Hi, I'm Henry. In 2012 I quit my job as a programmer at BioWare to spend a year making my own indie games. This blog is about what happened next...

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Bits & Pieces

First, some more recognition! The A MAZE. Indie Games Festival was held in Berlin at the end of April. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to Germany to be there, because it sounded really cool. What did make it out there was Spaceteam, as one of the games nominated for “The Most Amazing Indie Game 2013”.

And, currently making its way back to me in Montréal is the award and prize money! It’s totally amazing to be recognized and rewarded by other indies that I respect. Huge thanks to the judges and organizers. And the money will allow me to keep working for another few months, which is incredible. Funnily enough, it’s almost the same amount of money that the game has made so far from upgrade purchases, so I just doubled my revenue :)**

**

So what’s next? I’m kind of in a weird limbo state now. I’m being kept busy with a handful of Spaceteam-related projects but I’m also trying to start working on my next game. It’s hard to stay focused.

Android

The Android version is getting very close! The porting company is still working on testing & polish. We want to make sure it’s ready before we release it. The remaining issues are things like Achievements and (unsurprisingly) some bugs that only happen on certain devices (eg. the OpenGL blend mode for erasing slime works on the Nexus 7, but not on a bunch of others…)

Localization

I’ve always felt like this was a reasonable next step because it’s not a whole lot of work (for me) and has the potential to expand my audience a fair bit. I’d like to get French, German, Spanish, and Italian at least. But I’ve also had fans offer to translate into Russian, Chinese, and Japanese!

But translating Spaceteam is not trivial. I can’t just hand off a list of static strings because most of the text in the game is randomly generated nonsense. I build imperative phrases like “Verb Adjective Noun!” with no regard to gender, conjugation, or adjective position (before/after the noun). Sometimes nouns and adjectives are used totally interchangeably (“Flange Gyro”, “Gyro Flange”, “Gyroflange”, etc).

Each language needs careful tweaking to make sure the word combinations make sense, sound technobabbly enough, and are funny without being too hard to say. So I’ve been building a Translation Tool to help with this process, you can check it out here: http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/spaceteam/TranslationTool/

(Incidentally if you or someone you know is interested in helping with the translation work, please let me know! I need all the help I can get.)

Furthermore, when I put the symbols (for Symbolic Mode) in the game I needed them to behave like regular words/letters for display, so I used a convenient hack: I replaced all the accented/foreign characters in my font bitmap with symbols.

Then when it came time to localize the game I faced a tricky problem: I had replaced all the accented/foreign characters in my font bitmap with symbols.

:) It took me a week of work to recover from that little hack.

Publishing

It looks like the publishing deal isn’t going to work out for one simple reason that I didn’t originally consider. The publisher requested that I move Spaceteam to their developer account (so all their apps were in one place, seemed perfectly fair). To do this Spaceteam would have to be replaced with a “new” app in the App Store (same name and icon, but different account). The unforeseen show-stopping side-effect was that not only would people lose all the achievements they had earned from the original app, they would lose all their In-App Purchases. We tried to brainstorm ways of dealing with this smoothly, but we couldn’t find a solution. In the end I decided that pissing off my biggest fans like this would be a bad move.

Reskins

A couple of fun reskin/conversion projects have come up that involve making customized versions of Spaceteam with different graphics and words. I can’t go into details yet, and they may not end up happening, but there’s definitely some potential here. New word lists (or customizable ones!) were always something I had planned for future upgrades.

Truthfully though, I’m looking forward to being done with all these loose ends.

I’m still not able to properly focus on my next big project (Shipshape) so in between juggling the various Spaceteam balls I’ve been prototyping some other small local-multiplayer games. This was never the plan… but they’re so much fun :)

Stats

Downloads for April/May

Average downloads: back down to 1,000/day

Total downloads: 387,716

Total sales revenue: $7,169.56

  • prize money: € 5,000