FIRST STEAM BLOG!
My name is Mattabulous and I am the founder of Head Tilt Games. Today, I'm going to tell you about what we've been up to in the past month!
Incorporating our business
We are now an official business. This was the first step towards a goal that I will be informing you all about shortly. As a result, we can now brag to all our friends... I'm just kidding! Now, we can actually earn money and have a legal standpoint! This was a huge moment for all of us: for me, it's my dream to be self-employed and so, this is really important. We were all just as excited, though, of course.
Musician
We now have an official musician working for us, allowing us to ask of his help when necessary. He believes in the project too: which a contracted musician may have found more difficult. In the long-term, we should have a complete soundtrack for the game because everyone knows how important music is in a game!
Website
Over the course of the month, I used Wix to create our website. Initially, I was going to teach myself how to make a website through the use of HTML, CSS, and JS. However, this wasn't very feasible because at this time, we were also working towards a Steam page release by the end of the year. I'll get onto that shortly. The website came out really well, and I'm proud that I did it in a fairly short time. It does what it needs to do: and for now, it's good for us.
Finally, we also have a merch store now so you can flex on everyone with official clothing that we've designed for you all to wear! REPRESENT!
You can view the website here, and the merch store here.
Demo release
As stated in the previous blog, we were working towards a tight deadline. We were working towards releasing version 0.2 for the public. Thinking back on it, we should have delayed the demo but we didn't think that'd be very fair on everyone as we had hyped it up so much. The demo itself was met with pretty good feedback: and we were given really insightful suggestions.
Our dedicated tester team were extremely helpful and we received loads of feedback including how we could balance the game better, bugs they encountered and much more.
We also saw the first content creator playing our game: this was insanely cool to watch and I felt like a kid after getting a whole bucket of candy: it was literally unbelievable and none of us could really believe it (Thank you Buraflux!).
Steam page (and the pains we went through)
This was, by far, the best highlight of last month. As I mentioned in the previous blog, Ectho was busy working on the Steam assets for the page. He did an amazing job at that, here's just one amazing piece!
I also mentioned that we were raising money for the page, and we were able to successfully do that. On the 21st, we paid the submission fee. However, we were met with irritating issues with banks. My Dad is managing that side of things, and he applied for a UK-only bank, which resulted in us having to wait another day for an international bank, that was online-based too. We were able to find one luckily: it's called Starling Bank and I would recommend it to people in a similar situation as we are in.
After a few days, I was able to correctly fill out the forms and set up payment procedures and tax information. Then, we had to do another week of waiting..
31st of December, we were finally able to edit the page and within 5 or 6 hours, I had the page completed! It's also worth noting that I was on holiday to celebrate New Years (an annual tradition for our family) so I had that taking up a fair bit of time anyways. Despite this, everything went smoothly... kinda. Luckily, the internet exists.
In essence, we did technically commit to our goals... 8 days into 2020, and we had the page up and running. YOU CAN WISHLIST IT ON HERE!
Next steps
We now have a set goal in mind, after several discussions, and over the next month: we should get ourselves on the right track.
Ectho will be recreating the assets as he has improved his digital art over the past few months. Although, we are unsure to what extent this recreation will reach to at the moment.
Spitzy will be reworking how the map works, and possibly making it into a smaller, dynamic, minimap that's always on the HUD. We noticed that many people ignored the map, but those who found it were able to easily navigate.
Goest is going to be refactoring a lot of code, and has even worked on a programming guide to ensure we all stick to the same conventions. This should also allow us to implement more abilities at ease.
I will be working on a select menu for a certain thing that I can't tell you about just yet. We are hoping that this should make the gameplay a lot more fluid and really alter how the gameplay feels. Drastically.
We have also thought about the possibility to publish a Kickstarter page but we will wait for your feedback on that one. This is because we have a business now and we've got to stay afloat -- this isn't just a passion, it's a genuine job.
Notes
Next month, February, I will be attending the PlayEXPO Margate convention in the UK. If you are close-by, feel free to check it out as you'll be able to play exclusive builds of the game that nobody else will have played (other than testers).
Also, I will be on holiday again from the 2nd to the 9th of February so a blog will be out on the 1st!
Thank you for reading
I hope you enjoyed this blog! As said last time, I will be doing a blog a month. I may start releasing dev blogs once a month on Blogger too (just a copy of this!) so you have the option to choose what you'd rather follow us on.
Feel free to follow and wishlist the game!