Back to development at least for a day :)

by | Jun 8, 2018 | Allgemein

Hey,

finally I am back to indie development with at least one day per week. I am still working as freelancer for two more months, but only 4 days / week. So, I will dedicate a full day per week to the development of my games and indie business. First progress is already made in a long awaited patch for Timbertales, which will fix some major issues. I will go a bit more into detail what we can expect for the next updates of Timbertales and how long it will take.

Steam Patch this week

To start off with good news: I will release a patch for the steam version of Timbertales this week. This patch includes major fixes for resolution issues, adding a quit mission button, fixes a freeze which is caused by switching portraits and some more minor things. Yesterday, I was able to finish 80% and the missing 20% will follow by tomorrow. So you can expect the patch at last by end of week 🙂

Feedback and further development

I am still gathering feedback for Timbertales and creating a roadmap in direction of full release. Thanks to everyone who contacted me and shared his thoughts about the current game state. There are some really cool ideas and I got a lot of motivation to implement those. There was a long passive phase in Timbertales development and I lost a bit of motivation in between, but with all the feedback and some new very cool ideas I am back on track. I want to release a full version with a good game state and of course it should worth its price. Here is a little preview of my open tickets, if you miss something please don’t hesitate to contact me.

One Idea I want to highlight – Battlemap

There was one person with this brilliant idea. In short there will be a new game mode (Maybe as DLC not sure about that yet). In this game mode we will have to fight for the dominion of Timbertales. We will have a battlemap with different regions and they will provide different bonuses. Your goal will be to conquer all regions, but of course the enemy will get stronger the longer the conquest take. So your strategy in which order you will conquer which regions is very important. Unfortunately I can’t share much details about the bonuses yet, since there is a lot of work needed to build the concept, but I will get back to you as soon as there is a rough concept.

Conclusion – What can we excpect?

My current plan is to bugfix and improve Timbertales to a state, where I am happy to release it to the full version and leave Early Access. Of course this will take some effort marketing and development wise etc. It is still a good time to share your feedback, if there is any. I don’t have any deadline for the release, so I don’t have to stress myself. First priority is to make the game more fun and enjoyable. If the release works out very well, I can imagine to add DLCs and work on more content patches otherwise I will focus on another project.

Daily business as freelancer and further planing

by | Feb 8, 2018 | Allgemein

Daily business at AboutYou

for about 2 weeks I am now working for AboutYou in Hamburg / Germany. Who not knows this company it is a fashion web store, which is quite popular in Germany. The workspaces are very modern, the team and its structure is really nice. Unfortunately it hasn’t that much to do with games, but anyhow it is a paid project job for at least 3 months and it allows me to get some distance from my projects. The income will help a lot to push my projects further and having more options such as paid artists etc. The downside is of course, that within the next three months I can’t update very much, since I am working as a full time freelancer.

Rainware – How does it continue?

Nevertheless, today I would love to share at least some ideas I came up with. So even if I can’t spend much time on my projects I have the possibility to rethink and plan the further course of Rainware. First of all I want to continue making games for at least one more project. With all the gathered experience within the last two years I need to make another one. The question is what kind of project will be the next one and when I can start with it.

New game project idea

A 3D remake of the game “Mega lo mania” or “Tyrants“, which was the game name in the US. It was actual the first strategy game I ever played, even before hits like Dune II completely got me, and for me it was the game, which made me loving RTS games. As a tribute and of course because the game was fucking awesome I would like to make a newer version out of it.
As a challenge and personal improvement I want to enter a new area: “3D”. I will stick to Unity as engine as far as I can tell you for now. The modelling will be done in Maya by myself. It won’t be an easy task at all, but I am very motivated and can’t wait to get started and keep you informed about the progress. 

Soon …

But first things first I have to finish the freelance job to refocus completely  on game development. This sets the start date for development to May, but there is actually already some work in progress. I am preparing the GDD and analyse the market, technologies etc. I will come up with more informations within the next blog post, which will focus around the new game project / idea.