Fledgling Videogame Developer

It is somehow rewarding (and also relaxing) to get something finished. I am happy to tell, that after all that debugging, polishing and problem solving we got " Explopool " flash game ready and released. Game mechanics is not too complex, but still there were challenges to be overcome before we were able to say that this (possibly) works. The basic idea of the game is simple: place and set a bomb to pool table, wait it to explode, and see how balls are pushed by the shock wave. If ball goes to the pocket, you will receive some points and handful of coins. When coin meter (on the right hand side) is full, you will get one more bomb. There is also possibility to get 2x or 3x points, if you get enough balls to the pockets with one explosion. There are few special features available to make game more interesting and challenging: black hole: sucks all balls in certain range to the hole color match: if this is activated, balls of same color will disappear if they col...

Since we are beginners in the field of game development, we have been learning game creation process, tools and production the hard way. During the process, we have noticed that making any game to the public distribution requires quite much: mechanics should be well planned and implemented, gameplay should be optimized, and game itself must be fun. Also, you should not forget the importance of visual appearance. To get all of this to one package requires lot of time and effort, but it is certainly possible and, ultimately, rewarding. But even if your upcoming game would be the first-class product, there is still one tricky question left: How you are going to get players to your glorious game? Do you just put the game to the distribution and then wait for success? I would guess this method works only for the very few games (or alternatively you are a famous game industry veteran with solid fan base). In most cases, getting large number of players for a game will require advertisin...

It's been months since my latest post to this blog, even though I have done something related to game development too. My day job related to semiconductors keeps me busy at daytime (and sometimes evenings also). I have got new responsibilities and at the moment I am very happy to my job. However, I started semi-seriously game development activities with my brother about 5 months ago. Our target was to learn how to develop and publish games, and even make some money besides that. To date, we have published seven small and simple flash games via Mochimedia ( edit: Mochimedia does not exist anymore ).  I can honestly tell you that only 2-3 of our games meet the characteristics of proper game. Rest of them are more or less stupid demos, but almost all of them work as originally planned. Every game has been better than the previous one, both from technical and visual point of view.  There has been thousands of players for our games, but still the ad revenue from Mochimed...