Blog – Page 8 – Pixelbyte Studios

In an effort to make Pixelbyte Studios more visible and to challenge myself, I’m announcing the game-a-month plan. Kind of like the meal plans at school, only tastier. Between February 2016 and July2016, I will be releasing one free game every month. I have some rules for this experiment:

The latest non-beta version of Unity3d must be used.
Announce the next game and its idea at the beginning of the month (Except for February which I’ll announce today).
Release games at the end of the month (some platforms might release later depending on store approval times).
The games will be released on PC, Mac, maybe Linux, Android, and iOS (iOS will be dependent on how well Unity’s IL2CPP works).
I can only use material/ideas from my 20 previous Ludum Dare competition entries and any other unfinished prototypes I have laying around.
I can optionally put Ads and/or In-App purchases in the games if I have the time. (I probably won’t)
Each game should somehow advertise the availability of the previous ones for marketing purposes. Hopefully I can come up with something good here, but this may be difficult.
Weekly (or maybe daily Monday-Friday) text or video blogs about the progress. I might also do some twitch streaming of development too if there is enough interest.
Daily tweets on the current game project or unity-related tips/tricks.
The game content must adhere to the Pixelbyte Studios family-friendly policy.

Some notes:

I may have trouble with the iOS and Mac store releases since they are more time consuming than the others. Plus, Mac OS is not something I use daily (I am installing El Capitan as I write this).
I’m going to keep the option of releasing the Mac builds directly on itch.io if the Mac App Store takes too long.
I suspect that gathering screenshots and other media for release to stores will be quite time-consuming. Hopefully through this I can come up with some time-saving software utilities.
Yes I do know about the One Game a Month initiative, but it doesn’t fit for what I want to do.
One of my other goals will be to come up with a way to do in-game polls asking users what extra or different things they would like to see in the games. This might be too much for my constraints but I still want to try it.
I will be participating in the Ludum Dare game jams, but I’m not sure how that will look. I’ll cross that bridge when it comes.
I will keep a Google Keep TODO list of my daily tasks and also one for my monthly tasks (mainly releasing the binaries to various stores). Ideally I would this to be publicly-viewable so I’ll look into alternatives like Trello.

Well, as I’m finishing up this post, El Capitan has downloaded and has begun installing on my Mac. Oh man. I have to download and install the new Unity3d tools on it too. So much to do and so little time.

This weekend I participated in and completed my 18th consecutive Ludum Dare 48 hour competition (Ludum Dare 32). The theme was “An Unconventional Weapon”. Not the most wonderful theme in my opinion, but it provided a canvas for creation. If you’d like to see what I came up with, visit this link.

In case you don’t know about Ludum Dare, let me give you a quick run-down of it. It is a Game-making competition that is held 3 times per year where participants have only 48 hours to design a game. The game must be designed around a theme which is revealed at the beginning of the competition after the community votes on 4 rounds themes. Once the competition starts, you have 48 hours to create your game, and all code, sounds, graphics, etc. must be created by you within the 48 hour window. The theme for this Ludum Dare competition ended up being “Beneath the surface”. In addition to that theme, “We must go deeper” was another top vote-getter, so I figured that it was quite possible that one of these two could be chosen. I started thinking about what I might do if one of these themes were chosen. I wanted to do some sort of 3D first-person puzzle game that you get thrown into with little explanation except for the controls. The game’s narrative and plot is revealed through a series of notes that you find throughout the game from someone who was in your same position. I knew this would be one of my biggest project in terms of scope for any Ludum Dare I’ve done (I have entered and completed 15). That turned out to be a bit of an understatement as I took this one down to the wire and a couple of bugs had me quite worried at the end. However, I managed to get it all together and get it submitted before the deadline. I even managed to throw in some cool image effects which I think add to the experience. With that, I present to you my most ambitions 48-hour creation to-date: Epsilon Adventure.

Category: Blog