《Elusive Ninja》成败谈编辑本段回目录
《Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief》是Bulletproof Outlaws（BPO）推出的首款游戏，BPO是工作外包的单人独立游戏工作室。我已经积累某些实际行业经验，但BPO是单人工作模式的一个尝试，我能够在作品中享有更多创作自由和选择机会。
孩童时代我就梦想以制作游戏谋生，如今手机市场的准入门槛很低，因此是个试验的好机会。我报名参加商业速成班，我把所有课程内容都存储备份，从上课第一天到完成首款游戏。《Elusive Ninja》开发博客每天都有100多条更新内容，其中包含众多幕后信息（游戏邦注：内容覆盖游戏开发、资金管理、避开法律问题及游戏设计哲学等方面）。
我是事后分析文章的忠实读者，因为我认为这能帮助文章作者学习如何将工作流程条理化，解决问题，让阅读此文章的开发者避免犯同样的错误，从惨痛经验中学习经验。所以下面就让我们看看《Elusive Ninja》的成功和失败之处。
成功之处：
1）动画工具
项目开始前，我将类似Flash运作方式的定制动画工具外包：我拖曳、调整和旋转屏幕画面，根据时间设定帧数，接着就出现包含坐标和时序的.XML文件。游戏引擎读出这些数据，然后填充所有中间帧数和信息。游戏内容鲜采用硬编码形式。动画工具亦称作功能，所以我能够制作攻击动画，在最后帧数访问“checkDamage:ninja:explosive”，其将会在检查武士和炸药冲突的游戏编码中运行内容。我甚至还会使用它运行特定帧数的音效，加载其他动画文件！
这就消除众多诸如“你能否向左移动画面2个像数？嗯嗯……这似乎不是很合适，向右移动画面1个像数怎么样？”之类的美工方面要求，消除编程过程中的系列他杀和自杀行为。最终结果更符合美工构想，在润色阶段，美工能够做出许多调整，无需劳烦程序员便能够进行调节。我能够将2帧动作循环火柴人植入主要角色动画当中，随后将其转换成10帧动作循环模式，而程序员需要做的就是重写.XML文件，进行重新编译！
开发这样的工具需耗费额外时间，但这能够为游戏实际开发节省很多时间。手动输入坐标和帧数时序速度缓慢、冗长乏味，而且颇费心神（游戏邦注：不论是从美工，还是编程角度而言）。未来我希望能够扩充这个工具，我无法想象回到没有动画工具的工作流程当中。
由于动画工具，我得以填充很多Flash画面。
ElusiveNinja from gamasutra.com
2）工作趣味横生
致力感兴趣内容所产生的结果截然不同。所有游戏内容都符合我的期望，即便是最成功的开发阶段依然散发“嘿，看到一切顺利发展是否棒极了？”的感觉。很多大公司开发者制作的作品都是他们不在乎或不了解的，这注定会带来糟糕结果，你将陷入同种压力当中（游戏邦注：除非这种情况更令人沮丧），因为你知道当你完成游戏，你并不会引以为傲。我并不指望游戏能带给我数十亿营收，只要收支平衡，我就心满意足，但我需要向大家展示游戏，并表示：“瞧，这就是我的作品”。虽然我之前有推出过游戏，但我从未指望自己能够榜上有名。
3）游戏测试很重要
我确实让10个人（有些是好友，有些是陌生人）彻底测试游戏，给我真实反馈。我真的认为我首次设置的游戏玩法很可靠，认为发布时机已经成熟，但当测试者玩过之后，我发现其中存在很多问题！人们希望以我预期之外的方式控制游戏，以他们而非我习惯的方式持有设备！没有说明体验方式以及认为大家持有设备的方式都与我相同是我的过失，但触屏设备并没有标准的控制装置，所以你无法预测用户的操作方式。除控制装置之外，困难主要在于他们认为操作方式不合理，透过统计分析数据我发现游戏的某些关卡无人能够通过。
ElusiveNinja Tutorials from gamasutra.com
因此我不得不添加动画视频教程，确保用户按照控制装置的设计方式体验，我花了整整一周时间解决游戏AI问题，使其更敏锐（游戏邦注：而非难以实现的更快速），所以难度有所增加，但又让玩家觉得只要他们具备足够技能，就能够通过关卡。
最后游戏得到合理平衡，但难度曲线明显不同于第一个版本。我无法想象发布未经测试员之手的作品。若我这样发布作品，我将会获得众多诸如“这个控制装置很糟糕”、“这个设计不合理”之类的评价，因为用户就会面对测试员需要面对的问题。为什么要自讨苦吃，不花1-2个礼拜完善作品呢？
4）理财规划
我为开发工作筹集充足资金，努力降低制作成本。我自己制作音效或以低价购买。我调动好友力量，且开展系列交叉推广活动。我的想法是制作成本越低，支出费用越小，就能够越快开始创收，为下款作品筹集资金。未来当我推出数款作品后，我就能够制作更大型作品，但我对此过程很有耐心。
