Lacuna Passage - Devlog #19 - The Power of Unity Plugins Round 2

Back in April we posted about some of the Unity plugins that we are using to create Lacuna Passage. Since then we have started using even more plugins that have further eased our development workflow. Here are some of our favorites.

Terrain Composer - By Nathaniel Doldersum

I wish we had access to this tool from the start. Terrain Composer allows you to do some pretty incredible things to generate and tweak your terrain directly in Unity without the help of external tools. We still utilize a few external tools like World Machine, but Terrain Composer helps in handling some of the more repetitive menial tasks. This is an extremely powerful tool for those who take the time to learn it.

ats Colormap ULTRA Terrain Shader - By forst

We talked about our terrain shader in our previous showcase, but this is much more than just a shader now. The updates made here have drastically improved our terrain creation workflow, especially now that it is fully compatible with Unity 4.X. The new editor interface for setting up your terrain is super intuitive and automates many of the steps that were originally mostly manual. In my honest opinion Unity needs to make these kinds of terrain tools the default. When combined with Terrain Composer you have everything you need to make the most believable worlds possible in Unity.

Highlighting System - By Deep Dream Games

We are using the Highlighting System to help the player identify some objectives and highlight key objects in the environment. The effects are fairly uniform, but you can change colors and overlay/blending methods to suit your needs. There are plenty of provided example scripts to get you started with whatever highlighting functionality you might need.

Mega-Fiers - By Chris West

Mega-Fiers… What can I say about Mega-Fiers that you haven’t heard already (seriously, they do an awesome job marketing and demonstrating this plugin). Well, in case you don’t know, Mega-Fiers is an extremely powerful mesh deformation plugin. If you need a mesh to bend, twist, wave, squish, or anything else, then look no further. I first used Mega-Fiers when working on TIMEframe to create the slow-motion blowing banners in the city. I was able to animate the banners in 3ds Max using physics simulations and export the vertex animation data for use in Unity. The result is a smooth, incredibly detailed cloth-like animation that would not have been possible with the Unity cloth animation tools. We are excited about the possibilities for Mega-Fiers in Lacuna Passage.

NGUI - By Tasharen Entertainment

There is a reason that NGUI has become almost the default for creating user interfaces in Unity. It is undeniably better suited for the task than the built-in Unity GUI tools. We recently began work on converting the datapad GUI over to NGUI and we are very happy with the results. Fewer draw calls, manageable layer depths, texture atlasing, and more. I can’t imagine using anything else. Once you try NGUI you don’t go back.

Shader Forge Alpha - By Acegikmo

In our last plugin showcase we mentioned some great hard surface shaders; however, since that time we have made the plunge into creating shaders of our own. I had used the node-based Strumpy Shader Editor for a few years, but that plugin seems to be defunct now and not supported correctly in Unity 4.X. Luckily Shader Forge appears to have picked up the mantle. They are still in Alpha, but we have been testing the Alpha version to create new shaders for Lacuna Passage and we are blown away with the results. Plugins like Shader Forge go a long way in closing the visual gap between engines like Unreal and Unity. Keep an eye on this one and snatch it up the minute it hits the asset store.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #18 - More Concept Art, a New Shader, and Terrain

While we toil away on development of Lacuna Passage we thought we might give you a peek at some more concept art. We have really hit our stride with our art style, due in large part to our concept artist, Brandon Kern. Check out some of his work below.

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As we worked on bringing these concepts to life in 3D we realized that our equipment shader just wasn't up to the task. The normal maps were not as pronounced as we would have liked, and it was difficult to define strongly contrasting materials. Our models looked somewhat desaturated and ubiquitous across what should have been different surfaces. We set about creating a shader that would give us greater control over contrast and material definition (things like fresnel lighting, reflectivity, edge highlighting, and specularity). Below you can see the result of our efforts. It is now much easier to see the difference between surfaces like shiny plastic, dull metal, and rough rubber. This improved shader is still in testing since it was created using an alpha version of the upcoming Unity add-on "Shader Forge", but we are excited with the results and hope to utilize the eventual commercial release of Shader Forge.

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We've also been hard at work detailing the full-scale terrain that will be featured in the final game. Proper textures will be applied much later, but the massive heightmap is coming together quite nicely and should present the player with a wide variety of real Mars geographic features to explore. Check out a little preview below.

