Game Development So Far
Hi everyone, it’s been another really productive and rewarding week for Gym Empire. There’s a long way to go but it is already starting to pick up a lot of steam! A lot of that has been to do with the tasks I set myself for the last week so we’ll go over those now:
- Look further into the MatchTarget animation issue (possibly try using a different client model to see if that affects things) – I’ve still not cracked this yet but I’m almost certain it’s that the character model I’m using does not support it in some way. Therefore I’ve decided this week due to this and some feedback comments from the community to look at revising the character style. The current chibi style was always a sort of placeholder but I’ve grown to like the cartoonish style. I think ultimately I’ll end up staying close to a cartoony style but in the meantime I’m going to test the waters with everything from cartoon to realistic. Whilst doing this I’m going to be cleaning up the character game objects in Unity to make it easier to swap in and out new character styles and hopefully solve the MatchTarget issue.
- Work on Staff behaviour (interacting with clients) – I’ve gotten a lot of the staff behaviour sorted now for this iteration, they look for clients that aren’t training, go over to them and then train them on different equipment types. There’s still a lot of tweaking left to do but I’m really happy with the progress so far.
- Update the Gym Empire landing page – I’ve updated the Gym Empire landing page and sorted out some security certificate issues that popped. I’m happy with how it looks and think it fits the purpose and current style of the game.
- Start creating Gym Empire press kit – I’ve not started the dopresskit page yet but I’ve done pretty much 80% of the work involved in writing descriptions, screenshot and video gathering. Most of this work was in relation to the IndieDB presence but its killing two birds with one stone.
- Create a Gym Empire presence on IndieDB – I’ve successfully created a Gym Empire presence on IndieDB and it’s been really successful so far, even getting so high as number 2 on the popular games of the day after an article I wrote! This has been really motivating and has led to a lot of nice early exposure. As well as this I’ve have been engaging with the reddit tycoon community and getting lots of great feedback. I’ve also sent out some early press emails to announce that Gym Empire is in development. Again this has proved more successful than I expected with the highlight being contacted by a 160k follower YouTuber showing their interest in covering Gym Empire when a beta version is available!
- Finish writing Part 3 of “Making an indie game series” – with the extra focus on marketing this week the blog series took a back seat unfortunately. I’ve matured it in my mind but I need to write the rest of it and complete it for you guys. That will roll over to this week’s tasks.
Other Developments
So it’s been a really productive week in terms of early marketing and I can already feel the difference in interest from Glo. When I talked about Glo I had to explain to people why it was worth playing. With Gym Empire I just need to mention the concept and people are eager to give it a go and are excited to give me ideas! With the idea of amending the character designs last week, this week is going to focus on that so that I can quickly make a decision on the direction I need to take i.e. to I continue to look for existing assets, do I pay for unique assets or do I try the hard way and create my own? I’ve already found some great character creation tools for getting the ball rolling but there are still quite a lot of finishing touches to add which can prove to take up quite a lot of time. Still I think it’s important to get the visual style right so I want to get it right.
Time Management
This week’s tasks are:
- Look into the complexity of creating own character assets
- Modify character objects to be more modular to enable easier character changing
- Further refine staff behaviour
- Add staff icons
- Complete part 3 of blog series
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
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