I feel in the mood to ramble, so stay with me here :)
First... 2010. Been an odd year for me. Start of the year was pretty bad for me, I was having massive disagreements with the heads of the My World project. I felt they were killing it, making stupid short term decisions, and were letting a bunch of juniors who didn't know what the hell they were doing, redesign everything. I started this project; all on my own. There's been a load of posts about the rise and fall of Realtime Worlds, but I think the real crime (money aside), was that they just didn't listen. Over the years, I told them over and over; Don't do this or that, you'll regret it. But no... they knew better. Yet, years later, they realised over and over that they had been wrong. You hire experienced people for a reason, you should really listen to them.
So this was the start of the year. They drove me out far earlier than I would have liked, but then in stepped Sandy and YoYo Games. Having been working freelance for them for quite some time, I was able to just jump right in and get going. Working from home was hard at times, but then again... it was also a joy! With Russell starting just a few weeks before me, we were in a real comfort zone, and worked well together, using Skype to discuss the hard bits. The real long term plans were finally kicking off. After about 3 months of this, we were ready to look of offices, both in terms of needing a place for new hires, and the fact that Russ and I had about exhausted the ability to work at home.
After looking at lots of places, we got a great deal from Abertay that we just couldn't say no too, and we moved in. Starting up, getting an office and moving in is always a great time. You feel like everything is on the up and are extremely motivated, so we ploughed through the work. Kirsty and Andrew obviously joined us about this point, and the feeling of growth continued. Much fun and joy ensued.
We plodded along like this for a little then we heard a loud bang from across road. Realtime Worlds had imploded. While it wasn't a huge surprise, it was a shock that it went down so quickly. Still, every cloud and all that... we picked up a few great guys from Realtime Worlds, Stuart, Lee and later Malcolm. Geoff also joined us as we shifted focus from PSP to iOS.
The iOS port was done very quickly, and so in less than a month we hard ported the Win32/PSP version of the runner over to iOS and had submitted our fist App. The long term dream of Sandy's was now a reality. Games running on multiple devices. Community games being sold on other devices. Getting Stuart from the ruins of RTW was a godsend, he jumped head first into production and started to formulate the pipeline, and we soon had several games lined up, and were pumping them out at the rate of about one a week.
Abertay also came into it's own. A huge pot of student artists, testers and musicians ready to help us, and this was all very welcome.
Sandy then wanted to release a free game, something to raise our profile a little in the iPhone/iPad world, and decided a little Solitaire game would be nice. So Andrew started work on this little game. But it actually turned into a monster. Lots of little niggles and bugs were causing Andrew to pull his hair out, so I took a little break from the platform side, and gave him a hand. This was the first time I had really used Game Maker in anger, so it took some time for me to get my head around it. It's a totally different way of doing things (from my perspective). Still, I took Solitaire apart, and put it all back together, and we were finally able to submit it to Apple. Little did we know that it would cause such a stir!
Now.. Christmas is a unique day in app-store time. Downloads are huge for everything as everyone gets apps for their new devices, and even though Solitaire had been doing great already, it stunned us on Christmas day. 75,000 downloads in a single day! Of course... we didn't find this out right away; no. The Apple site was down for a week over Christmas, so late on the 28th December when we got the weeks numbers, we were ecstatic!
So... all in all, a good year, with a bad start. But a good year never the less. So what's next? Well, Sandy has already said we're now working on Gamer Maker 8.1, and I've been doing just that over Christmas. I've been itching to get my hands on it, and improve Marks already damn fine program. I'm currently adding the much asked for ZOOM feature to the room editor. Ever since I started playing around with Game Maker, I felt this was missing. I've never written a modern tile editor that didn't have a zoom. Simply put: you need it. Moving back from my test version to the 8.0 is now hard going! The lack of ZOOM in there is even more apparent, so it's great to finally get it in.
However, because of this... it also needs a little speed boost. So I'll also be speeding up all the drawing code that's in the editor. I was surprised to discover it's not hardware accelerated, so it's actually doing pretty well in it's current state! We will at some point change that, but not just now, that'll take more time, and we simply don't have that just yet. However... once we've done a new release, we'll be able to play with it in the background and make the improvements we need, and you want.
We will also be doing a load of bug fixes. As many simple niggles as we can, along with the more complicated ones that stop folk dead in their tracks - if we can (it's still a new code base to us). I really feel excited to finally be able to extend and improve Game Maker, and although it'll take a little time; it's gonna be great!
So finally... looking forward to 2011. What does it hold for us? Onwards and upwards I hope!!! We're building some real momentum here, and it's looking better and better for all things Game Maker and YoYo! We have big plans for both community games, and Game Maker itself, and I am literary tingling with anticipation! I'm a games coder at heart, and the thought of helping you make more great games is a real buzz.
So lets all hope for a good 2011, and we'll see you all on the flip side!!
No comments:
Post a Comment