Not a ton to report this month. I released Demolo last month, which allows me to reflect on it. Meanwhile I’m gearing up to resume working on my first-person dungeon crawler. And then I’ve also been considering a little video project, so I’ll describe that too.
Demolo hasn’t been a huge hit, which is mildly disappointing but mostly expected. Slightly disappointing in that you always hope it’ll be a hit when you release a game, but I wasn’t expecting a giant response considering it was a pretty limited audience. I mean, VR games in general have been a smaller market than companies banked on, and I specifically targeted just one device, the Oculus Go.
Anyway, I did learn a lot from doing this project, including the simple fact that the Oculus Go is a lot of fun to develop for. In particular, it has me looking forward to the Oculus Quest, because I may breath new life into Demolo on that platform when it comes out.
As for the RPG game, I’ve come up with a couple new things to put in the mix. One is aiming for even shorter playthroughs, and then making it so players will want to play it over and over in order to experience everything in the game. I’m thinking along the lines of a couple hours to complete the entire quest.
To go along with this, I’m probably going to implement a system to upgrade your character’s class. At a certain level you can choose to either dual-class or promote a character. Dual-class would mean you warrior can cast spells too, or your mage can cast both fireballs and healing, that sort of thing. Promoting on the other hand would simply be turning your lowly warrior into a Knight. Thus players can customize their party more than just the initial class, encouraging repeat plays to experiment with different parties.
I’ve also been thinking I might shift focus from mobile to a PC release, I’m not sure. Certainly, I was already planning to release both mobile and desktop (monetized through rewarded ads on mobile, while it’d simply be $6.99 or something on Steam) and the PC version will have some advantages, in particular basic modding support. That plan is still on the table, but I’ve come up with a new game concept on mobile, so maybe it makes more sense to just do desktop for this one.
The little video project isn’t directly related to game development; it’s about computing in general. While there are lots of resources out there that explain how to use computers or how to program or whatever, I’ve found little that explains how computers work from the ground up. As in the physical mechanisms underlying computers – how a bunch of wires with electricity running through them can do anything useful. Thus I’m thinking of doing a few YouTube videos where I simply take some wires, hook them up to a battery, and explain that stuff.
