Fledgling Videogame Developer

The original logo of WestSloth Games was created by me for several years ago. Basically, it was a hanging sloth that was built using voxels. I guess MagicaVoxel was the tool used to create it. In the beginning logo looked pretty ok. But over time it started to look confusing and not so good anymore. So there was a clear need to draw a new logo. But what kind of a logo is good one? Some views can be found for example from this  article concerning logo design : " A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic and simple in form, and it conveys the owner’s intended message.   " So yes, logo must be at least appropriate, practical and simple. Those were the words I thought I understood.  Additionally, there was also a short list of characteristics of good logo: 1. Simple 2. Memorable 3. Timeless 4. Versatile 5. Appropriate So, I tried to follow these guidelines and started drawing with Inkscape. After 30 minutes of fiddling logo looked like this: ...

After 6+ years of existence and hobby-based game development, WestSloth Games is now part of a freshly registered company called Westsloth Oy! My family member needed to set up a company for invoicing occasional work, and we decided it's time to make Westsloth a real game company! To secure company's finances our main businesses are computer hardware and software consultancy plus office and financial management services. But game and app development stays as an essential part of Westsloth and we hope games will start generating revenue in the future. This change does not have much impact the way we develop games: At the moment I am doing development on a part-time basis (my day job has priority). But of course things can change. And as before, we know we are still ramping up our game development competence and our target is to do every new game better than the previous one! Transition to company control is ongoing and there will be some changes e.g. in WestSloth Games ...

First part of my summer vacations is over, and tomorrow it is time go back to work. Luckily, I have still one week vacation left in the beginning of August. :) My game development activities have also been quite minimal for last couple of weeks. However, there is a small exception: I've been discussing with my brother how our gamedev activities should be continued for the rest of the year. And as a part of this process we have tried to sketch a roadmap for upcoming game releases. I work full-time in large telecommunications company and all my game development is done in leisure time, so there is a clear need for some kind of a rough plan to keep things progressing smoothly. First of all, we have a plan to release three html5 games in the next six months: Two smaller ones and one large one. Smaller games are planned to have relatively simple graphics and gameplay, so we are able to finish them ourselves quite smoothly. There are already technology demos up and running for both ...

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...