The new year is almost upon us and it’s time for the holidays, I hope you and yours are having a great day whichever way you chose to celebrate it 🙂 And if you don’t celebrate it, I hope you have a great day and don’t get too annoyed with those of us who might be a little too loud in our celebrations 🙂
I guess this might seem like kind of a pointless question, everyone knows what a game is right? But this is the internet and today I saw one gamedev tell another that the game they had been spending years making, wasn’t a game. Suffice to say I disagree with said gamedev and am no longer following them. It was sad to see and I hope it’s not a prevalent attitude.
It did make me think about the nature of game, and just how much can you boil it down. I got it right down to ‘interactive experiences’. Which let’s be honest, is pretty close to the bone. Mirriam-Webster defines it in a few ways narrowing it into a few category’s, which makes sense, but it’s Mirriam-Webster’s very first definition that’s at play here: ‘activity engaged in for diversion or amusement ‘. That could be pretty much anything, and if you want to put video before that it’s still hugely broad category of electronic diversions or amusements.
Many people might take ‘amusement’ as being the operative word here but I don’t think we should ignore ‘diversion’, this covers a scope of games that are made to evoke something other than amusement, games the deal with emotions directly, like depression or loss are just as important as a million dollar match 3 or AAA shooters. So if your game is for amusement alone, it’s still a game, or if you want to delve into something a bit different, or some mix of the 2, it’s still a game. And I really hope you make it, because diversity in games can only help our medium, and really, there’s plenty of room for everybody!
After a ton of hard work and working out more than a few problems (mostly resolved), Beta 1 is almost here. Beta 1 will launch on the 5th of January 2017, and I can’t wait for it to be in your hands! There are a lot of changes, not the least of which is new dynamically updating stations as you edit them, and of course the promised UI overhaul. A lot of work has gone into making Station Generator more accessible, and more usable.
But not only will I be launching Beta 1, I will also be starting the Steam Greenlight campaign. I’m working on setting up the page and getting the word out now so hopefully we’ll all be ready to give it a bit of a push when the time comes. I think launching both at the same time will compliment each other nicely.
With that said, here’s the updated trailer with Beta 1 footage now added.
I’d been hoping to get my hands on this set before I knew it was coming out. Having seen the movie I knew Lego were going to have a treat in store regarding the various ships and I wasn’t disappointed. The set I wanted the most had to be Rey’s Landspeeder, but Poe’s X-Wing wasn’t far behind it, but at more than three times the price it didn’t look like I was going to be able to get my hands on it. Luckily for me, my family knows me well, and I got it as a birthday present back in September.
A year and a day ago I started this blog with the aim of posting once a week, either about games or gamedev. In my first post ‘Opening Gambit’, I talked a little but about where I was in my game dev and where I was planning on going. Of course nothing has turned out quite as I’d planned and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I thought it would be fitting to talk a bit about how I’ve progressed in the year and how I plan to go from there, as a reflection of my first post.
Today’s post will be quite short, I’ve been struggling with a cold for the last few days so I’ll just give a brief update on where I’m at right now. I re-scoped the UI update as I had been far too ambitious with what I wanted to get done in it. I haven’t so much gotten rid of features as I have moved them to another update. This update will make UI functionality (Is that UX?) the hero of this update.
Usability and feedback to the user are what I’m focusing on, and I’ve made heaps of progress on that front. I’m have an almost working version of what I want just a couple bugs I need to work out and then I can spend a bit of time putting the UI back together in terms of design.
Apologies for the short post this week, hopefully I’ll be in better health next week 🙂
After getting Station Generator on the Humble Store I’ve been working on the next update, namely UI. This has been a bigger task than I had initially thought it would be. Getting a new basic design took a little time but I’ve had a few decent ideas which will greatly improve both the functionality of the generator and the usability.
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the games I’ve been playing lately. I’ve dabbled in a few games but I’ll only talk about the few that really grabbed me. I’ve been replaying a lot of CoD: Modern Warfare 2 lately but there’s no real point getting into that, and besides I’m terrible at it. I’m gonna get right into it…
For the last while, I’ve been pretty focused on getting Station Generator on the Humble Store. Once my application was approved I needed to get a whole bunch of marketing type stuff together to put the Humble Store page together. Most of it I had already done or had versions close enough that editing them to fit was a non-issue. The one thing I didn’t have funnily enough was a trailer. Well, that’s been sorted now (Huge thanks to everyone involved).
Since I’ve been away from the actual development of my companion app (That’s how I’ll be referring to it from now on as it makes more sense, Station Generator isn’t a game of itself and Utility or Tool doesn’t quite do it justice) for nearly a month it’s taken be a little while to get back into it, that said things are picking up pretty well. The next update to Station Generator is gonna focus on UI improvements.
Just a quick note to let people know how I’m going to be handling sales for Station Generator.
It’s pretty simple really, as you already know, when the game gets a major update, the price will rise by a dollar until the final release when it will be $8. For the first week of each update I’ll run a sale where the game will be a dollar off, so it’ll be the old price for one more week, then on to the new higher price.
I have no intentions at all on bundling Station Generator unless I’m lucky enough to get in on a Humble Bundle. This could change depending on my circumstances, however I have a very steady income so this is unlikely to be the case.
Any questions, feel free to ping me 🙂
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