我过去读过很多事后分析文章，有的开发商花费2-3年制作游戏，偶然一举成名，他就瞬间变成百万富翁，但更多时候游戏都是石沉大海，削弱开发者的经济力量！我希望像其他开发者那样制作一款40小时的史诗般角色扮演游戏或者是100多等级动作类杰作，但我希望等自己积累更多经验，经济实力更加雄厚以后再做尝试，这样我就能够花1年时间开发游戏，无需担心游戏销量。
我有理财规划，所以我无需担心能否承担房租，或者是否需要兼职，或者是否能够支付他人相应款项。无需顾虑资金问题，我就能全心专注游戏工作，工作就变得更简单。
5）商业培训
我参加6个月紧凑而累人的商业课程，这也许是我最重要的工作内容之一。我们被迫进行市场、制作成本和营销策略的相关调查，所有这些都令我受益匪浅。很多人遵照内心想法做出商业决策，这行得通，但通常我们的想法会受个人偏见或立场影响，深入研究后我们会发现实际研究和数据呈现的是截然不同的结果。
这个商业课程强调连续营销的重要性。我无法指出我读过的此类事后分析文章有多少，这些人花费若干年在自己的梦想项目中，但没有开展任何营销活动，而只是相信“如果这个好作品，用户自会发现”。随着时光的流逝，这些项目均未获得任何曝光度，开发者备受打击，因为入不敷出，更别提开发另一款游戏。
如今是口头广告时期。社交媒介和互联网提供如此多的免费营销机会，我们因此需在幕后不断开展活动。我熟知的有些开发者已经推出众多游戏，但其在Twitter的粉丝仍旧只有25人。在这款游戏推出之前，我有200位粉丝，他们会转发我的消息，进行口头传播，因为他们随时关注我的动态。反过来，我也会在力所能及范围内帮助他们，这对我们来说是个双赢结果！经营博客没必要向开展项目那样深入，但每个开发者都至少要开设自己的免费博客和Twitter帐号。
未来我希望我的游戏能有留言板论坛，让玩家能够讨论游戏，分享技巧，上传同人画面，参与竞赛获得免费物品，献谋献策，进而形成一个社区！
失败之处：
1）进程缓慢
原本计划游戏最多花费1-2个月。这原本就是个精致、简单的iOS项目。这从理论上行得通，但作为一个美工，我深陷关注苹果iDevice设备屏幕优势的迷思当中！所有颜色色泽鲜明，缤纷多彩，我多少陷入此类圈套中：“如果这个爆炸能有3个层次就太棒了”、“这里还有很多空间，为何不加入升级装置？”以及“若菜单之间有过渡动画就太好啦。”曾经有一度我计划设计8个不同等级的内容，在各个等级之间嵌入过场动画。随着时间的流逝，我开始意识到这款游戏的设计有些过于雄心勃勃，我开始削减内容！
ElusiveNinja BeforeAfter from gamasutra.com
最后整个游戏制作过程耗费足足5个月。回头想想，有些内容并非不可或缺（游戏邦注：菜单本能够更加简单，动画的帧数也无需如此之多）。这些完全能够控制，这也是在敲响警钟：如果你是游戏唯一设计者，你应该退后一步，客观看待游戏，合理控制自己！请求好友平衡观点是个不错的主意，但前提是好友需足够诚实，发表这样的言论：“这听起来不错，你认为你能够在1个礼拜内整理8个不同背景？”
2）缺乏足够人力资源
成立Bulletproof Outlaws前，我参加了商业课程，课程反复强调产品开发阶段营销的重要性，而不是等到工作完成后再迎头赶上。此外，我几乎每天发表游戏进程博文，因为我本身就是开发博客阅读粉丝，喜欢同其他开发商分享信息和经验，而且我发现我可以将这些开发博客打包作为游戏奖励。
问题出在处理文字工作，这些文书涉及业务创建、资金管理、定期发博文、游戏设计、所有美工工作、所有营销工作、发微博、留言板发帖、制作横幅和电影以及结尾完善阶段的程序工作……众多我需要扮演的角色。我知道游戏设计涉及很多工作，因为这就是创业的本质，但这有些令人不知所措。未来我希望外包更多工作（游戏邦注：如博客更新、营销以及制作预告片），让我的工作任务不要显得过于疯狂。我每天的工作任务都是这些。对任何想要从事严肃游戏开发的全职人员，我将给予鼎力支持。
3）缺乏压力管理
这点咋听有些戏剧化，当我读到其他企业家给予此类建议时我通常会嗤之以鼻。诸如“在家设置独立房间作为办公室，不要使用卧室。不要把放松和工作的地方混为一体。”之类的言论会令我翻白眼。但在开发结束时，我处在特殊阶段，常常每次睡几小时，然后醒来，开始操作我的便携电脑，工作到我觉得精疲力尽，然后接着睡。我一度一个礼拜没有离开我的房间，我连续工作几礼拜！基本上所有醒着的时候我都是在房间使用我的便携电脑工作。
这其实给我带来很大负面影响，因为原本有趣、令人兴奋的工作开始让我感到窒息、束缚，特别是在此期间我毫无放松时间。长时间工作带来的压力开始影响我的个人生活，我开始变得易怒、沮丧，严重到好友都察觉，并向我指出。我没有想到压力竟然给我带来如此消极的影响！
我认为其中的诀窍就是把工作和家庭生活区分开。5点关掉电脑，出去外面享受阳光，周末时间好好放松，这样星期一8点开始工作时，你就会感觉自己活力焕发，十分放松，而不是疲惫不堪、精疲力尽。这对于身处传统大公司的员工来说不易实现，所以独立的部分意思是你能够自己制定计划，确保在每个项目都有停工时间。
