Welcome or Welcome Back!

I've decided I'd keep these kind of thought-piece devlogs local to itch.io, I'm not really sure the steam crowd would want to read them in the pile of other games with all sorts of updates, I think itch is just a better place for them. Speaking of, and yep I'm boutta plug it, Final Notice is now on Steam! You should go wishlist it! Now! RIGHT NOW! 

CLICK THIS TO GO WISHLIST FINAL NOTICE RIGHT NOW. I AM NO LONGER ASKING.

Anyway, let's get into what today's devlog is about.

Flying Solo, New to the Game.

I didn't start Final Notice with the intent of it ever really going anywhere, I mostly just did it as a little project thinking I'd probably dump it after a week or two. I'm sure we've all done that enough times, I figured this would be no different. I made some cards, they moved around, you could click them, they'd get discarded, so on and so forth, it was nothing really "special." 

But I wanted it to be. Somewhere in that, somewhere in that gradual formation of a new system or making a card do something I couldn't make it do before, somewhere in that progression, that evolution, I wanted it to be something more. I'd thought about projects I'd dropped in the past, Stuff I'd started but never finished - or sometimes barely even started - Final Notice's theme and "story" if you want to call it that, is actually based off the very same idea I had, god, 5 years ago now or something for an entirely different genre. I always liked the idea of death being mundane and what we view as mystical or abnormal to be much more akin to our daily lives than we'd like to imagine it to be.

I added a couple "themes" to the game. Some naming structure that was sort of coherent, some rough idea of what I wanted the game to look like, honestly it was going to be a lot more "fantasy" initially - take a look at this super early screenshot of the game

Before

GOD isn't this ugly. But it's what the initial idea was going to be. Crazy how it went from the above to this:

After

so fast.

Obviously it became a lot more stylised as time went on, you can sort of see the problem with placeholders I had for a while. Would you believe it if I said the first image is from the 22nd of May and the second is from, oh I don't know, 3 days ago? 2 days ago? All that change in a month and a week. Wild.

The Difficulties of Going It Alone

It's hard being on your own. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. You've got to do everything yourself, the marketing, the art, the sounds, the actual honest-to-god gameplay, the balancing, the direction of the game, everything. It's hard as shit. It's why I'm not particularly that concerned if the art I grab from royalty free sources is generated by AI or not, cause I'm still going to have to edit them manually anyway to get them to be coherent with what I've got in my mind for Final Notice to look like - and it's usually quite a bit of editing! Photobashing stuff, cleaning up stuff when I change it to pixels, it's annoying sometimes. I'm not saying it's harder than making it from scratch - far from it, massive respect to the artists that can and do create their own work from nothing - but I've just got a lot more going on behind the scenes that's, well, HARD! 

I think the thing people DO hide from you though, is just how difficult it is to "get a game out there" and why it's so insanely impractical for most people to do it. You've got to learn so much about marketing and audience targeting and - AND - even make your own ads unless you want to spend the additional money for someone else to make it for you, which honestly might've been a good call now that I'm thinking about it, but I'm already spending quite a bit out of my own pocket just to get the game in front of people so that I can garner the feedback to continue making them game in a direction that's enjoyable.

(Thank you for any feedback anyone reading this has left by the way, it all helps).

It costs a lot of money, or a lot of time learning a massive array of skills, to make a game do well. Publishers are a thing for that reason alone - but nobody really talks about this as a warning before you get into gamedev.

Your First Game Will Fail

I'm sure anyone that's tried to make a game has heard that a thousand times, and it's true, it probably will fail - depending on what your definition of "fail" is.

"Start small, build the knowledge" is another one, and I think that's probably solid advice too, I didn't jump into this with NO idea about code, I knew bits and pieces, but I will say I've had to learn A LOT to get this game to where it is.

Stats don't lie, man! 323 hours in a month and a week is pretty fucking crazy for a guy that works a full time job.

But, if I had one piece of advice that I could give to a new game dev, it'd be:

"You are going to have to spend money if you want this game to gain an audience, and you are going to have to do a lot of extra shit that isn't just making the game, and a lot of it is arguably going to be harder and more frustrating than making the game."

There's a freedom in development, you can do it your way and as long as it works, it works. You can make it as hacky as held-together-by-tape as you want, but if it does the end result, all good. I structure a lot of my code to be really, really modular, so I can staple bits and pieces together to create new systems faster later if I want to. I think I mentioned it before, but the bounty SYSTEM took about 2 days to actually develop, Zeus himself took about a day, and I've decided to add one more bounty boss due to the time I have, and that took, oh I don't know, 2 hours? Not to complete and fully test of course, but to get them in the game and playable, it didn't take any time at all. I'm still working on that boss now, because I want their AI to be especially complex and interesting, but you'll see more information on that soon.

But marketing? Advertising? That's by the book, that's on some "you'll do it the right way or fail" type thing. It's genuinely difficult. I can't even really give good advice on it, because I'm still working on it myself - CTR is something you think is probably important until you realise it's heavily diluted by a lot of factors, and you have to sort of "cut out" a lot of information or learn trends before you start being able to accurately read it - and I'm not even at a point I can yet!

Anyway, all this is to say, there's a lot to this whole thing, I haven't even mentioned managing versions or planning future updates and so on, and how many wrenches just LOVE to get thrown at plans like that. Well, yknow the saying.

Either way, look forward to more information about the bounty updates coming soon, I hope this was an interesting read and, as always -

Till next time!