In this writing, I would like to share my experience of publishing my first game, and I hope it can motivate you to develop and publish games.
I have been passionate about video games and animation since I was five years old and I dreamt that one day I would publish a game so that people could play if they wanted to. However, it is not until I am almost done with my bachelor degree, I wrote my first game - a crappy one - but I am glad that I did the game. Then, I have joined game programming courses, hackathons, and game jams to learn to develop video games. However, all of the games were for "learning purposes", I have never thought of publishing any of the games because of being afraid of uncertainties (maybe it takes a lot of time to publish a game, is not a good enough game idea, does not have a good architecture, no scale, no way to earn money, just a learning project...). Then I realized that the excuses would be always there if you look for them. This time, I decided to make a game for publishing, so I built a team and made Wine Drop.
After publishing our first game Wine Drop, there are a few things I would like to share with all of you.
The feeling
I felt damn proud and accomplished when our team published our first game call Wine Drop. After pushing the first version of Wine Drop to Play store, I wondered why didn't the games that I made so far didn't to aim for publishing from the very beginning. It was an absolutely great feeling which inspiring me on doing more games. If you are just starting the journey of games making just like me, I encourage quickly publish your first game and enjoy the experience.
Publishing a game is not necessarily tedious.
These are the steps are working well in this case:
1. Find some of your friends, relatives, colleagues, or classmates who like making games to work with to have more ideas, more fun. My preference is finding someone who has different skill sets than mine.
2. Choose free/affordable, simple, and familiar tools, in our case the tools are libgdx, firealpaca, Pyxel Edit, and Android.
3. Choose simple game on the internet to clone or to put a little bit more variant.
4. Make the simplest playable prototype and publish it.
5. Gather feedbacks and improve the game.
Following are the screenshots of the first version of wine drop. The total amount of hours put to this first prototype is ten hours of one person. We have 4 people working on this, so roughly 2.5 hours of working together.
Richer experience, much more fun and learning.
I have learnt a lot more after doing this "for publishing" game than those a lot more than the boring "learning purposes" ones. In this project, we learnt the whole process instead of just the coding game part. Moreover, The anxiety of someone is playing your game makes my team and I feel a lot more fun, challenged, and motivated.
Summary: Break the ice to see the sky. Have fun making games.
Meet the teams: Anh Duong, Nhat Nguyen Quang, Tuan Nhat Nguyen, Anh Dung Do
- ninjahoahong
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