Time-lapse of the (still unfinished) terrain

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Untextured 3D preview of terrain in its current state

Find out more about how we are creating our terrain in our previous devlog.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #16 - From The Forums #1

 This week we are starting a new intermittent devlog feature called "From The Forums" where we will highlight some of our favorite questions posed by fans on our official forums. Check out some of our answers from the previous month.

1. Forum user mcchic45 asked if there will be actual previous or future/planned Mars mission equipment to discover.

Tyler Owen: This is definitely something that we have considered, however, there are two sides to the blade of realism. Mars is very large and our previous rovers are spread out over vast distances on it's surface. If we want to be pedantically realistic then it would be impossible for us to reach those other man-made structures from the region where Lacuna Passage takes place (namely Holden Crater). We will see how we might be able to find a balance here since so many people have expressed a similar desire.

2. Forum user JosephineC asked about system requirements.

Owen: It is still very early, but generally we would like to have the game run well on low settings on a 2012 MacBook Pro. That is the Mac we have for testing so that is our goal. I think if you have a desktop that is less than 5 years old you should be okay, but even older might be reasonable. We really want the game to scale for many different machines.

I don't want to really quote any real system specs and get caught with my foot in my mouth later (but hopefully in the near future we will have more details).

3. Forum user orpheus asked if anyone from Random Seed Games will be attending any gaming shows in the future.

Owen: The first show that we are planning to attend is GDC 2014, but we may hit a few more if the budget and scheduling allows for it (potentially PAX East).

4. Forum user orpheus asked if the game will be exclusively first-person and if you will be able to see your body.

Owen: Our goal is to never cut away from the first-person perspective. I look to games like Half Life for their ability to tell a story entirely through a first-person perspective.

As far as body awareness goes, it will be difficult for us to achieve an animated body with the limited resources we have.

5. Forum user masookerguy asked about the dynamic elements of the game play (weather, survival resources, etc).

Owen: Since the story of the game is almost completely non-linear we have quite a bit of freedom to have lots of randomly generated events and little details. It's more about what we have time for than anything. We would like to make lots of elements unpredictable so that everyone will have different survival experiences and so that the game is more replayable.

6. Forum user orpheus asked how saving will work.

Owen: We are still experimenting with a save method that we think will fit the gameplay best. Our intent right now is to save the game every time you "sleep". This adds a bit of danger to exploration in that you could lose your progress if you don't keep track of your resources. This could change though. It depends on what feels best for gameplay.

7. Forum user synchromesh asked if habitats and stations will be exploreable and if vehicles will be driveable.

Owen: Almost all of the habitats and capsules will be exploreable. We have not confirmed any usable vehicles however. There are some limitations for us to consider.

8. Forum user ItchyVagoo asked what survival elements we are focused on.

Owen: Here are the survival elements that we are currently working with:

• Starvation

• Dehydration

• Exhaustion

• Stamina

• Oxygen levels

• Battery levels

And here are a few things we are considering or currently testing:

• Body temperature

• Injuries

• Illness

9. Forum user orpheus asked if we will be including controller support.

Owen: This is something we plan to support 100%. I also play many PC games with a 360 pad so that's how I plan on playing LP myself.

10. Forum user orpheus asked if Lacuna Passage will contain any mature themes or content.

Owen: That is a very good question. I would personally like to have some of our characters react in ways that I find more realistic (swearing, discussing mature themes, etc), but we may decide to offer a "clean" version as well.

Most of these astronauts would probably be very professional in their conduct, but if you had all communication cut off from Earth with no way to return I think almost anyone would slip a little. We aren't looking to include mature content for shock value. We just want to avoid the "censored for TV" effect, where it's more noticeable when someone reacts inappropriately because they *avoid* swearing/etc.

11. Forum user orpheus asked if Jessica Rainer’s character development will be a primary element of the plot.

Owen: Jessica's character development is a huge part of your journey on Mars. We are going to be focusing a lot of time and attention on her motivations for becoming an astronaut as well as what keeps her going when it seems like all hope is lost.

12. Forum user orpheus (this person is seriously hungry for info about Lacuna Passage) asked what might be included in the Kickstarter Exclusive Bonus Content.