开发下款游戏，我计划制定稳定规则：无论事情如何紊乱，我都不会在周末工作。我们打算制作电子游戏，这应该会很有趣，而不会充满压力！
4）缺乏平台经验
我对iDevices的所有知识是它们能够支持大幅图画，而你能够享有众多自由。设备没有16X16图片限制或256调色板限制。但随着开发接近尾声，我们陷入设备局限问题。iPad是个大设备，但事实证明其不过和iPhone 3GS功能相当，只不过其屏幕大过后者两倍。所以虽然游戏运作于iPhone 3GS，iPad还是努力将游戏植入这个屏幕大过两倍的平台。
ElusiveNinja Devices from gamasutra.com
除此之外，iDevices文件夹的最大限度20M，因此无法下载超过3G的应用。如果应用超过20M，用户需连接Wi-Fi方能下载。App Store倡导“冲动购买”，所以用户首次购买若无法顺利实现，当他们链接至Wi-Fi就不会考虑再次下载，“我要这个”的时刻已经过去。
然后你在游戏中引入Retina画面（游戏邦注：这是正常iPhone画面的2倍），除非你需要在游戏中同时引入正常画面和Retina画面。所以你的iPhone游戏是8兆周，而Retina版本是16兆周，然后你把二者结合起来，所得到的应用是24M，超过20M限度。
所以未来当我设计游戏的时候，我会把这些考虑在内，特别是我如果添加过场动画、配音和大量音乐。我会一开始就留心文件大小。
5）动画工具
不幸的是，这个节省大量时间的神奇动画工具，并未进行充分测试，存在许多漏洞，找出这些漏洞需耗费大量时间。而且这个工具对信息显示方式十分挑剔，我耗费许多时间弄清所有细小差别让该设备的内容和我笔记本的保持一致。在聘请程序员之前，我尝试制作系列动画，但当我把动画放入游戏中时，我发现它们需以不同方式排列，我需要重新制作动画。
我们在做Retina版本时发现工具及传输方式使得Retina版本完全出错，所有内容严重失衡。到我们耗尽所有时间时，我决定完全放弃Retina版本。
既然工具操作顺利，我找到所有细微差别，下款游戏应该会进展更顺利，但所有这些问题使得项目比预期晚1个月完成，遭遇漏洞问题和放弃Retina版本着实颇令人沮丧。
总结
从这个项目，我学到许多，虽然有时压力非常大，但完成自己设计作品的回报感受让人觉得一切都值得。我原本认为游戏完成后我会希望腾出1个月好好放松，但老实讲看到游戏入驻App Store，我感到特别迫不及待，特别受鼓舞，开始希望着手下款作品。
我希望加强每个项目的流程，有天能够同小型内部团队共事，而不是与1-2个承包商合作，通过互联网联系。但我认为一切都要循序渐进。我学会如何应对进度缓慢，如何处理游戏工作安排问题，这点对于将来我管理不只包含我和程序员的团队颇有益处。错误最好在我还是小型开发者的时候凸显出来，这样才不会带来巨大经济损失，若是未来，这些错误产生的后果将更加严重。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，作者：Jeff Hangartner）
Postmortem: Bulletproof Outlaws’ Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief
by Jeff Hangartner
Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief is the first game released by Bulletproof Outlaws, a newly formed “one guy contracting out help” indie game studio. I’ve got some actual industry experience, but BPO is an attempt to go it solo and have more creative freedom and choice in what I create!
Since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to make my own games for a living, and the barrier of entry into the mobile market is so low these days that this felt like the perfect opportunity to give it a go. I signed up for a crash-course in business entrepreneurship and documented everything almost daily all the way from Day 1 of the course till the completion of this first game. There’s over 100+ updates with plenty of behind-the-scenes info on everything from the game’s development, to managing finances, to avoiding legal issues, to game design philosophy, etc. at the Elusive Ninja devBlog.
