Adventures in Game Making

If you don’t know me, my name is Bobby and I’m the one man, lone-wolf, rouge operation known as Highcastle Studios. But it’s more like basement studio with 1 employee but hey, you’ve got to dream big and name your company accordingly. After a brief setback due to a major computer malfunction I’m back in action! However it has left me months behind on my goal to have a playable prototype for my upcoming game “Beer League Hockey”. Ultimately it would be ideal to have something to show publishers before Christmas rolls around. So now is the time to cut out the excuses, set the flux capacitor to 11 and kick this operation into overdrive.

Game dev related injuries

Professional athletes can get tennis elbow but game developers get carpal tunnel syndrome. The other day I was doing the tedious task of changing the values on hundreds of programming variables. It involved a crap load of clicking that put my hand in a state of suspended animation. You see, I would never think this could happen to me in a million years because there have been many long nights where I have played League of Legends for countless hours. If you’ve never played it I will sum it up for you easily as “clicking simulator 2015”. All you do is click in that game, and I’ve had some serious League of Legends benders in my day. I guess there is a big difference between work and play because in that moment I had lost all motor skills in my right hand. I was like Stephen Hawking trying to play Point Perfect (*changes eye contact from camera 1 to camera 2 directly at the reader of this article*). Shameless plug: Available on Steam, check it out!

If you don’t have anything nice to say…

If I don’t have anything nice to say, lately I’ve just been saying it. I’m not proud to admit that crunch time has me acting crazy towards people. We’ve all seen those videos on youtube of people losing there shit and putting their foot through their computer monitors. There are whole tribes of people in remote areas of this planet that just don’t trust technology, they think that if their picture is taken they will lose a piece of their soul. And sure, they might not have the highest level of education and wear nothing but a rubber tube on their private parts, but I think they’re on to something here. I mean, there is something about sitting at a computer all day that can really test your humanity. It’s not just people that I get angry at either, sometimes I find myself arguing with inanimate objects. There’s nothing worse than having a programming issue with your game and then on the way back from the washroom you bang your toe on a piece of furniture. In that moment I find it helps to pretend that piece of furniture is actually a person that comes to life when you fall asleep. I’m talking full blown Beauty and the Beast kind of shit. That way you don’t feel so crazy that you’re telling your desk to fuck off. Or when you’re right in middle of something and then Adobe Acrobat decides to grace you with another update. Then instead of working on your project you spend the next hour writing Adobe some nasty email about how their programmers need to find a new hobby.

Keeping it real

I do think at the end of the day you’ve got to put yourself in pain if you want to get good results. It’s like what I always say to other devs about not compromising your vision. You have to make your product valuable to the players to make a profit. And they don’t care what excuses you have for leaving out features of half-assing it.

I’m not sure when my next post might be. Thanks for reading and feel free to post your comments. I will eventually give updates about my progress with Beer League Hockey!

-Bobby