Owen: We haven't finalized anything for the Kickstarter bonus content ($25 level), but here are some ideas we are working with:

• Blueprints for some of the habitats

• Playlist of Jessica's favorite music

• A mini-game playable on the datapad

• A book/short story/poetry that Jessica brought with her

• High-resolution maps of the mission area

• 3D-model viewer of mission equipment and previous Mars rovers

• Unique in-game HUD colors/reskins

This is NOT a list of what we have planned, just ideas. From that list though I hope you can see that we are trying to stay away from anything that could be consider direct "story" content relevant to Jessica's journey. We still have a year and a half to sort it out and get feedback/suggestions/think of more stuff. There is a thread in the Backers Only board where you can give suggestions and feedback for the exclusive Bonus Content.

13. Forum user synchromesh asked if we are considering releasing a walk-around demo any time soon.

Owen: I would like to at some point in the near future, but we want to pin down a few performance issues so that we put our best foot forward. I'm open to a simple walk-around demonstration though. Any bit of time we spend on extras takes away from development on the final game however. We will try to balance requests with requirements.

We love all the discussion that has been going on in our forums and we thank you all for your great questions. If you want your question to be a part of our next "From The Forums" feature then get on over to the forums now!

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #14 - Kickstarter Breakdown: The Return of the Devlog

 The last couple months have been an absolute whirlwind for our team. In case you hadn't heard, Lacuna Passage was recently successfully funded on Kickstarter, surpassing our goal by 36%.  Since then we've been trying to tie up all the loose ends associated with a sudden windfall of development money. Unfortunately that has meant more time spent on the business side than on development, but it's all part of building a foundation so that we can focus more on development soon.

Kickstarter comes with a lot of strings attached, not the least of which is delivering on the promises made to your backers. Obviously the next year or so we are going to be discussing exactly how we are going to be doing that, so right now we thought it might be best to talk about some of the challenges we faced before, during, and immediately following our campaign and some things we learned from the process.

Prior to Launch - The Long Game of Marketing

When it came to preparing for our Kickstarter we knew that we had a lot of work to do before we were ready, and a big part of that was gathering interest during development. We spent almost six months marketing Lacuna Passage and I think this had a big impact on the success of our campaign later.

The devlog: Our devlog has been one of our most useful tools throughout our project. It is an extremely versatile way to communicate with our audience and it helps to demonstrate progress and improvement over the course of development. Often times when people have questions that require detailed answers I can just refer them to an old devlog post where we have already discussed the topic in-depth.

All aboard the karma train: Reddit has easily been our number one source of website views. For several months before our Kickstarter we participated almost weekly in Screenshot Saturday as well as posting each of our devlogs in any relevant subreddit. Posts of our early screenshots brought us a lot of attention and even resulted in a few articles on sites like Discovery News, Mashable, and Kotaku. Reddit is most useful in attracting an audience for your game which will hopefully translate to twitter followers, facebook likes, and rss subscribers.

The Top 10 referrers to our website over the last 6 months. Reddit is a powerhouse for traffic.

“Like my tweet post tumblrspace!”: Never underestimate the influence of social media. Many people use twitter and facebook as a type of RSS feed for news for things they are interested in, so we made sure that we had a presence anywhere our audience might be. Developing these micro-communities gave us some great early support when it came to launching the Kickstarter. We literally had people waiting to donate.

Presskit: It’s best to have one of these before you need it. When journalists started asking for screenshots, videos, and game summaries we were able to simply point them to our presskit page rather than manually sending out materials to every inquirer. We also made sure it was clearly linked from our website. Sometimes journalists wouldn’t contact us and would just run a story with whatever information we had available on our site. Having our presskit easy to find was very helpful in that regard.

Preparing for Launch - All Ducks in a Row

If you don’t know, ask: There are a ton of things to consider before launching your Kickstarter and one of the best ways to learn the process is to ask someone who’s been through it (and preferably succeeded). We were lucky enough to take advantage of (creator of Cards Against Humanity) Max Temkin’s Kickstarter Office Hours, which I believe he has unfortunately ended, but there are plenty of successful people out there who will likely respond well if you ask them nicely for advice. We were glad we did this before putting tons of work into our campaign because we quickly realized that we needed to change how we were approaching some of our rewards and business decisions.

Doing research: We used the site KickSpy.com to search for projects with similar themes (space, exploration, survival, etc) and with similar goals. KickSpy gives you much more freedom while searching projects than Kickstarter itself, which will give you a better picture of what to expect. With this approach we were able to compare ourselves to other successful and unsuccessful projects to determine what aspects of their campaigns we should adopt or abandon.

