I quitted my day work!

I quitted on the beginning of this month, actually.

So? Well, I have heard a lot of this cliched success story where people quitting their school, university, work to achieve their own dreams, and that kind of story is coming from people already succeed.

They are in many motivational article, famous biographies and when reader read it their eyes became sparkled with hope, freedom and successful life. I have read through those stories, too. Steve Jobs dropped out of college and choose to audit. Bill Gates also dropped out of Harvard...

Revamped!

Today I just made our "Factora Redesign" project to public for the first time. Here is a comparison of the old and new web page!

Old

New

The new design is somewhat enlightening, that we immediately see the flaw of old character design previously unseen. The scary thing is no one including me is able to realize the flaw until half a year later from the first design. Maybe this design can be improve too who knows?

The app's Facebook page just got updated too... (https://www.facebook.com/FactoraExc7)

And I just created our Exceed7 Experiments page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Exceed7Experiments) so I can include it as my work history. Cool!

Now whats left is finish the development already!

It's all shaping up!

Incredible thing do happens. In the last few days my programmer and artist finally got to work together! Together as in side-by-side, not across Facebook or version control system. This is probably the 2nd times my team got together for real to develop the game since the complete restart of Factora project on January-February and even I can't believe the productivity we got from this. I really hope this kind of chance occur more often.

My life took a big turn. Time is running out.

Been a long time since last post! As soon as I finally managed to get my team going full-power again (yay), another issue comes.

Its decided that I was qualified as a 2 years MEXT scholarship student to study at Japan (The motherland of all childhood games) in this September-October. Now that the clock is ticking to that promised day, what will happen to my team and our games?

The difficulty of maintaining a team

This is a long one.

When I was working on my own project, I would be like all fired up and keep working on it all night. It happened so many times before and they are all useless projects like charting Stepmania simfiles for submitting to a pack in FFR webboard, learning how to compose music with my DAW, painting a anime-ish picture of my friend because she wanted a new profile picture for her Twitter.. they all have no financial value, but I'd been fun. Really fun.

I think it had been this way since high school, when I learned that I could make my own world in RPG Maker XP. Countless hours poured into learning the RMXP itself, learning Photoshop, learning about (how to copy) ruby scripts...

But now it's a different world. This project "Factora" would be for profit. I wanted to try selling things. This game was not designed to drain money through addiction like mobile games nowadays. Exactly 1 non-consumable in-app purchase has been planned for this game and yet it is so different from what it had been.

Harsh truth

It's 3:50 AM now and I'm wide awake. Gotta go to work in the morning so what am I doing at this time?

I've always been an artist for this project. Painting BG, stage, UI and effects stuff. I recently switched to coding side so I can program the animation for my UI as I desired. So for the first time, I got to build my project directly onto my iPod. Until now I've only seen our own game only on my teammate's iDevice.

A change

I changed my team's logo just a moment ago. Sometimes you have to live with something long enough to realize that we are not compatible to each other after all. (Just like a relationship)

After 2 weeks or so of using this logo :

I just can't ignore the feeling of "Hmmmm...." in my head. So here goes :

I think this new logo really reflects me and my team. It helped a lot in building self-confidence and I'm now more proud to make games to be under this playful logo. The "Experiments" thing encourage me to dare for something most people avoid (cost-wise and time-wise) and most importantly, the star is soo cute don't you agree with me? :3

Ps. The star is rotated from its popular position by 45 degrees.