Classic 2D quest or how our two years of development went. Part 2
Continuation of the story about how the “Swordbreaker The Game” was forged, in this part there will be a story about the launch of the first demo, localization, about how we tried to go on indie-gogo, and a little bit of seals. :)
The continuation of the history of the development of our first game, start here
In the last article we ended up collecting the demo version of our game for google play, which included about 60 scenes, one of the branches of the passing game, and of course advertising (hehe).
')
Edit bugs before running the demo
After about a month, the results turned out to be quite good, in general, people liked the game, but some lucky ones who managed to skip all the right decisions from the first time reached the end in just 10-12 scenes, which is only 10-15 minutes of gameplay if you read the texts . Of course, we understood that the format of the game is such that there are branches along which you can quickly reach the final, but the idea was that the player would be interested in exploring all the scenes of the game. Advertising also brought us the first $ 1.
Demo in the super-top
Meanwhile, Zhenya drew us the logo of the team, which we decided to take as the main one (picture at the beginning of the article).
We can assume that at this time we went to the main point in the development - namely, a full-fledged vision of how and what will be implemented in the final version of the game. The case remained quite small - add the remaining 250+ scenes to the game. =]
And since we already had something to show people and even it was possible to play, we also moved into the Steam Greenlight passage. Yes, at the moment the information on the greenline is no longer relevant, the system has been simplified, and now for the passage it is no longer necessary to wait for the applet from the community as before. But in general, the following steps were important for the passage of the greenlight:
Funny story: the name of the team rolled out randomly on the basis, I think you guess what song, and Sasha's cat, which they took at about the same time.
However, the series of coincidences continued even after we called our creative tandem, we received a message about plagiarism (xD) from one of the participants of gcup.ru with the nickname ducat, who thought that we brazenly decided to seize the nickname that he had invented) peacefully settled and he even made a review about us on his YouTube channel, and now he is developing his own game.
Sashkin kitten
As a result, thanks to the support of people who are interested in the game, they gave us the green light to launch and access the Steam developer portal.
Not the coolest statistics, but we did go greenlight
Final result
Of course, we decided not to limit ourselves to the greenlight and try to collect the amount for development at other sites, namely IndieGoGo, I must say that most of all in this case we puzzled over how to send gifts to those who decide to support us, as well as with what should be these same gifts. We didn’t come up with anything especially creative except T-shirts, posters, and, of course, a copy of the game’s incentive. The company eventually collected a certain amount, but also failed miserably, although at that time we were offering not just a spherical horse in a vacuum, but we had a demo, a video on YouTube, and a website, but we raised funds not for development, but only on the localization of the game.
M ... patronage)
In general, translation into foreign languages has become a small problem for us - the text in the game is really quite a lot, and taking into account Russian specifics, translating it with the same idea into other languages is not so easy, and what is more important is not so cheap. . The total text in the game is ~ 100kk characters, the cost of translation was announced to us about 1000 dead raccoons in the calculations of that time. We have already managed to work on translating parts of texts for the demo, with some translators we tried to find through VK groups, but the translation left much to be desired ... In general, for the demo we decided to take what we have, even if it was not a perfect translation, but we simply had no other option. For the full version of the game, the search for a translator continued for a long time ...
In general, the problem of translation of texts is always that you, as a developer, want to get the highest quality results for any sane amount and time, but at the same time you don’t have any means of controlling the quality of this translation, you just don’t know a foreign language and what's really written there. This is especially evident when working with freelancers, some managed to translate text using a google translator and pass it off as a professional translation, I certainly speak English at some reading level, and such people were puzzling.
But later we found a way out, again, not without the help of the community, one of the familiar developers from Krealit gave us the contacts of the translator with whom they themselves worked, and, miraculously, he turned out to be Russian, who at that time was studying at the European Institute foreign languages and moonlighting as a freelancer, in the end he made us translate all the texts in the game at a fairly high level. How did we check it? It's simple - because Sanya scribbled in all the forums where you could scribble, he asked his foreign colleagues in game-girl to read a piece of text and give his assessment of the quality. In the end, everything was really cool. Also thanks to our translator, we had the word “Timbernator”, which he invented to call the Pinocchio robot in the game.
Like the translation
Generally, if there is a lot of text to translate in a game and translation to different languages is required, then it is better to start doing it in advance, because in our case the translation took about a month and a half.
Meanwhile, Zhenya continued to draw, draw, draw and draw, I gradually rewrote the code and we all tested it, collected it and moved slowly to release.
This ends the second part of the story, next I will try to tell you directly about programming and after that what happened after the full release.
The continuation of the history of the development of our first game, start here
In the last article we ended up collecting the demo version of our game for google play, which included about 60 scenes, one of the branches of the passing game, and of course advertising (hehe).