Overestimate everything: Kickstarter is pretty unforgiving when it comes to making mistakes. Overestimate how much time it will take you to run your campaign. Overestimate how much money you need to raise. Overestimate how stressed out you will be. Overestimate everything... We estimated the minimum amount of funding that it would take us to complete the game and we increased that by about 15% to cover unforeseen expenses, plus another 8% to cover the fees to Kickstarter and Amazon Payments, plus another 2% to cover failed payments.

What happens if we fail?: This was a difficult question, but an important one we had to ask ourselves. The continued development of Lacuna Passage was entirely dependent on our Kickstarter funding and we made sure that was clear during our campaign.

The page and video: We wanted to keep our Kickstarter video under five minutes and spend as much time as possible speaking directly to our audience. Gameplay footage and bullet points are great for selling your game, but on Kickstarter that is not your goal. You are not selling your game, you are asking for funding. It’s tempting to describe every single feature of your game either in your video or in your description, but that’s what your website (and hopefully your devlog) is for. Since we had been documenting our development prior to our Kickstarter it was easy for us to refer people to those resources rather than clutter up our page.

Art is your best friend: When a game is still in development sometimes it can be difficult to show exactly what the game will look like when it’s finished, yet it should be no surprise that good-looking games do better on Kickstarter. Do whatever you can to put your best foot forward when it comes to visuals. With Lacuna Passage we made sure to have concept art available for any features that did not currently exist in our prototype. This helped us to have more visual aids than text on our final page. Also, don’t underestimate the importance of sound and music. We had numerous backers who cited the music as the reason they decided to back our project.

Deciding on rewards: This was one of the most difficult aspects of the campaign to estimate accurately. Problems will always arise and the costs associated with reward fulfillment may be extremely volatile. This is where the overestimation part comes in. Hopefully if you’ve planned for the worst then you can handle it when it comes. In our case, we avoided physical rewards as much as possible to cut down on production and shipping costs. Extra pledges don’t count for much if a majority of the funding has to go towards extraneous physical rewards rather than the development of your game. Digital exclusives ended up being our most popular option and resulted in lots of extra funding for very little extra cost.

 $25 is the most popular pledge level across all Kickstarter projects, so we made sure that this level would be an attractive option with very little overhead cost.

Launch - No Turning Back

Contacting the press: We knew that we needed to do a press release right after we launched, but we made the mistake of not gathering a press contact list prior to launch. That meant that we spent the better part of two days collecting email addresses and sending out press releases when we likely could have accomplished the same thing in a few hours with a prepared contact list. Whatever you can accomplish before launching your project is always a good idea to get out of the way. In the end we got some great attention for our project through key articles from RPS, Kotaku, and Penny Arcade.

Our Top 10 sources of Kickstarter Pledges. Three articles from different gaming websites brought in a huge number of pledges while reddit was our single largest source of external donations.

The power of reddit: Throughout the campaign we posted announcements and updates on relevant subreddits, but our most successful post was an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on /r/gamedev. AMAs are a great way to gather interest and also figure out the “holes” in your campaign. If lots of people are asking the same questions then you probably need to look at your Kickstarter page and find a way to include the answers somewhere (the FAQ section can be your “catch-all” for common questions). We did our AMA on /r/gamedev.

PayPal: Supporting PayPal pledges alongside your Kickstarter campaign can be a bit of a double-edged sword. In our case we were not 100% confident that we would be funded so if we had begun taking PayPal pledges from the beginning and somehow fallen short of our Kickstarter goal we would have had to refund all PayPal pledges (since they are charged immediately whereas Kickstarter pledges are only charged at the end of a campaign). We didn’t want to deal with that headache so we waited until after we were fully funded on Kickstarter before we began supporting PayPal. It still ended up providing us with an extra $1,155 in funding after only 8 days. You can even use PayPal to “extend” your campaign, which we did for 5 days following the end of the Kickstarter funding. A majority of that $1,155 was raised after the Kickstarter had officially closed.

Expand your outreach: Sending preview builds to YouTube “Let’s Play”-ers can get you some great additional exposure. We had several influential YouTube personalities create videos of our prototype and they were very instrumental in getting the word out early. After we expanded our reach beyond just games journalists we got some really cool coverage from places like SpaceVidCast, who eventually gave us a sizeable donation to benefit subscribers of their show. Find anyone who might even be just tangentially related to your project and let them know about what you are doing.