I’ve always been a big fan of Post-Mortems because I think they help the developers writing them learn to streamline their work-flow and iron out kinks, and they help developers reading them avoid making the same mistakes and learning things the hard way. So on that note, let’s look at what went right and wrong with Elusive Ninja!
What Went Right:
1) Animation Tool
Before starting the project, I contracted out a custom Animation Tool that essentially works like Flash: I can drag, scale and rotate art around the screen visually, keyframing it to a timeline, and it spits out an .XML file full of coordinates and timings. The game engine reads these numbers and fills in all the in-between frames and information. Very little in the game is hard-coded, the Animation Tool even calls functions so I can make an attack animation and on the last frame tell it to call something like “checkDamage:ninja:explosive” which’ll run something in the game’s code that checks for collision between the ninja and the explosive, etc. I even use it to play sound effects on certain frames and load other animation files!
This eliminates a ton of “Could you shift that graphic 2 pixels to the left? hmmm…no that’s still not quite right, how about moving it back 1 pixel to the right?” requests on the art side, and eliminates a ton of suicide and manslaughter on the programming side haha It also means the final result looks a lot more like the artist envisions, and in the polish stages the artist can make a lot of changes and tweaks without having to bother the programmer. I can throw a 2 frame walk cycle with a stick-man into the main character’s animation, and then down the road turn it into a 10 frame walk cycle with final art and all the programmer has to do is overwrite the .XML file and re-compile!
