![]() I found inspiration and guidance from two books I had the opportunity to discover and enjoy. I also worked very hard to stay motivated while developing my Reflective Journal, not being english my mother tongue, this was quite a challenge. Debbie did a fantastic job providing additional animations and narrative content, while I put all my efforts on getting the game working on local and WebGL versions. I was eager to be part of a real team again, and working in collaboration with Debbie Norton for the second ideation project was a great experience to confront points of view and share responsibilities. The use of Control Version to track the evolution of each new prototype was also a life saver. It is also clear that I need to keep learning how to use Unity, as in the future I prefer to put all my efforts on the early development phases, having prove to myself that visual scripting is a valid instrument to fast test my ideas. With my roots on traditional programming languages as Pascal or C, this was a huge change of mindset for me. For that I spent at least two extra hours during 8 evenings to understand how to create state machines without any line of code. I started to use new tools to find solutions in order to solve most of the problems I mentioned before.įor both rapid iterations, I forced myself to make fast prototypes with Unity and Playmaker. Equally important: I learnt when to stop and ‘unplug the cable’. I am pleased to recognise that during the two rapid ideation sessions I obtained a better understanding on the use of an Agile philosophy to handle time more efficiently, to identify tasks and keep track of them. ![]() These are the main reasons for which I decided to do this MA, as I need to improve on those key areas and also face some other issues from a professional point of view. Must be a better way to deal with time management.ĭo I have to stay as a solo developer or maybe get a publisher? What can I do to avoid making the same mistakes? īy the end I was happy to have finished, ready to move on… and forget about game making. Dealing with criticism without compromising my mental and emotional health was very difficult. I set the bar way too high, and sank into endless crunching hours.Įven though a lot of people loved my creation, some others found it very disappointing. I was not focused on making fast prototypes to validate my assumptions, assuming that a demo of the same game, would be more than enough to take this big leap of faith. I did not follow a clear path of action, sometimes I just improvised on the go, based on trial and error… I have goals, of course, but not so smart goals. In consequence I went over budget and the development process took way longer than planned. I was the only one responsible to keep things going on, so I had to make many decisions relying on my own judgement. I did well on most of this areas, but I also failed very hard in others. I even designed the merchandise items for the backers. I coded more than 25 levels, supervised and finished thousands of hand made animations, situations, scripts and dialogues not to mention localisation, music or casting voices. To create my first commercial game I did almost everything by myself: I run a Kickstarter campaign, I pitched my idea to a financial committee to get some extra fundings and I had the opportunity to represent the Swiss Game delegation on several international exhibitions. I would like to introduce myself as an independent game developer, but to be honest I’m not quite sure.
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