by Rainware | Mar 7, 2017 | Allgemein
[:en]Greetings-
My name is Henrik and I am an intern at Rainware for the next 12 weeks.
In this time, my main focus will lie on game design – changes on existing games like Timbertales and making other ideas for games easy to grab and fun to play.
And I already started working – Some features of Timbertales were not really introduced so players might have been confused – they are explained within the campaign now…Also some of the later Levels in Timbertales were to hard, so I made small adjustments and they are now easier to finish (but believe me, they still pose a challenge).
Well, now you have a rough idea of my main purpose here . Of course I will also be connecting with you via social networks and translate (and proof-read) texts in English or German.
Now that you know who you will have to deal with the next 12 weeks, let me tell you something about me. I will Keep it short(as in – not two pages long) and what could be shorter than a bullet list:
- Name: Henrik
- Age: 20
- Profession: Student of Media Informatics and Interactive Entertainment at Hochschule Mittweida(Specialization: Creative Content Design)
- Why am I at Rainware? Good Question. We need an internship of 12 weeks before we can start with our Bachelor thesis. A bit of googling, writing applications, getting rejected and trying elsewhere, and after a short skype call I am now here.
- Hobbies: Reading, Going for walks, Gaming (Especially Nintendo), translating EN/GER and word puns of any kind
Well, that was much shorter than I anticipated…I can normally go on forever with such lists. You can confirm this yourself by looking at my Profile(Website) 😛
Up to this point, it is really nice here – just to get the symbol count up a bit more.
Anyways, if you have questions left dont let them be unanswered, and if you have any Feedback concerning Rainware products also feel free to comment below.
Have a nice week,
Henrik
[:de]Guten Tag-
Mein Name ist Henrik und ich bin für die nächsten 12 Wochen Praktikant bei Rainware.
Während dieser Zeit wird mein Hauptfokus auf Game Design liegen – Änderungen an bereits existierenden Spielen wie Timbertales oder neue Spielideen einfach verständlich und spaßig zum Spielen machen.
Und ich habe schon angefangen zu arbeiten – Einige Features von Timbertales wurden nicht wirklich eingeführt, sodass Spieler verwirrt sein könnten – Diese werden nun innerhalb der Kampagne erklärt…Außerdem waren einige der späteren Level in Timbertales zu schwer, also habe ich kleine Anpassungen vorgenommen und sie sind nun einfacher zu schaffen (aber glaubt mir, sie sind immer noch eine Herausforderung).
So, nun wisst ihr ungefähr, wozu ich hier bin. Natürlich werde ich mich auch um die sozialen Netzwerke kümmern und englische oder deutsche Texte übersetzen (und Korrekturlesen).
Jetzt, da ihr wisst, mit wem ihr es die nächsten 12 Wochen zu tun haben werdet, lasst mich euch etwas über mich erzählen. Ich werde mich kurz fassen(Also – nicht zwei Seiten lang), und was könnte kürzer sein, als eine Stichpunktliste:
- Name: Henrik
- Alter: 20
- “Beruf”: Student Medieninformatik und Interaktives Entertainment an der Hochschule Mittweida (Fachrichtung Creative Content Design)
- Warum bin ich bei Rainware? Gute Frage. Wir müssen 12 Wochen Praktikum gemacht haben, bevor wir unsere Bachelorarbeit schreiben können. Nach etwas Googeln, Bewerbungen schreiben, abgelehnt werden und woanders versuchen, und nach einem kurzen Skypegescpräch bin ich jetzt hier.
- Hobbies: Lesen, spazieren gehen, Zocken (insbesondere Nintendo), DE/EN Übersetzungen und Wortspiele aller Art
Nun, das war deutlich kürzer, als ich erwartet hatte…Normalerweise kann ich solche Listen endlos weiterführen. Davon könnt ihr euch selbst überzeugen, wenn ihr auf mein Profil(Website) schaut 😛
Bisher gefällt es mir schon mal sehr gut hier – um die Zeichenzahl noch etwas zu erhöhen.
Naja, wenn ihr noch Fragen habt, lasst sie nicht unbeantwortet, und wenn ihr irgendeine Form von Feedback bezüglich Rainware Produkten habt – kommentiert gerne hier drunter.
