Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Where I'm Coming From

OK. So - Who am I?
I've been working in various Hi-Tech companies for the last twelve years or so (in Israel and in the US). Started out with programming and in the last few years moved to project management.
I usually use my "night time" (after the wife and kids are asleep) for my hobbies - a bit of writing and drawing but mostly for developing games. I've started numerous "nightly" projects but to date only finished very few.
If we disregard the writing and drawing projects (for the sake of keeping this blog focused) I actually finished two games.
The first was a Sudoku game called "Sudoku Blues" (all the other good names were taken) that I started working on around 2003, forgot about it for two years or so and finished it in 2005. This, btw, points to one of my main weaknesses of working very hard to begin with and then losing interest and not finishing the project (I think I have around twenty examples of such projects, but I think I'll dedicate a complete blog-post for this issue). Anyways - I did finish this one. When I started working on it there were only a handful of Sudoku apps for PC, upon finishing there were well over 300. I put it out as donationware (yes. Once there was such a thing), got a lot of downloads (over 200,000 if memory serves) and made around 200$.
My second game was called "Cube Monsters". It was my first stab at doing something graphical and to begin with was just something I thought I'd play around with. After some time I like the way the game behaved (It's basically a match-3 game in 3D), put some more effort into it, collaborated with the amazing Inbal Laniado for graphics (check her out at http://inballaniado.com/ ), changed the name from the original "Cubism" and put a changing price tag on it (usually 99 cents). It was only available for the PC (big mistake) and I didn't have the will power to port it to a different platform. around 30,000 people downloaded the demo but only around 100 people actually bought it. It was, however, added to games-on-demand services in Portugal and Singapore.
As you can probably see - no real commercial successes (I think I'll dedicate a blog post to explain the mistakes I made leading to this later on), but on the other hand I learned a lot from these two games and had a lot of fun making them.
Incidentally - If you're curious about them you can check them out at http://www.oggasoft.com/ ,
I suppose this makes a pretty high-level summary of my Game Dev experience up till now (without referencing unfinished games). There's a bit more to me than that but I'm trying to focus on game development here so I suppose it's enough.
At the moment I'm working on an IPhone game (as are 50% of the indie game developers out there, with the other 50% working on IPad games). I had a strong spurt to begin with but haven't touched it for around two weeks. I just returned from a family vacation very eager to return to it and I hope this blog will have a positive effect.
I'll explain where I want to get to (at least in terms of my current game) in my next post.

2 comments:

  1. it seems that you are very talented guy, don't give up. i'm already waiting to see your new game soon... good luck !

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  2. I suppose that many people start more things that they don't complete than things that they actually complete.

    I think that working on something is worth your time (previous off-work time) as long as doing it is fun and as long as you learn something from it. It's quite reasonable not to spend time on completing things that do not interest you anymore.

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