Wednesday, September 17, 2014

My very own "night before release" and the estimated 341$ revenue



Tomorrow is the day that I will press the "Release this version" button to release the game.

So.. this is the night before release I have heard many times from indie dev stories? Let me share mine now.

I once imagined I would like a crazy party night and my team would get together to help look out for mistakes. On the launch day we would test the game til dawn together to find left over bugs and once released, we will brainstorm together what marketing strategy we will come up afterwards.

You see, the reality is not working that way.

Monday, September 8, 2014

The want to be noticed

Edit : Having finished typing, turned out that this extremely long blog post is all-text, very personal and may bore you guys that is expecting dev story. I'm really sorry about that!

I have noticed (pun not intended!) something of myself, that deep inside I really wanted to be noticed.

My team worked remotely and everyone would be working at different time. I often get this feeling of "Am I the only one hard-working on this project!?"

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Finally we are at this point...



It's 7:00 AM, the sky's no longer dark and I haven't slept yet.

My teammate who just came to my place on 9:00 PM to 'fix small bugs and watch me submit the game' just goes back to sleep a moment ago. (He will have to skip his work today, how lucky!)

Today we just finished fixing usability issues after a round of public beta testing with my other friends. I planned today to be the (long awaited) app submission day so I persuade him to came watch the submission process together and help looking out for small mistakes.

Turned out, the process is much more detailed than we thought! It took us whole night till dawn to fill out all the required form, and combatting bugs that promptly appear on the last minute.

Looking back to 2 years ago, we have been working purely remotely with only willpower. No salary, no fancy workplace, day job still intact, pay your own computer and softwares, squeeze out your own free time. It had been very slow process and we face many problems from our unconventional workflow. Finally, we managed to get to this finish line in the end!

Let me go to my comfy bed for now. I hope on the launch day the game's sale will be enough to afford us some memorable meals for my planned postmortem meeting. I have so much to say to my team before I left to study at Japan.

These commits are not possible without help from my friends who beta-test the game!