Schöne Woche noch,
Henrik
[:]
by Rainware | Jan 13, 2017 | Allgemein
Hey everyone,
I had to recreate my Steam-Greenlight page. This means I need your support and votes again to become greenlit with Timbertales. I would love to have the possibility to distribute the desktop version of Timbertales over Steam. Of course this is only possible if we can make enough votes on Greenlight. So please check out the Greenlight Page of Timbertales and don’t hesitate to comment and vote! Thank you a lot for your support and may Timbertales make it!
Steam-Greenlight
by Rainware | Jan 6, 2017 | Allgemein
There were a lot of actions ongoing the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately they weren’t related to the development of Timbertales, at least not directly. Today I want to introduce my new office and my daily business. With the beginning of 2017 I am finished with freelancing and working full time again on Timbertales. It is time for some insights of my daily business!
The new Office
I always wanted to have an external office, because working at home can be very hard and challenging. So I decided to rent an office after 1 year of developing at home. This was quite a hard time. I had to stay motivated and disciplined all the time. Working in my gaming room was another challenge. Nevertheless I am quite happy with my productivity level I could keep up. But as I said I always wanted to split up private and business concerns.
So lets talk about the new office I have about 13 square meters with 2 desks, printer, WiFi, 2 racks and my task board. The office is about 10 minutes from my house away by car. The cool thing about the office complex, where the office is located, is I can use the conference rooms, if I need to. There is also a kitchen for coffee or tea. At the entrance is a receptionist for daily post. After one week of working in the new office I am pretty sure, that it was the right decision and I can increase my productivity here.
Office
Entrance
Daily Business
I absolutely love to sleep, so I normally start my day around 10-11. After my morning routine I usually drive by car to the new office and start working. This includes developing, planing, marketing and of course paperwork. As game developer I always try to have as much time as possible for developing, but this is quite hard sometimes. Even for a one man company there is a little bit of paperwork to do and I am quite good in shifting paperwork until critical deadlines.
I always try to reserve some hours at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day for marketing or paperwork. This allows me to develop in one time block. With the start of the new year I also try to keep track of my time spending for everything as strict as possible to identify where I am wasting the most. When I leave the office in the evening around 20-22 usually everyone else in the complex gone since hours. After the dinner I usually play Xbox or PC. At the moment I am playing Van Helsing II a lot:)
Agile development process
For developing itself I use some kind of an agile approach. I have two task boards a digital and an analog one. The digital task board is managed by PivotalTracker, I like this tool very much and it is free for small usage. There I keep track of all my stories and tasks for the releases. Also the backlog is handled there. After I prioritized my task I sync them manually to cards and pin them on my analog magnet board. During the day I completely work with the magnet task board and sync the digital one as my last task of the day. I am quite happy with this approach for daily tasks so far. For my road map I use a standard calendar and spreadsheets. Game design and balancing is usually also done on spreadsheets.
Next steps
This week I removed the registration process and made the game more accessible. After the installation you will just have to choose a nickname. If you want to restore or backup your account you should connect it with Facebook or google play service through the account settings. With this step I hope to get more player in the game and receive more feedback about the game. Earlier I lost a lot of players within the registration process.
The next step is to rework the premium system. My idea is just having one place to exchange money for in game currency. Every spending option in the game will be available for in game currency. You will be able to earn in game currency by playing as well. So the whole buying process is just optional and shouldn’t be a requirement at any time! Also every premium option is only an entrance, unlocking or cosmetic change it will never effect the game play itself. The new version is scheduled for the end of the next week. So don’t miss to sign up: Timbertales – Beta
by Rainware | Nov 14, 2016 | Allgemein
Introduction
A short introduction of my new project: Timbertales Puzzle. Currently I am developing a puzzle game based on Timbertales assets. I want to give you a short insight into my current state of development. Let me introduce the game in detail first. You will have to move tiles around in a specific level until your turns for this level are depleted or the level is finished.
Goal and mechanics
To finish a level you need to clear the way for rainy to reach his badger set with limited turns.
To control the tiles you just need to drag them around. It is very intuitive as you know the touch gesture from many other apps or games. There will be also some special mechanics: Tiles, which are blocked and cannot be moved or other obstacles to pass.
The game should contain round about 40 different levels at release and more will follow. The difficulty will of course increase with each level. I plan to offer different level packages, so it will be possible to continuously release updates with new level packages. The development time is scheduled until mid of December. Of course Timbertales puzzle will be released as android and iOS app and will be for free. Some level packages might cost a little fee in future.
by Rainware | Nov 1, 2016 | Allgemein
Short Summary about Freelancing building up the brand of Timbertales with a puzzle game and creating some ways to actually earn money to provide a better Version of Timbertales!
