This is the last entry so far! We did it! I hope you have enjoyed the ride as much as me! In this post you will find my Personal Case Study video.

 

Personal Case Study Video

Transcription download

 

Transcript

Hello, my name is Patricio Land. I would like to introduce myself as an independent game developer, but to be honest I’m not quite sure.

Let me explain why…

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.

To make this game I put all the hats on.  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. I even designed the merchandise items for the backers.

I did  well on most of this areas, but I also failed very hard in others. I was the only one responsible to keep things going on, so I had to make many decisions relying on my own judgement.

In consequence I went over budget and the development process took way longer than planned.

 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. 

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 set the bar way too high, and sank into endless crunching hours. 

Even though a lot of people loved my creation, some others found it very disappointing. Dealing with criticism without compromising my mental and emotional health was very difficult .

By the end I was happy to have finished, ready to move on… and forget about game making.

Not really! 

Back to the University, at my age?

What can I do to avoid making the same mistakes?

Must be a better way to deal with time management.

Do I have to stay as a solo developer or maybe get a publisher? 

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.

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. Equally important: I learnt when to stop and ‘unplug the cable’.

I started to use new tools to find solutions in order to solve most of the problems I mentioned before.

For both rapid  iterations, I forced myself to make fast prototypes with Unity and Playmaker. For that  I spent at least two extra hours during 8 evenings  to understand how to create state machines without any line of code. With my roots on traditional programming languages as Pascal or C, this was a huge change of mindset for me. 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. 

The use of Control Version to track the evolution of each new prototype was also a life saver. 

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. 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 also worked very hard to stay motivated while developing my Reflective Journal, not being english my mother tongue, this was quite a challenge. I found inspiration and guidance from two books I had the opportunity to discover and enjoy.  Reading the lectures  for each module and participating on several  online conferences gave me a lot of material to share on the blog.

As I wrote, another of my big goals for the next period is to complete the documentation for the open source engine that I used on my first game, this could be a nice way to help help the community of adventure game developers. To accomplish this i’m  testing the bucket system within an Agile framework to evaluate each tutorial content in the form of story points.

I have exciting plans for the future and I can’t wait to start prototyping my next indie game!

Thank you for watching this video.

 

List of images

Sol 705 point ‘n’ click graphic adventure by Patricio Land

Kickstarter campaign for Sol 705 by Patricio Land

Pro Helvetia Production contributions for 2019. Pro Helvetia Foundation

Hero Expo Convention 2019 – Bern, Switzerland 2019 by the author.

Paris Game Connection – Paris, France 2019. Video by the author.

Sol 705 promotional video clip. ‘The time is now’ theme performed by The Corianders. Used with permission.

Swiss Game Week 2019 on Steam promotional art. Image by the author.

Sol 705 demo version by Patricio Land.

Google Play Store page for Sol 705 and Sol 705 demo. Images by the author.

Space Indie Studios logo animation, created by Filip Velkosvky and Patricio Land.

Concept illustration for the first rapid ideation by Patricio Land.

Concept illustrations for the second rapid ideation by Patricio Land and Debbie Norton.

Personal Reflective Journal by Patricio Land.

Pocket Gamer video vault and Pocket Gamer Connect digital 6 web sites by Pocket Gamer.

Unreal Engine masterclass session by Eduardo Martin.

AdventureX promotional video from AdventureX Kickstarter  2019.

The Revenge of Johny Bonasera promotional art by Rafael Garcia.

References

Cohn, M. 2006. ‘Agile Estimating and Planning‘. Published by Pearson Education, Inc.

Langr, J. and Ottinger, T. 2011. ‘Agile in a Flash Speed-learning Agile Software Development‘.  Pragmatic Programmers, LCC.

Rubin, K. 2012. ‘Essential Scrum: A practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process’.  Published by Addison-Wesley Professional.

Aurich, R. and Mohiudin, A. 2019. ‘An outlook at Agile methodologies for the independent games developer’.

[online] Available at:<https://doi.org/10.1080/1206212X.2019.1621463>  International Journal of Computers and Applications [Accessed 5 April 2021].

Hutong Games. ‘Playmaker Manual’.[online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCll8FyIFgevUyLfd-jhhskA> [Accessed 22 March 2021].

Fauzi, R. Youtube channel. ‘2D Platformers using Unity and Playmaker 2020 update‘.[online]  Available at:<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbjQvNpDaHBrlBhpk65OQgA> [Accessed 22 March 2021].

Unity Forum.[online] Available at: <https://hutonggames.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W1>[Accessed 21-23 March 2021].

Williams, R. 2001. ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit‘. Faber and Faber.

Lord.P and Sibley B. 2010. ‘Cracking Animation‘. Published by Thames & Hudson.

Schell, J. 2014. ‘The Art of Game Design – A book of Lenses‘. 2nd Edition. Published by CRC Press – Taylor Francis Group.

Bassot, B. 2016. ‘The Reflective Practice Guide‘. Published by Routledge.

Hill-Whittall, R. 2015. ‘The Indie Game Developer Handbook‘. Published by Focal Press.

Hernandez, E. 2013. ‘Set the Action! Creating Backgrounds for Compelling Storytelling in Animation, Comics and Games‘. Published by Focal Press.

Software

Mac Os Catalina version 10.15.7 by Apple Inc.

Bladecoder game Engine version 4.2.0 by Rafael Garcia. [online] Available at: <https://bladecoder.github.io/bladecoder-adventure-engine/> [Accessed 14 May 2021].

Unity 3D engine version 3.0f1 by Unity Technologies. [online] Available at: <https://unity.com> [Accessed 9 May 2021].

Adobe Photoshop release 22.3.1 by Adobe <https://www.adobe.com/> [Accessed 14 May 2021].

iMovie version 10.2.3 by Apple Inc. [online] Available at: <https://www.apple.com/imovie/> [Accessed 10 May 2021].

Blender version 2.92 by The Blender Foundation. [online] Available at <https://www.blender.org> [Accessed 2 April 2021].

Aseprite version 1.2.17 by David Capello. [online] Available at  <https://www.aseprite.org> [Accessed 22 March 2021].

Audacity 3.0.0 by Audacity Team. [online] Available at  <https://www.audacityteam.org> [Accessed 6 May 2021].

Focus Tomato App for iOS by Chih-Shan Liu. [online] Available at  <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/focus-tomato-lets-focus-now/id1471458198> [Accessed 5 February 2021].

Pomodoro Focus Timer App for iOS by Tianna Henry-Lewis. [online] Available at  <https://pomofocus.io> [Accessed 12 February 2021]

Trello  online by Attlassian. [online] Available at <https://trello.com> [Accessed 10 May 2021].

Free Sound FX [online] Available at  <http://www.freesound.org> [Accessed 10 May 2021].

 

The video has been made using an iPhone 11Pro with an Zhiyum Smooth 4 handstabilizator.