Not just a business and a form of art.... A Lifestyle!

On January 18th I mentioned that I got an aim set... I thought I'm going to manage to make my first simple game in a month... Today is 3rd of April and I'm pretty far from that. Maybe it's all not that simple as it seemed to be.


Not only I didn't post anything in the blog, which was supposed to keep me motivated, I wasn't also paying enough attention to the project. I can tell you a lot about how much tired I get after my full-time job, about the feeling of need to rest at least a little spend time with your girlfriend and friends, but... What I'm starting to understand is: My quest is not only about learning software and game design. It's also about changing my lifestyle,the way I am and the main part - staying motivated most of the time. Few of the thought I had after all this time.


Hit the break to see what I think we can do about that!

Kismet vs UnrealScript

As I've mentioned in one of the previous posts Unreal Engine has this visual scripting language called Kismet. It's pretty powerful and simple at the same time. I really loved using it while making tests of our upcoming game. So far I surprisingly mostly had difficulties with the Content Browser and the Level Editor itself, but never with Kismet... Working with is a real fun!

But one question always bothered me... Will I have to code? Where is the limit of Kismet's power? When will I have to give up visual scripting to actual coding?

News Update after the holidays...

Hey there! First of all, Happy New Year! I'm not really a big fan of holidays, but who cares what I think. They still do happen every year and people keep on complaining that I forget to with them something.
I did't post here for long time. It's been hard days for me and our whole team at the studio where I currently work. We've finished the first feature animated movie in our country and the last days before the deadline were living hell. I've posted a few thoughts about that on my other blog.
As to our topic, I do have some news too, although as u might expect I didn't have enough time for it either. But the news are mostly good and pretty inspiring for me.
First of all the greatest event is that Epic has finally released the update of UDK that completely supports iOS. I'll post about all the great things they've added to the package in the December's release later. But what I’d like to mention right now is that, because of what I’ve learnt after a more in-deep study of the engine and analyzing our financial situation I’ve decided to choose UDK as the engine to develop on. And I’ve already mentioned that it doesn’t ask for good coding skills (in most of situations) and it takes only 99$ to start up.
Me and my friend, who’s also taking part in this quest of ours, came up with few ideas of games that we assume would work. I’m not telling you any details about the games so far, just because they’re too basic so far and need more work. But what matters is that we decided to try and have a ready game in one month since today. The game will be pretty simple and I don’t expect any big success of it. It’s just that I want to go through the whole process in order to improve my vision of this industry and market.
I also won’t spend too much time thinking of how can we make the first game better. I assume it’s smarter to “just do” it instead of spending weeks in brainstorming, redoing gameplay, visuals and animations. As they say “good is better then perfect” and I couldn't agree more. Of course someday I will (everyone will!) create the best game ever, but by now... Let’s just create a game...)
The day will come, when we’ll be independent... And it’s not so far from here...
Alfred

We'll have to invest a little...

Hello, there!

So in this last post I've listed tools I think of choosing as my primaries. But the thing is, we are all limited to how much money we've got! And when u decide to change your full time job or as in the case to start your own business, then you're probably a bit limited within your budget. So in my case I'm super limited... I live in Georgia and currently make 500$ a month. It's pretty enough to live here, but not a lot as u might expect. So I need to find a way to do what we've planed without big expenses.

Take into consideration that the purchases will have to take place only after you’ve developed a draft of a game on your PC.  Of course you can buy all these things beforehand, but you don’t have to! You use your good old computer, with all this software you didn’t pay a penny for until you understand that what you’ve developed can bring you money…

Let’s find out what we need!

One of three ways...

Hey there! So I'm on the stage of studying thing and planning where to go next...
Here are some news:


At firs I thought that I need to concentrate on learning iOS SDK perfectly, but pretty soon, after having some studies I understood it's much better to learn a cross-platform tool of creating a mobile game. AppStore is good and I love it, but making what u've created cross-platform means greater number of consumers and as a result more profit. Taking into consideration that number of Android devices is growing and even Woz thinks that it will be the main stream platform in the world it would be stupid to invest in iOS only. Although I just have this feeling that it limits your possibilities, when you create something that works on multiple platforms, I have to admit that it didn't stop any software developer so far.


So here is what I found cross-platform.

Escaping the reality...

Hey there! My name is Alfred and just a few weeks ago I understood that things aren't goin right in my life... Don't get me wrong I have a pretty good job which I like a lot. I have good friends and a passionate girlfriend. But... it's all not the way I used to dream it to be when I was just a few years younger.

A few words about my background. I'm a college drop-out... I wanted to be a programmer, but then came this passion for CG and 3D animation and I thought I don't need the uni any more... I'm not sure so far if it was a good decision or if it was bad one. Anyway, mostly I don't regret it.

So back to the "few weeks ago" thing... I keep reading these lifestyle blogs (my favourite and actually the first blog of the kind that I subscribed to is Oscar's http://freestylemind.com/) and these guys showed me that there is another life! That u don't actually have to spend your whole day at the studio working as hard as u can EVEN if u're too young for a calm life. That there is much more about this world then work. They really inspired me!

In addition I never enjoyed having a boss (although I believe to be a really good employee). So I came up with this thought and vision of living a life where you do what you want whenever you want, make enough money for it and don't have this feeling of all the fun in the world simply passing by.

"Great!" one would say! It's a dream come true! But... how?! Good question. I actually realised that subconsciously I've been asking myself this question for the last 21 years... (which is my age BTW)
And here was the simple answer... I love doing animation and working with 3D graphics... I worship Apple!
I'm a geek! I'm good at self educating, self motivating and working without a team... I have programmer's background and although I'm not VERY experienced at it, I love this feeling of working with the code! So if you sum it all up (in my naive vision of the world) u get a perfect indie game developer of iOS, oh don't ya?!)) At least that's what i believe in and that's all that matters so far.

So I just understood that I need a blog just to report my progress. I believe it will make me stay more concentrated.
At this stage I'm collecting information and trying to develop a good action plan. It appeared to be harder then I thought, because there are lots of different ways you can make an iOS game...
In a few days I'll update you with the news about what I've found out.