New Projects
Since the last post, Bacons On A Boat was released to the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in the US. At first, it felt like a weight off my shoulders. Honestly I just walked away from it for about a week, then I check on the analytics. The good news was that people were playing my game, but there were only about 30 installs and people were slowly starting to stop playing and uninstall it. I know this is normal, I do that with free-to-play mobile games all the time.
On Christmas Eve, I had a lot of time to myself and I started reading a lot about app store optimization (makes it easier for people to find your app). I went down this rabbit hole of marketing tips and tricks and became frustrated that more people didn’t know about the game, but also I didn’t have a good idea of the intended audience for Bacons On A Boat.
Mentally exhausted over the audience issue, I had an idea. “What if I just churned out YouTube content?” If there really isn’t an audience then it is on me to try to make one. So I started brainstorming and I came to two main conclusions. One, the content should be easy to make and second It has to be about something I am comfortable with talking about.
GAME DEVELOPMENT IT IS!
But there are a lot of good channels on that subject, and I didn’t what to tell people how to be a game developer since I clearly don’t know what I’m doing. Even if my game was an overnight success I wouldn’t know why exactly or what to do next, so I really thought about it for a while. I think I would keep my day job and hire someone to do a lot of the marketing stuff for me and rent some office space.
Off and on, in the next weeks I started building an office in Unity3D using a few office asset packs, and I started working on the characters that would work in that office.
While this was going I started working through the Unity Learn tutorials. I learned how to use Cinemachine, which is a programmable camera and I learned how to use Unity’s New Input System which is use to make controller mapping simpler in the code.
My new goal was to create short animated videos by simply recording a game. . . but not a game. It is more like a interacting with digital puppets.
Next was a lot of drawing, tracing, and layering.
Then it took some time to figure out audio. Basically I just talk to myself and apply a sound effects preset I made to change my voice for one of the characters.
At the time of posting this I have a few video almost ready, but I’m still working on some details. I’ve also been working a prototype for a new game, but that will be in another post.