Your first game

I don't really post much in this blog but since Nessiah doesn't yet have an update, I decided to do one for her.

How many of you have finished your first game? Have you made plans for it? Is there a particular project you really wanted to do and have thought of for a while now?

Whatever you use to make your game with, game making is a pretty time consuming hobby. People tend to plan big for their projects, since they really want it to stand out and be fun. It's not something I'd like to discourage, but your "masterpiece" game should probably not be the first game you make. What tends to happen in peoples projects, is that they start working on a game with little knowledge or planning, then later when they learn more about the program and get a better idea of what they'll do, they find out the beginning is lacking in quality compared to the later game.

While that's not something you can truly avoid (especially since we can always learn something new), you may want to try to reduce this happening with the game you really care about. My suggestion would be to make a practice project first. Use that one to learn the basic systems and implement ideas that you would want to use for your main projects. Try not to make it too long! You'll want to use that project to judge how long it takes you to work on something. Try aiming for a 2 hour long game.

Once you have a simple first project done, you don't have to release it if you don't want to. You may want to get a friend or a volunteer to play through it and see what they think of the ideas. Sometimes ideas may sound good in theory but may in practice not work out as expected. Making that will help you learn from it for your next project.

Slightly off topic, but make sure you playtest your own game before sending it out! You should try to make your own game bug if you can, by going areas that aren't on the main path, talking to people in different orders, and things like that. You don't want to give a bad impression when you release a demo. While people would be willing to help, they'll also feel like you're a lazy developer if they find obvious bugs and mispellings in it.

72nd Day

Exams today oh noes!
I should be studying instead I'm posting here for reasons that I don't even know why~

I got Visual Arts Award though! It's amazing :D
I have a gift card of $25 but I dunno what to use it for 'w'
Sorry if I told this before, I can't remember because I'm so stressed right now.

I failed 2 subjects (D is a fail right?) because I had some family...issues to take care of and I swear if I find my sister I'm going to knock her senseless for ruining my school life *orz* and I'm not sure how to tell my dad geh... My teacher was like, how about your brother, why won't he look for her, well he doesn't know anything and it's better for him to concentrate on his studies since his grades are way lower than mine and that he only has 3 subjects, I have 4 and I have a lot of SACE points anyway so it's better for him to pass than me and I graduated highschool twice anyway @_@

That said, I've been working on this game for a while, I'm trying to finish some commissions so I can hire a pixel artist to do some tilesets for Advent Cirno, I am so bad at platformer tiles when it comes to cities and stuff and it takes me years to animate those sprites so sorry~

But hey at least Advent Cirno will be free once it goes out...if it does get done :p
For now I leave you with Night of Marian Visual(s) for my halloween and visual art backup game thingy that didn't made it and some game that I just made in a few minutes because I missed rpgmaker 2003...