It can take a little extra time to develop a tool like this, but the time it saves on a game’s actual development is phenomenal. Having to enter co-ordinates and frame timings in by hand is slow, tedious, and soul-sucking, both on the art and the programming side. I’d like to expand on this tool in the future and I can’t imagine going back to a work-flow that DOESN’T have an Animation Tool!
Thanks to the Animation Tool I was able to cram tons of flashy art in!
2) Work Is Fun!
It really makes a difference to be working on something you enjoy working on. Everything in the game is the way I wanted it, and even at the most stressful points of development there was still an underlying “but MAN is it cool to see this shaping up” feeling. A lot of developers in large companies are stuck working on games they don’t care about or know from Day 1 are going to be terrible, and you run into the same types of stress except it’s more depressing because you know when you finish the game you won’t even be proud of it. I don’t expect this game to make me a billion dollars, I’ll be happy if it just covers it’s own development costs and I can break even…but this is a game that I would show people and say “Look, I made this!!” whereas some of the projects I worked on in the industry before, I almost didn’t even want my name in the credits haha
3) Play-testing Is Vital
I made sure to have a solid 10 people (some friends, some strangers) test out my game pretty thoroughly and give me honest feedback. I actually thought I had the gameplay pretty solid the first go and figured I could release it as-is…but when my testers played it I found there were a TON of problems! People were trying to control the game in ways I didn’t intend, holding the devices in ways that were natural for them but not for me! That was my fault for not explaining how to play and just assuming everyone would naturally pick the device up the same way I do…but touch devices have no real standard control scheme to them so you never know what people will do. Aside from the controls, the difficulty ramped up in ways that felt unfair to them, and by recording analytics I was able to see that no one was getting past certain points in the game.
Turns out people hold touch devices all SORTS of crazy ways!
As a result I ended up having to add an animated visual tutorial to ensure people were playing the way the controls were designed and I spent a solid week ironing out the game’s AI and making it smarter instead of just impossibly faster, so the difficulty would increase but in a way that the players felt they could still beat it if they were skilled enough!
In the end the game is balanced great, but the difficulty curve now is incredibly different compared to the first version. I can’t imagine submitting a game without getting a handful of testers to give it a go. If I had submitted the game as-is, I would have gotten a ton of “this controls bad” and “this is unfair” reviews because everyone would have had the same problems those testers did. Why shoot yourself in the foot like that when you can take a week or two and tweak things?
4) Financial Planning
I saved up a solid chunk of money to live off through development, and I tried to keep development costs low. I made the sound effects or purchased them cheaply, I called in favors from friends, I did some cross-promotion exchanges. My thinking was that the lower I can keep the development costs, the less I have to make to cover them and start actually making money for the next game. Down the road when I have a few games out, I’ll be able to afford making a larger game, but I’m approaching this very patiently.
I read a lot of Post-Mortems in the past where a developer spends 2 or 3 years on their game, and sometimes they hit and the person becomes a millionaire, but a lot of time the game tanks and financially cripples the developer! I want to make an epic 40 hour RPG or 100+ level platformer magnum opus like any other developer, but I want to wait to attempt that until I have some more experience and stable finances where I can take a year to develop a game and won’t be obliterated if it doesn’t sell.
Because I went into this with a financial plan I never had to stress whether I could pay my rent, or if I needed to take a part-time job, or if I couldn’t pay people what I owed them. It’s a lot easier to focus on the game itself when you don’t have money troubles lurking over your shoulder!
5) Business Training
I took a really compact grueling 6 month business course and it was probably one of the most important things I’ve done. We were forced to do a ton of research into markets and development costs and marketing strategies, and all of that has been a big help. A lot of people go by their gut when they make business decisions and that can work out, but often our guts can be influenced by our own personal biases or perspectives, and looking into it we find the actual research and statistics end up telling a different story.
