

Show HN: Four months of indie game dev - redbluething
http://www.cannonade.net/blog.php?id=1587

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BSousa
Congrats on finishing and publishing the game.

I skipped a bit through the video and checked the game at the end.

Please, please, please save 1000-2000 grand, browse dribbble.com or similar,
and get a decent designer to update the look on the game.

I'll try the game when I get home but if you hope to make some money out of
it, you really need to polish the graphics/UI.

~~~
markdown
> 1000-2000 grand

O_o

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prawn
If you're boggling at the $1-2m mistake, then fair enough.

If at the $1-2k budget being too small, then:

When there are people around the world entering design competitions for simply
a chance at $xx, and a few are half-decent, you could get some mileage for
assets at $1,000-2,000. At least something that will improve the polish on
this game.

(Otherwise, I love the progress video. Great to see persistence!)

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Rinum
Based on the timestamps on the video it seems like 2 months were spent
building the core game functionality. The remaining 2 months were pretty much
used to polish the game.

Is that the case with most indie games? ~50% core gameplay and ~50% polish.

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angrycoder
I would say the 50/50 rule holds true for most software, not just games.
Although most people usually express it as the 80/20 rule where 20=the other
80%.

~~~
shaggyfrog
"Writing the first 90 percent of a computer program takes 90 percent of the
time. The remaining ten percent also takes 90 percent of the time and the
final touches also take 90 percent of the time." -- N. J. Rubenking

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notclive
I like the idea of showing the progress of an application over time. You could
use your CI system to take a snapshot on every commit. In the simplest form
you could just take a screenshot, or to capture interaction you could record
selenium tests (or any equivalent suite).

~~~
redbluething
I actually did it at the end.

Just went back through the Git history, found milestones and checked out those
commits. Ran each commit in the sim and took a video. First time I have done
that and pretty happy with how it turned out :).

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forrestthewoods
Nice! It's always super cool to see this type of thing. The more people doing
it the better. I recommend putting together an easy to view infographic image.

I did something very similar for a project and put together a full blog post,
video, and infographic. The infographic got waaaaaaay more attention and views
than everything else.

Blog: <http://forrestthewoods.com/30-weeks-of-development/>

Image: [https://outland-live.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...](https://outland-live.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downloads/30weeksOfOutland.jpg)

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Lockyy
This is awesome. I was going to agree with the guy below about the ui needing
some polish, but once it got to the later iterations I think it looks great.
Shame I don't have an iOS device to try it out on.

I'm doing some game dev now too and wish I had video's of my progress to
compile into a video like this. I guess I've got screenshots that I could
stitch together that I used to show friends my progress early on.

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winter_blue
Can the horizontal rotation being performed on the discs/coins as shown in the
game, be performed with a 2D engine? (Is there some kind of matrix
transformation that can accomplish it on an image?)

Or is it absolutely necessary to have a 3D model of a coin, in order to do
that?

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bprater
Fascinating way to view the development of an app. I'd love for more
developers to do this!

~~~
xtrumanx
Do you think it would be better with commentary and unedited?

For instance, imagine watching a 20 minute video of the dev trying to get the
discs spinning with the textures? It'll be like the Let's Play[0] videos on
YouTube of people playing a video game with commentary (usually unrehearsed)
except this time the person is writing code and switching between their IDE
and StackOverflow.

[0] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya2mm6iwiKs>

~~~
redbluething
Maybe not unedited, but definitely commentary would be cool :)

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johnkchow
Great video OP! Really inspiring stuff. Rooting for you and your game! :D

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redbluething
Thanks very much. Awesome getting such wonderful support from the HN
community.

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krakensden
It's interesting to me that the thing you started with was the flipping disk.
Reminds me of some blogposts from a year or two ago about 'juicy' interaction,
and why it's important.

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glitchdout
"Juice it or lose it" is the best presentation I've seen on the matter. It's
really funny and it clearly show how adding some bouncing or some particles
can completely change the feel of a game (or UI) <http://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg>

~~~
shardling
That sounds a lot like what Tim Rogers calls "friction".

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swanify
It's really great to see the evolution of a game like this, i agree with other
commenters that it would be great to see other game developers do this.

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thenicepostr
Great work! loved the vid too