')
Edit bugs before running the demo
After about a month, the results turned out to be quite good, in general, people liked the game, but some lucky ones who managed to skip all the right decisions from the first time reached the end in just 10-12 scenes, which is only 10-15 minutes of gameplay if you read the texts . Of course, we understood that the format of the game is such that there are branches along which you can quickly reach the final, but the idea was that the player would be interested in exploring all the scenes of the game. Advertising also brought us the first $ 1.
Demo in the super-top
Meanwhile, Zhenya drew us the logo of the team, which we decided to take as the main one (picture at the beginning of the article).
We can assume that at this time we went to the main point in the development - namely, a full-fledged vision of how and what will be implemented in the final version of the game. The case remained quite small - add the remaining 250+ scenes to the game. =]
And since we already had something to show people and even it was possible to play, we also moved into the Steam Greenlight passage. Yes, at the moment the information on the greenline is no longer relevant, the system has been simplified, and now for the passage it is no longer necessary to wait for the applet from the community as before. But in general, the following steps were important for the passage of the greenlight:
- Sanya tried to tell about the game wherever possible, in all the famous forums on game development (gcup, gamedev - some of the healthiest), on forms of gambling, on text-based forums of quest, not bypassed by Kanobu.ru and others as well.
- Made groups in VK, facebook, tweeter
- They made the site (I think it was superfluous, but on the whole we considered that we should have it)
- Well, also some YouTube channels have kindly agreed to tell about the game.
- In addition, Sanya even tried to grasp the immensity and write in foreign forums (more on that a bit later)
Funny story: the name of the team rolled out randomly on the basis, I think you guess what song, and Sasha's cat, which they took at about the same time.
However, the series of coincidences continued even after we called our creative tandem, we received a message about plagiarism (xD) from one of the participants of gcup.ru with the nickname ducat, who thought that we brazenly decided to seize the nickname that he had invented) peacefully settled and he even made a review about us on his YouTube channel, and now he is developing his own game.
Sashkin kitten
As a result, thanks to the support of people who are interested in the game, they gave us the green light to launch and access the Steam developer portal.
Not the coolest statistics, but we did go greenlight
Final result
Of course, we decided not to limit ourselves to the greenlight and try to collect the amount for development at other sites, namely IndieGoGo, I must say that most of all in this case we puzzled over how to send gifts to those who decide to support us, as well as with what should be these same gifts. We didn’t come up with anything especially creative except T-shirts, posters, and, of course, a copy of the game’s incentive. The company eventually collected a certain amount, but also failed miserably, although at that time we were offering not just a spherical horse in a vacuum, but we had a demo, a video on YouTube, and a website, but we raised funds not for development, but only on the localization of the game.
M ... patronage)
In general, translation into foreign languages has become a small problem for us - the text in the game is really quite a lot, and taking into account Russian specifics, translating it with the same idea into other languages is not so easy, and what is more important is not so cheap. . The total text in the game is ~ 100kk characters, the cost of translation was announced to us about 1000 dead raccoons in the calculations of that time. We have already managed to work on translating parts of texts for the demo, with some translators we tried to find through VK groups, but the translation left much to be desired ... In general, for the demo we decided to take what we have, even if it was not a perfect translation, but we simply had no other option. For the full version of the game, the search for a translator continued for a long time ...
In general, the problem of translation of texts is always that you, as a developer, want to get the highest quality results for any sane amount and time, but at the same time you don’t have any means of controlling the quality of this translation, you just don’t know a foreign language and what's really written there. This is especially evident when working with freelancers, some managed to translate text using a google translator and pass it off as a professional translation, I certainly speak English at some reading level, and such people were puzzling.
But later we found a way out, again, not without the help of the community, one of the familiar developers from Krealit gave us the contacts of the translator with whom they themselves worked, and, miraculously, he turned out to be Russian, who at that time was studying at the European Institute foreign languages and moonlighting as a freelancer, in the end he made us translate all the texts in the game at a fairly high level. How did we check it? It's simple - because Sanya scribbled in all the forums where you could scribble, he asked his foreign colleagues in game-girl to read a piece of text and give his assessment of the quality. In the end, everything was really cool. Also thanks to our translator, we had the word “Timbernator”, which he invented to call the Pinocchio robot in the game.
Like the translation
Generally, if there is a lot of text to translate in a game and translation to different languages is required, then it is better to start doing it in advance, because in our case the translation took about a month and a half.
Meanwhile, Zhenya continued to draw, draw, draw and draw, I gradually rewrote the code and we all tested it, collected it and moved slowly to release.
This ends the second part of the story, next I will try to tell you directly about programming and after that what happened after the full release.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/338938/
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