No Such Thing As “Easy” Software

Quick update on “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth:” my hand-drawn 3D indie game is seeking voice actors and music, two things that I can’t do on my own (well, I could, but it would be embarrassingly bad, and having it at decent quality does wonders for the final game). I admit that I should have contacted people I have in mind sooner… now hoping to get these things finished in the next couple of weeks, I realize most of my contacts are either not available during the summer or busy with other things. If only I started contacting a few weeks ago… but I haven’t gone through all of my contacts yet. And surprisingly, a lot of existing sources for both of these things exist to hire people/content on short notice, and I did expect to pay something anyway…

Now, the point of this article. Some months ago, I volunteered to help a session of high school students experiment with “Kodu Game Lab” on the Xbox 360. I had a conversation with another student about the software: it was meant as a simplistic visual interface to make games, cute and colorful, sort of like “Little Big Planet” on PS3, but with a greater focus on the actual programming and design of games. My point of view was that Kodu wasn’t that easy to pick up. Well, perhaps for a newcomer it may have been more inviting, and certain concepts would have come through. But in my mind, having learned programming in another class years prior, I felt programming in general was really easy to pickup. And so, I felt that Kodu was redundant, since you couldn’t actually do much with it, and any time spent learning to use Kodu could probably have been spent on learning a real programming language, and in the same amount of time.
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“Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” – Development Progress for Hand-Drawn 3D Indie Game

It’s been a long time since I did a blog post. Which, really, is how it should be, I made way too many posts before. Again, this is because I am very busy finishing “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth,” which I planned for completion in August (next month).

It’s been a bit over 30 days since the hand-drawn 3D puzzle platformer has been on Steam Greenlight. It’s made some progress, although the biggest jumps it makes to the top 100 games comes every two weeks when Steam greenlight’s a giant batch of games. It’s nice to get those popular games, some of which have been there for a long time, out of the way, but it’s not exactly how I hoped to get my game passed. And I’m still confused as to exactly how Steam compares games to be in the “top 100,” as I expect it isn’t just number of visitors or number of “up” votes. Anywho, if you haven’t yet given the page a look, progress has slowed to a crawl, and I’d appreciate a visitor and a vote, either yes or no: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=268645572

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Some Cool Crowdfunding Projects (July 2014)

Holy cow, it’s already July. I wish it was June again…

Anyway, as usual, here’s some crowdfunding game projects I think are worth looking at. It annoys me how poorly thought out some listings can be, as if they were put on Kickstarter.com in a minute by a 8th grader thinking it was a sure way to make money. Either that, or they ask for tens of thousands of dollars to complete what I could personally do within a month. What’s more, some of these projects actually get fully funded… <sigh>… the people of the Internet are strange creatures sometimes. Here’s a few I think actually deserve some attention:
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