If you've been following this blog (or checked out the archives) you'll see that there's been an awful lot of talk the talk but no walk the walk - this is where things start to change...
Let me introduce you to ...
Now this is a simple enough idea and one which I had whilst working through some other prototypes (but more about that later), in a nutshell I had an idea simple idea which I could complete fairly easily on my own and if polished well enough I might even be able to entice a few people into downloading it.
So this is my WHY - I wanted to make a game, I wanted to make it fun, I wanted to make it playable and enjoyable and finally I wanted to see it finished and gracing the front of my soon to be launched casual games website (ok I wanted it to make me a bit of spare cash as well - but that would have really been a bonus and not the primary concern at this stage in the game).
You'll notice then that my primary concern is as a hobbyist but sprinkled with some long term aspirations to actually make a living out of what I love doing! Look at any set of figures for startup companies or speak to any independant developers actually making money out of making games and they'll tell you it's a long hard slog especially before any decent standard of living can be achieved. My plan therefore was to focus on this (and subsequent) projects from a hobbyist point of view, squeezing hours here and there, evenings and weekends getting the game finished whilst maintaining a wife, kids and full time job to pay the bills.
My hope was (and it still seems a reasonable propasition) that seeing as the most expensive part of the development would be the time spent programming the game I could effectively reduce those costs to nothing (after all this was my hobby) by using my free time, ok it would take a lot longer to complete but when it's done then any money earned would be pure profit (less any business expenses, taxes etc, of course).
So that's my WHY, back to the WHAT...
As I said PipeDreams will be a very simple puzzle game, simple games seem to in vogue at the moment (the Casual Games market is a multi-million dollar a year industry!), I like simple puzzle games, my wife likes simple puzzle games so done well enough why wouldn't somebody else like my simple puzzle game?
My initial idea was inspired by the classic PipeMania games where by you had to place pieces of pipes to connect a tap to a drain, instead of that I turned the concept on it's head and placed all the pieces on the board to start and instead had to rotate the pipes so that they all joined up with in a time limit. Here's a very early mockup of the sort of thing I mean.
As you can see it's a very basic idea, but as a first project it seemed like a good idea...
Next time : The Design Document (does it need one?)
0 comments:
Post a Comment