Superhero or full time developer

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Antonio Dominguez

As I said in my last post here, a lot of things have changed since our little feline boss came hand in hand with this blog. When someone is out of touch with the videogame world, is so difficult to tell how much work is needed to build any kind of videogame from scratch, but those who tried at least once knows that even the most simple game can be a challenge for a sole developer. Unfortunately we belong to a group of crazy people who prefers to put their souls and their minds in impossible projects without expecting anything in return.

But at the end of the day we need to go out of our wonderful word of art, code and melodies to pay some bills or to attend our duties. In this scenario, it’s hard to keep your hobbies, even more if it’s as time consuming as videogame development, but is it viable to do it as a full time job?

A normal life by day and a secret one by night!

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Going mobile: expanding your game’s horizons

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Sergio Barrio

Let’s say you managed to build and release a game of your own. Maybe your game runs on desktop platforms or it may even be an HTML5 game. It does not matter. You are probably getting a few people to play it and they are enjoying it a lot. That’s great, congratulations on that, I really mean it.

But maybe you are starting to hear a little voice in your head. A not so loud but persistent little voice that keeps saying the same thing: you should port your game to mobile platforms and start getting thousands of new players every day. And of course it’s a tempting idea. Everybody is doing it nowadays and it seems that it is the real easy way to make a lot of money while you get a straight shot to fame and success, right?

Well, it may not be as easy as you may think, and I won’t lie about your chances, but one thing is sure: mobile platforms are the place to be for most indie developers, and you probably want to get a piece of the action as well.

For this reason I’m going to give you some advice on how to accomplish just that. Let’s get on with it!

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Another kind of graphic resources: marketing assets

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Antonio Dominguez

After a huge amount of work finally the time comes: the videogame is already finished! Congratulations to everyone who took part in the process! Buy some booze and let’s party!

Then someone realize that there is no money for booze because the game itself does not produce any income stored in the studio main server, the party gets delayed and someone says something about distribution and marketing. Usually is not like that, but it’s a way to show how a game has more assets than most of people thinks. As a teacher said in one of my Software Engineering classes, every file of a project, including documents, code or even images are “software”, and in my opinion, every resource created for a project are part of it even if it’s used externally, like in the Google Play store or the Apple App store. Those resources are logos, screenshots, landing images, icons, press kits… when a game is finished there is still a lot of work to do.

Angry Birds Stella screenshot and icon

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