Stretch goals: This was probably one thing that we messed up a little bit. Early on when we were preparing our Kickstarter we knew that we wanted to include stretch goals from the beginning to emphasize some of the ways we could expand on our root concept for the game. We thought there were plenty of optional things we could add that wouldn’t dilute our main vision. We organized these optional improvements in order of how many backers they would benefit, so we had things like “Additional Voice Acting” and “Live Music Recording” as some of our first stretch goals. These were things that every backer would benefit from if we reached them so it made sense to have them easily attainable. Unfortunately they were not very “exciting” prospects for most backers, so after we reached our main goal of $40,000 there was not much of a push to reach any of these goals. It became apparent in our comments that people were much more interested in some of our loftier goals like Oculus Rift support, but the general consensus was that we were too far from those goals and it wasn’t worth trying to reach them. At this point we made the decision to rearrange some of our stretch goals. We moved them so that the Rift goal would be the next goal to reach, but all the costs associated with each level were still intact. The effect was immediate. It should have been obvious to us from the beginning that the Rift goal would be more exciting for backers to reach. Switching our goals mid-campaign resulted in a few upset backers, but far more were supportive of the change. I think it was almost entirely responsible for our final day surge of over $5,000 in pledges, pushing us past the Rift goal. Hopefully we will still be able to hit a few more stretch goals via our Humble Store pre-order widget, which is available now on our website.

Our stretch goal switch made a big difference in our funding over the last few days of the campaign.

Success! - What next?

Financial planning: We got a lot more money than we were expecting. $54,295 to be exact. $14,000 over our goal (not to mention the $1,155 from PayPal and continued income from our pre-order widget). Since I’m the only one personally responsible for the management and disbursement of the funding I decided that it was in my best interest to form an LLC. There are many reasons to do this and I will spare you the details, but ultimately I would recommend it for anyone who is working on a project who expects to pay contracts to contributors, plus it’s a bit easier to manage your taxes (it’s easy to forget that you still have to pay taxes on all that income - Kickstarter doesn’t take it out for you).

Communication: We plan on doing at least two major devlog posts each month to keep our backers and other interested parties up to date on our progress. This post marks our return to the devlog after our Kickstarter hiatus. I’m sure we will jump back into Screenshot Saturdays on reddit as well.

Full-Time Development!: With the money from Kickstarter I can now work on Lacuna Passage full-time for the next year and a half and I can afford to pay some of our dedicated collaborators as well. I couldn’t be more excited about the future. Thanks in large part to reddit, I have finally fulfilled my dream of being a full-time indie game developer!

If you have any questions at all please leave a comment!

Additional Kickstarter stats for Lacuna Passage can be found here (Kicktraq.com)

Lacuna Passage - Live on Kickstarter!

The drought of info about Lacuna Passage is over! Go on over to our Kickstarter page now for all the juicy details. Check out our reward levels and get in on the action!

Lacuna Passage - Now on Steam Greenlight!

In preparation for our Kickstarter launch we have just created a Steam Greenlight page. We know that many of you have been following us for a long time so we would love to see an early rush of votes. Click the image below to check out our Greenlight page now (and see a couple new videos)!

Lacuna Passage - Quick Update

We have been uncharacteristically silent lately and that's because we have our heads down in preparation for a Kickstarter campaign launch later this month. There is a lot to do, and even though we don't have any strict deadlines, we would like to hold ourselves accountable to our goals. We have many additions to make to the gameplay prototype, a pitch video to shoot, and backer reward levels to finalize. As much as we love sharing our progress we hope you will forgive us for holding a few reveals back for the Kickstarter launch. We have been stunned by the amount of support we have received in the last few months and we are sure that all of you can help us make this game a success. Stay tuned for more information. If you follow our blog then you will be the first to know about the Kickstarter launch and there may be a few early bird reward tiers for you to take advantage of. Alright... back to work!

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #14 - Random New Stuff

In this week's devlog we cover a bunch of new stuff we've been working on including audio, dust storms, map navigation, and a nearly completed rover model.

In this week's video devlog we cover a bunch of new stuff we've been working on including audio, dust storms, map navigation, and a nearly completed rover model.

