Developper Diary #9: How soon is now?

So here I am.

Right now, i'm finishing the port of Death Pirate for Android. I was pretty scared at the amount of work and the complexity of the task but, actually, it was pretty easy (in spite of a few Game Maker issues that got me stuck for a few days... :-/ ).

At first, I wanted to add a lot more stuff and release a new mini game in a free version of the game. In the end, I did none of that. The vanilla game already had a lot of contents. It would have taken me a lot of time to make the new graphics, code a new mode and think about the new concepts. A friend of mine, who is also a developper, told me that it would be better to use this time to polish my game instead of adding new clunky modes and butchered graphics. At first, I thought he was wrong.

I think most of the appeal of Death Pirate comes from its story, characters and universe. So I wanted to add more of that, to expand the license to make it richer and attract more people. To give his idea a try, I revamped the game menu to make it more dynamic and more pro. And then I realized he was right.

Adding more content in an amateurish game would be useless. And my game is already 26 stages long and features 7 playable characters. It was enough. I had to do that polish and make some publicity to give the game a true second chance. Then goes away then the idea of a free version. I'm against demoes. I think they kill the magic that happens when you play a game for the first time. It's more frustrating than anything else as you don't get the real scope of the game.That's why I wanted to make a specific new mini game that would be included in the full version but also released as a free game. Well, it won't happen. Well, not now.

Right now, I'm in a big bug chase. And there are a lot.

Buma