Whats going on
Meanwhile I am able to earn some money with my freelancing project yeah! My first investment – a new Asus Zenbook. I had to buy a new notebook, because my macbook finally died 🙁 So I will be back on arch linux for now :).
But lets get back to the topic. With the upcoming money I will be able to finally finish Timbertales within the next couple of months. Unfortunately at the moment there is a very short time frame to work on my Rainware projects.
Timbertales puzzle
With the short time in mind I came up with a new game idea: A Timbertales branded puzzle game – a tiny single player puzzle game based on the Timbertales Brand and assets, which already exists. The game should contain round about 40 levels. I reuse many of the assets I already use in Timbertales and also some of the code. This allows me to keep the development time for the entire game very short. My goal is to strengthen the Timbertales Brand and to create more attention for the upcoming Timbertales game. In addition I want to deliver something, earning money and so on 🙂
Whats about Timbertales?
This won’t delay Timbertales even more, because as I said for the moment there isn’t much time for it anyway. I will need to redefine some things and refactor a lot to improve the quality. That will make sure to reach the quality I was aiming for and deploy a game, which is fun for everyone. I want to release the puzzle game in between.
Shopware Plugins
Just another topic or opportunity for me is to distribute Shopware – Plugins. I am quite experienced in this area and just want to try out how the money can flow in this business 🙂 Of course this involves only small Plugins with a development time of less than 1 day. It should be a one time process to create the plugins and sell them over the store. Observe how its working.
For continuous news / updates about Timbertales – make sure to follow me on twitter! 🙂
by Rainware | Sep 30, 2016 | Allgemein
[:en]
The last weeks …
First of all I am sorry for the silence the last couple of weeks. I had a lot of stuff ongoing and wasn’t able to spend my time to keep you informed. Anyhow I will try my best to catch up. Bad things first I think, I will not be able to release any stable version of Timbertales soon. I did a quite unrealistic estimation with being releasable in October. Everything costs more time than expected and I also have to say I am not very happy with the gameplay itself at the moment. For this reason I want to delay the release – to craft a game, which fits my idea of quality and fun. But let us talk more in detail …
Money, resources, budget
September was the last month I could afford to be independent with my resources. So I needed to find a solution to keep the project ongoing. I had the opportunity to work as a full time freelancer for a project, which is scheduled for 3 months. This is one of the reasons, why I was such busy the last weeks and will be the next weeks. With the full time job it takes me a lot of energy to work in my spare free time, but I do my best to work on Timbertales every day. At least one problem will be solved: The money. After the project is finished I will have enough money to focus on Timbertales again completely for a long time.
Quality, concepts and more
Another reason for the delay as I mentioned is the quality of the game at the moment. I am not very happy with some parts of the game.
First the graphics, I actually like the graphic style and think for an Independent developer without any real artist resources its quite good. But I would love to offer more effects, animations and stuff like that. I think there is a lot of space for polishing and make the style more shining even with the limited resources. Of course it will take some time to implement such stuff, but in my opinion its worth.
Second I missed to design Timbertales with a mobile focus. I started to develop Timbertales as cross platform game, but with the lack of mobile game experience and testing everything on desktop version I lost a little bit the view for mobile. The last weeks I played a lot of mobile games to keep up with experience and concepts how to change Timbertales. The biggest problems I am aware of at the moment are: The registration, payments and the look and feel.
Registration: As known from most of the mobile games I played it is unlikely to register yourself an account today and is a barrier for new players, since there are google play and the iOS equivalent, if you want to persist your progress. Also on steam we don’t need a extra registration, so I will remove this part from the game with the next update. New players will also instantly start with the first tutorial mission after downloading and starting.
Payments: I spend a lot of time to think about how to monetize Timbertales and wanted to be innovativ with the start of development. Unfortunately that doesn’t work out and I have gone into a completely wrong direction. Instead of focusing on developing a good game I started to make myself to many thoughts on this topic. I received a lot of negativ feedback about that topic.
Simple Solution: Simple approach will be a place to exchange money for acorn points. Everything in game will be paid by acorn points except skins. Of course acorn points can get collected by playing and don’t have to be bought. I am absolutely open for suggestions on that point. Feel free to contact me!