The business course also stressed the importance of continuous marketing. I can’t count the number of Post-Mortems I’ve read where someone spends years working on their dream project but they don’t bother marketing it at all and just trust that “if it’s good, people will find it”. And time and time again those projects never actually pick up any exposure and the developer is crushed because they didn’t make enough to even cover their game’s development costs, let alone fund another game.
This is the age of word-of-mouth advertising. Social media and the Internet in general allow us so much free marketing that we should be doing it constantly in the background. I know developers who have a couple games out and still only have like 25 followers on Twitter. I had 200 before this game was even finished. That’s not a ton, but it IS a possible 200 people who will re-tweet my announcements and spread word-of-mouth to help me out because they’ve been following my progress. And in turn I help them out when I can too, it’s win-win for everyone! It’s probably not necessary to do as in-depth a blog as I’ve done with my project, but at the very least every developer should set themselves up a free blog and a Twitter account.
In the future I hope to have a message board forum for my games where people can discuss them and share tips & tricks, submit fan-art, enter contests to win free stuff, suggest ideas, and basically build a community!
What Went Wrong:
1) Feature Creep
The original plan was for the game to take a month or two max from start to finish. It was just going to be a nice simple bare-bones project to get used to iOS development. And in theory, it was possible to do that…but as an artist, I got suckered into how beautiful the iDevice screens are! All the colors come out so vibrant and colorful that I sort of fell into the trap of “But it’d be cool if this explosion had like 3 layers to it…” and “there’s lots of space left, why not have another power-up?” and “It’d be awesome if the menus had transition animations between all of them…” There was a point where I was planning to have like 8 different level backgrounds and fully animated cut-scenes in-between each level, etc. and that was around the time I realized the game’s design was getting over-ambitious and I started trying to cut stuff back!
In the end the game took a solid 5 months from start to finish. And in retrospect, some of the stuff that was added wasn’t really necessary. The menus could have been a lot simpler, animations probably didn’t need quite as many frames as they have, etc. This didn’t get as out of hand as it could have, but it was a pretty big wake-up call that when you’re the only one planning out the design you should step back and look at things objectively once in a while and keep yourself in check! It’s good to have friends to bounce ideas off and who’ll be honest with you and say “Man, this sounds cool, but do you REALLY think you can do up 8 unique backgrounds in a week?”
2) Not Enough Manpower
I took a business course before starting Bulletproof Outlaws up and they drilled into us the importance of marketing during development of your product instead of waiting till it’s done and playing catch-up. I also had a big drive to blog about the progress of the game on an almost daily basis because I’ve always been a fan of reading development blogs and I’m a huge fan of sharing information and experience with other developers…plus I figured I could package the development blog up as a Bonus Feature in the game.
The problem is between doing all the paperwork for setting up a business, managing the money, blogging regularly, doing the game design, all the art, all the marketing, Tweeting, posting on message boards, making banners and movies, even a little of the programming towards the end to polish things up…that’s a LOT of hats for one person to wear! I knew going in that it was going to be a lot of work, because that’s just the nature of starting your own business, but it got pretty overwhelming. In the future I’d like to be able to outsource a lot of stuff, like blog updates, marketing, making trailers, etc. just to keep my personal To-Do list from being insane. And I don’t even have a day job outside of this, so I give a ton of props to anyone who’s attempting serious game development while also working a full-time job!
3) Lack of Stress Management
This one sounds over-dramatic at first, and I know I pooh-pooh’ed it back when I was reading advice about it from other start-up entrepreneurs. Stuff like “Make a separate room in your house your office, don’t use your bedroom. Don’t make the place you work the same place you relax.” made me roll my eyes. But by the end of development I was in crunch mode, basically napping a few hours at a time, then waking up and flipping my laptop on, working till I was exhausted, then napping again. I didn’t leave my room for a solid week at a time, and I was working on weekends! Basically every waking moment I was on my laptop in my room working.
