during a more quiet time of the week. This certainly seemed to work well with TA reviewing me on Friday, right before the weekend, but who knows if they just planned to do the review at that time anyway *shrug*. I certainly failed to “get all the reviews out on the same day” as seems the classic strategy. At the end of the day you have no control over this, and just have to hope for the best. I imagine the better your game, the more likely you’ll get it featured/reviewed closer to your release date.
Gamasutra Article
I also managed to get an article published on Gamasutra called “Suck at Coding, But Make Games Anyway“, which has gone over well. Whether this had much/anything to do with getting some of the reviews, or helped my rankings, I’m not sure. It was published the day after the game went live on Wednesday. I then posted it on Reddit, which seemed rather popular too. Reddit is my new favourite site for just about everything!
Problems
There wasn’t much in the way of problems – probably the only thing that’s gone a little awry is that I had to use my company, Hyperfocal Design, to publish the game (long story, I’m in London, company is Australian, couldn’t form a new company…) so I just had to use it and say it was developed by Exbleative. Most people reported that the game was made by Hyperfocal, because that’s how it appears on the app store.
End!
Looking at my current ranking on Monday night GMT, it seems I’m still up around the 150 ranking mark (iPad/Aracade) in the US app store, which is nice considering I don’t think any major press has done features in the last couple days. If I could carry on making $30-50 a day or so, then that’d be a nice additional income stream.
Next? I’m thinking a lot about what game/update I’d like to do next. Its also coming up on Christmas/New Year, and I’m moving back to Australia in mid January, so I doubt I’ll get a huge amount done before then. I’ll be talking to some people about the procedural generation stuff, brainstorming new ideas, and eating XMas turkey. I’m glad I got this thing out before Christmas, its a load off!
Thanks for everyone who helped me with the game, reviewed or chatted with me on the forums.
Also a big thanks to this guy on the UK app store for this thoughtful and hilarious review. I’ll end with it, for the lols:
You lot should thank me for buying this before you
by Stumpyjay on Friday, December 07 2012 version 1.0
“69p is way too much for this catastrophe of a game. Trust me shoemaker levy 9 moved better than this rubbish after it had smashed into jupiter. I just wish it had taken this tripe with it. Utter drivel. If i see 1 more negative review then you should really read reviews first you idiot and it serves you right. 69p is all this guy should ever make from this tripe. The other review is obviously fake”
I have sent out a press release via PRMac, and I believe I will get a couple of reviews from some big name sites as well, but I wont hold my breath until they actually appear! I’m going to now do a little more promotion on Reddit and Twitter, some token Facebook ads and then I’m finished fo’ realz. Or at least until a future update!
I’ve also been been talking to Gamasutra about an article on making games with no code (how Unknown Orbit was made), so that may appear soon. If not I’ll be posting it here.
Cross your fingers for me, and please lend a hand if you can by sharing/retweeting, etc!
I’m now days away from submitting to the app store, after a year of developing Unknown Orbit, I’m super excited/terrified/(?) to see how it goes. I feel like I’ve ticked all the boxes in terms of marketing, screenshots, trailers, press packs etc, I like the icon I’ve developed and I quite like the game I’ve made, so I like my chances of it doing at least reasonably well.
I actually feel like UO is the first game I’ve ever made. While I have worked with other people on games before, this is the first game that I conceived of, prototyped, then created all on my own. When I was a game designer with Ratbag, I recreated stock car racing rules, and then worked on a game design for a GTA/Mad Max style game which was never finished, and barely started. At Binary Space, I was never happy with how much gameplay we put in to the zombie games, and I was reliant on Saxon, my programming/biz partner to implement things. We also often disagreed about what features should go in, and being part time, many of my plans for the game just never made it in. So again, this feels like its ‘all me’, which is sort of scary… unless it’s a huge hit, in which case I will do an extravagant dance.
The game is probably 90% of what I wanted it to be. That 10% is probably half due to technical limitations and half lack of time, skills and resources. I imagine this is true for most games, though, and if things go well I’ll certainly be investigating updates or sequels.
Right now I’m waiting for Apple to change my account from an individual to a company. It will change from Jay Weston to Hyperfocal Design (my texture/hdri company), unfortunately I can’t use a trade name (Exbleative) nor do I want to form another pty ltd company, so I felt like this was the only option. Luckily Hyperfocal’s name somewhat translates well to games, and hopefully there isn’t much confusion as I try to promote the game under the Exbleative name!
Once I’m set to go with Hyperfocal, it’ll be one release candidate round on Testflight for super-final-for-realz testing, then I’ll submit and lose around 1 weeks worth of sleep.
Cross your fingers for me that some press like the game and review it!
