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.

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!?"

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!

The battle that did not ends on 11 August

I scheduled myself to stop making "Duel Otters" and let my friends continue on 11 August, but the reality isn't that easy!

I realised that Apple does not allow me to use custom business name for individual account anymore, thus I embark on an epic quest to register for limited partnership (L.P) with my friends so that we became a legal person and can use "Exceed7 Experiments" as an entity for all of us.

Only 3 days left

Guess what? I just completed all songs for the game!  Finally I can completely remove all the Michael Jackson songs in my game! (It's a technique called placeholder, of course my song can't match Michael's quality but whatever.)

Also spiffy promotional video (PV) has been done. Man! Can't believe that my interest to learn animating things began from my meeting with DJMAX series. Especially Clazziquai Edition onwards, the MVs are extremely beautiful and fits the song well. Since that day I became interested in how to make those kind of animation and later learned that it can be done with Adobe After Effects.

11 days to the end...

Recently I have come to realize one thing, I'm not gonna make it in time.

I will have to go to Japan in this mid-September. I'm quite a "creator" person since child (but just learned to code in university) thus I wanted to finish many things that can only be done at Thailand. Finishing the game and have a nice postmortem at a restaurant, is one of the top priority in my list.

But there are also other things I wanted to have it done. Many will be quite silly in other's eye like wanting to compose a vocal song and have my friend's vocal in it. (Definitely can't have my friend sing for me if I'm at Japan.)

"Wanna develop game together, for real?"

The post's topic was my question to one of my teammate, the passionate programmer who is the second most active developer in my remote-working team. The other two can barely find him/herself any free time so I save this question for later.

It all started the moment I finished this article
http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/7/2/5858032/towerfall-matt-thorson