Lacuna Passage - Devlog #13 - The mundane side of game development

I really struggled to come up with a topic for a devlog this week. I feared that I might have to skip a week for the first time since I started writing devlogs for Lacuna Passage. Despite lots of game-related work that I had been doing I didn’t think that any of it was interesting enough to show off. A few people suggested, “Why not write a post explaining the mundane stuff?”. So you can thank those people for this devlog... hopefully it gives you some insight into the less-than-glamorous aspects of developing Lacuna Passage.

Managing a Team

The sad fact of team development is that someone inevitably has to spend time “managing” the team which detracts from the amount of time they can spend actually developing the game. This means finding reference images for concept artists and modelers, critiquing finished work, assigning new work, and documenting art pipeline specifics. Believe it or not, team management requires more than just poking your head into a room and telling someone to “tighten up the graphics on level 3”.

Google Drive is a lifesaver when it comes to communicating with your team. There is no better way that I have found to share and collaborate on important documents. All of our story and art pipeline documentation is shared via Google Drive.

Another great tool for team management is Trello. If you haven’t heard of it I highly suggest you check it out. It is essentially an advanced to-do list. You can assign team members to tasks, set due dates, attach files and screenshots, and leave comments and feedback. It’s seriously great. Even if you work alone it is perfect for keeping yourself on task.

Managing Assets

When I tell people I make video games in my free time I highly doubt they picture me spending 4 hours on a Saturday night converting image formats and adding new filename prefixes. But that’s exactly what happens more often than many developers would care to admit.

The allure of quickly throwing assets into your game “just to see how they look” can be strong, but you must resist the urge. Haphazardly importing BigAwesomeRock_07, MoreBigAwesomeRock_07_new, and SeriouslyThisIsTheFinalBigAwesomeRock_07_morenew will turn your folder structure into a wasteland of assets that have you scratching your head. Sometimes I wonder what the ratio of asset production to asset management is, but I know it’s much higher than most people think (or at least it should be). I spend a lot of time ensuring that there are backups of all our files and that all those files are properly labeled according to our naming conventions (which are conveniently available for reference in a Google doc).

When an asset is finally imported into the game I make sure that it has been properly checked for quality and conforms to our import settings for scale, etc. On the (hopefully rare) occasion that an in-game asset needs to be replaced it’s a good idea to make sure that both the old and new versions are backed up in a separate folder. Once the new version of the asset is imported into your game’s working project folder you want to be sure and delete the old file so that you never use the incorrect version by mistake. It will always be in your backup files if you need to return to it.

This process of keeping your game assets properly organized can be tedious and extremely repetitive, but in the end you will be glad you had the forethought. You might have a firm mental grasp on your folder structure when your game only has a few dozen assets, but before you know it you will be swimming in hundreds of messy files.

Bug-hunting

I’m not sure if I can even conceive of a more annoying aspect of game development. If someone asked me how I spent last Friday evening this would be how the conversation would go:

“Hey Tyler, so you’re still working on that game of yours huh? What did you accomplish recently?”

“Oh, well just the other day I was trying to get the image loading code for the in-game digital camera working and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. After hours of pouring over my code I realized I forgot to capitalize a letter. If there was a baby nearby at the time I would have punched it.”

Absolutely infuriating. Though I suppose I should mention that I am not a trained programmer and everything I do in code is extremely amatuer (I mostly work in Playmaker), but the stories I hear from close friends who have been programming for years are fairly similar. Bugs and code errors are the bane of the game developer’s existence.

Promotion

Email, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Screenshot Saturdays, press kits, Indie DB, and yes - Devlogs. I actually really enjoy promoting Lacuna Passage. It’s great to see people’s reactions to all your hard work, but it really takes a lot of time and effort to do it right. After all, even if you have the greatest game in the world it doesn’t really matter if no one knows it exists.

Just last week I spent nearly three days putting together a press kit for the game so that we have an easy place for journalists to find the latest info. That’s three days that I would love to have back for improving the game, but it’s just another necessary part of the process.

After a full day of work at my 9-5 job I come home to manage team assignments, manage new assets, hunt through the previous day’s progress for bugs, do some quick rounds of promotion, and maybe - just maybe - I will have time to get some real development done. All of this I do without the promise of any pay or reward, because there isn’t anything I would rather be doing. I make games and this is what it takes.