It turned out to really take a toll on me, because what was fun and exciting started to feel suffocating and inescapable, especially with no days off to relax. The stress of always having to work started to carry over into my personal life too, and I became irritable and depressed to the point where friends noticed and pointed it out to me…I hadn’t even realized the stress was affecting me that bad!
I believe the trick is to be able to separate your work and your home life. Turn off the computer at 5pm, go out in the sunshine and relax on the weekends, etc. Start work again at 8am Monday morning feeling fresh and relaxed instead of burnt out and exhausted. This isn’t something you can always get away with in a traditional “working for a large company” office environment, so part of the point of being independent is that you CAN set your own schedule and ensure you have downtime on each project.
Next game I develop, I plan to make a steadfast rule that no matter how chaotic things get, I won’t work on the weekends. We make videogames, it’s supposed to be fun, not stressful!
4) No Experience on the Platforms
All I really knew about the iDevices was that they can push some pretty big graphics around and creatively you have a ton of freedom. There’s no 16×16 tile restrictions or 256 color palette restrictions…But as development got closer to the end we started running into the limitations of each device. The iPad was a big one, it turns out it’s only about as powerful as an iPhone 3GS, except the screen is twice as big. So while the game runs on an iPhone 3GS, the iPad struggles trying to push around art that’s twice as big!
On top of that there’s a 20MB file size limit for iDevices to download an App over 3G…if the App is bigger than 20MB, the user needs to be connected to Wi-Fi to download it. The App Store tends to be very “impulse buy” oriented, so if a user can’t buy your game when they first attempt to, odds are a lot of them probably won’t bother to hunt it down when they get home to Wi-Fi because the moment of “I want this!!” has passed.
Then you throw in Retina art for a game, which is double the size of normal iPhone art…except that you have to include both the normal art and the Retina art in the game. So your iPhone game came out to 8 megs, and the Retina version ends up at 16 megs…then you combine them and you end up with a 24MB App that’s way over the 20MB limit!
So in the future I’ll have to take these things into consideration when I’m designing the game, especially if I’m adding cutscenes, voice-acting, lots of songs, etc. I’ll be keeping a pretty keen eye on file sizes right from Day 1!
5) Animation Tool
Unfortunately the wonderful awesome fantastic Animation Tool that did save a ton of time, wasn’t fully tested and had a handful of bugs that took forever to figure out. On top of that it was very picky about exactly how it wanted things done to spit the information out right and it took a while to learn all the little nuances to get things on the devices to look like what was showing on my laptop screen. I was attempting to do a lot of the animations before hiring a programmer to save time, but there was a point where I had to redo a TON of animations when we put them in-game and found out we needed them arranged in a different way to work right.
Then when we started working on the Retina version we found out that the Tool and the way we had duct-taped around it’s issues made the Retina version go completely haywire with everything mis-aligned dramatically. By that point we were running out of time and I decided to drop the Retina version entirely.
Now that the Tool is working right and I’ve got all the nuances down, the next game should go way smoother, but all these little problems set us back a solid month behind schedule and it was pretty demoralizing to keep running into bugs and have to drop the Retina version!
Conclusion:
I learned a ton from this project, and while it was stressful at times, the rewarding feeling of finishing a game that’s completely my design from start to finish is completely worth it. I figured I’d want to take a month off when my game was done to relax, but honestly seeing the game on the App Store, I’m just more pumped and motivated to get going on the next game!
I expect to tighten up my work-flow with each project, and to someday expand into working in an office with a small in-house team instead of working with a contractor or two over the Internet…but I don’t think it’s wise to rush that. I learned a lot about avoiding feature creep and dealing with scheduling issues on this game and that’s going to help me when I’m managing more than just myself and a programmer. Better to make the mistakes now when I’m a small developer and the mistakes don’t cost me much money, than to make them down the road where the consequences are more severe.
Thanks for reading! I hope other developers can avoid some of the mistakes I made, and that you guys follow along as I blog about the development of my next game!（Source：gamasutra）