Look and Feel: I think it is possible to create a better look and feel with using touch technologies of smart devices. Since most parts are tested and played on desktop version I missed to apply touch events for several actions. For example to collect acorn points in game you have to move your unit on the acorn point, why not touch it to collect? Presenting rewards will be also improved for mobile devices.
I am currently working on performance. I refactor a lot of old code, since my first approaches on openGL wasn’t the best. I learned a lot about openGL and libGDX the last couple of weeks and trying to improve a lot of parts through the game to minimize draw calls, memory usage and space usage. I am nearly finished on that topic so with the next update you should also receive a much better performance.
Outlook
This is the road map for the next updates. I think the game lacks a bit of long-term goals at the moment, but I can’t focus on everything and have to be more focused on single parts. My goal is to release a version as soon as possible, but it must fit my expectation of quality. For the moment it is really hard for me to say how long it will take until Timbertales is release able. I will provide an update as soon as possible with the mentioned changes. I hope to receive a lot of feedback and we can plan the next steps[:de]
The last weeks …
First of all I am sorry for the silence the last couple of weeks. I had a lot of stuff ongoing and wasn’t able to spend my time to keep you informed. Anyhow I will try my best to catch up. Bad things first: I will not be able to release any stable version of Timbertales soon. The estimation with being release able in October was quite unrealistic. Everything costs more time than I expected and I am not very happy with the gameplay itself at the moment. For this reason I want to delay the release – to craft a game, which fits my idea of quality and fun. But let us talk more in detail …
Money, resources, budget
September was the last month I could afford to be independent with my resources. So I needed to find a solution to keep the project ongoing. I had the opportunity to work as a full time freelancer for a project, which is scheduled for 3 months. This is one of the reasons, why I was such busy the last weeks and will be the next weeks. With the full time job it takes me a lot of energy to work in my spare free time, but I do my best to work every day on Timbertales. At least one problem will be solved: The money. After the project is finished I have enough money to focus on Timbertales again completely for a long time.
Quality, concepts and more
Another reason for the delay as I mentioned is the quality of the game at the moment. I am not very happy with some parts of the game.
First the graphics, I actually like the graphic style and think for an Independent developer without any real artist resources its quite good. But I would love to offer more effects, animations and stuff like that. I think there is a lot of space for polishing and make the style more shining even with the limited resources. Of course it will take some time to implement such stuff, but in my opinion its worth.
Second I missed to design Timbertales with a mobile focus. I started to develop Timbertales as cross platform game, but with the lack of mobile game experience and testing everything on desktop version I lost a little bit the view for mobile. The last weeks I played a lot of mobile games to keep up with experience and concepts how to change Timbertales. The biggest problems are: The registration, payments and the look and feel.
Registration
As known from most of the mobile games I played it is unlikely to register yourself an account and is a barrier for new players. So I will remove this part from the game with the next update. New players will start with the first tutorial mission after downloading instantly.
Payments
I spend a lot of time to think about how to monetize Timbertales and I wanted to be innovativ. Unfortunately that doesn’t work out and I have gone into a completely wrong direction. Instead of focusing on developing a good game I made to many thoughts on this topic. I received a lot of negativ feedback.
Solution – Simple approach: A place to exchange money for acorn points. Everything in game can be paid by acorn points except skins. Of course you can collect acorn points by playing. I am absolutely open for suggestions on that point. Feel free to contact me!
Look and Feel
I think it is possible to create a better look and feel with using touch technologies of smart devices. Since most parts are tested and played on desktop version I missed to apply touch events for several actions. For example collecting acorn points in game: You have to move your unit on the acorn point, why not touch it to collect?
Currently I am working on performance. Since my first approaches on openGL wasn’t the best, I try to refactor a lot of old code. I learned a lot about openGL and libGDX the last couple of weeks and trying to improve a lot of parts through the game to minimize draw calls, memory usage and space usage. I am nearly finished on that topic so with the next update you should also receive a much better performance.
Outlook
This is the road map for the next updates. I think the game lacks a bit of long-term goals at the moment. I can’t focus on everything and have to be more focused on single parts. My goal is to release a version as soon as possible, but it must fit my expectation of quality. For the moment it is really hard for me to say how long it will take until Timbertales is release able. I will provide an update as soon as possible with the mentioned changes. Hopfully I will receive a lot of feedback and we can plan the next steps[:]
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