Hi guys,
I'm sorry for being silent for a while! Eventually, I recovered from my illness completely. It is crazy that I needed 1 complete month for that. The pre and post-crunch around the release date of indies are real and dangerous. You can find a lot of guys like me who don't sleep for days during that period and push themselves into illness AND depression. Please support indies! It is really harsh out there nowadays as an indie dev. Many of my friends failed utterly with their projects lately. Who goes indie have a great chance of losing everything including savings and physical/mental health.
The positive feedback that you gave me during that time meant really a lot. These are not just words guys. It meant a LOT. Although we developers are mostly responsible for our own working conditions, the pressure is really high to do well and to crunch. Also, I got pretty hate as well. I was even attacked by people on facebook that I'm a liar and I insult people here on the forums. I'm not angry because of any of these. We are just human beings, right?
As good news, I can tell you that slowly I think the project will pay for itself eventually. I won't lose (much) money! This is awesome as the first project of mine right at the start of Steam Direct. Also, the game managed to have a "very positive" review score for a long time now - you don't know how happy I'm for that, although this "score" is still very fragile at the border of 80%.
I know that the game is still really flawed. From your input, I've built a very long to-do list of bugs and polish tasks. I'm still here to make those happen, and also I've built a list of new features as well.
In the last week, I managed to update the GUI system to a more flexible one. So I have a new version that solved some small glitches with the computer screens. I just didn't publish it, because I won't be here today, and I wanna stay around while you get it - so I can give a hotfix if anything goes wrong.
Also, I was working on the historical map. I just found out the needed solutions to make it happen.
And also, I just tried to relax a bit and manage the business side of things. Well, managing a real company in the real world is not as much fun as in Computer Tycoon!
Here is a brief list of the features that I'd like to add to the game. These don't have explanations and please don't consider this as a promise. These are only my plans that I really would like to make happen. The list is not ordered. I just wanna give you a "what's the big picture" thingy as Sid games used to do:
- tutorial
- starting from the garage, adding features and sites slowly
- historical map, government relation management
- altering economy and population, altering preferences
- more realistic, non-rule-braking AI
- reviews about computers
- selling hardware separately
- building site list screen with separated option to build/upgrade and manage departments
- loan when player hits a negative bank balance
- buying stuff for the CEO
- extended life management of the CEO
- leadership management for the company in the late game
- extended hardware design with more element specific modification options
- new building site environments
- extended statistics per products with sales charts as in game dev tycoon
- localizations
- a bit of modding support with techs
- hall of fame/score lists and other steam features
- ending screens and stats after completing the game
- aiding poor countries
Some are already in progress by the way just as I mentioned. I think I will need crunch time again, unfortunately. How many of these points will be implemented will depend on how will my body react to overtime again and/or how will sales (so literally positive/negative reviews) go.
The guaranteed time while I can work on this is the end of February right now. That's 3.5 months left. This is plenty time if you consider that I made the whole game that you played on the release date in only 5 full-time months. (Well I had a one year part-time before starting the project, while I learned the stuff around the engine and so on, but I didn't make anything specifically for Computer Tycoon).
I know that it seems to be not much time, but please again - consider the overwork here. When somebody works literally day and night every day it is just way much more. In normal working, ours this 5 months was more than 10. As an example I worked (my logs show it) 348 hours on Computer Tycoon in October and 412 hours in September. And these don't include the time that I put into non-computer based works.
I had to do this because I couldn't afford financially more time, but I really wanted to make this happen. It is a game that I wanted since I first played Transport Tycoon back in the day on my 486DX Computer. I'm coming as a leader from the IT business sector. I'm not here for the money, I'm here for my passion.
When I designed the game I even wanted to include smartphones, PDAs and robots, and much more technology. Unfortunately, I can't extend the game's scope to that. Maybe with DLCs in the future IF I can afford it.
Some of you ask me about localizations as well often. Some languages such as German or Russian or French already have translations for the technology descriptions, but I will need plenty time to make this happen. Probably I will include the localization at the end of the development, otherwise, I will have a lot of overhead work. I as a one-band indie studio can't do otherwise.
Oh, Dear Germans! Vielen Dank! You gave the second biggest chunk of revenue for the game right after the United States!
As a closing note... Jep Steam finally approved the trading cards for the game! Enjoy them! :) (but most of you with those extreme work hours already got some cards, right? :) )
So again, thanks for the support on the game's Steam Page! I really appreciate it, and the game really needs it!
Your friend,
Andris