Dash release, Microsoft, and Development Process
So I've released Dash today. I apologize for being wrong about when I talked about the release date, but I got so caught up in making it perfect (Gosh, I'm sounding like Valve!) It's out now, though, and I encourage (pronounced en cur aw ge) you to try it out! If you haven't seen it yet, you can download it. It's only for Windows RIGHT now, but it is very soon going to be for Mac, too. All I need is to get my hands on a Mac computer, run one application, upload, and Shazam. It's quite fun. If you haven't been keeping track, it's a puzzle / action game about cubes (though I wouldn't say it's voxel-based). It's built in the Indigo Engine, which is coming along, and I'm very excited about. I might be talking about Code Indigo and the Indigo Engine a lot more now that I'm not distracted by Dash.
Now I want to mention something I'm very angry at Microsoft for. I'm normally pretty much a devotee of Microsoft, and I like what they come out with. (I want to talk about Windows 8 in another blog post, I'll get to that.) I'm very disappointed, though, with their SmartScreen, because it discriminates against (Very) Indy developers like me. Their SmartScreen is majorly based on two things, neither of which I have: Money and Popularity. They will most likely recognize your application as a virus if it doesn't have a specific PAID (hundreds of dollars!) digital signature, it is far more likely to reject you. The only easy way to get around it is if you have tons of people who have run your application. So if you can't pay hundreds of dollars on every game you release, like me, Windows tells everybody you're a virus. "The condition is, 'unless your popular,' so just make something good," you might say, but it's pretty darn difficult to make a popular game if everyone who downloads it gets told it "might harm your computer." It's terrible for Indy devs, because they can't rise to the top, they're being held back. Microsoft is perpetrating Capitolism on the Internet, which if you follow my blog, I'm not fond of. And, by the way, Microsoft, why do you think that a virus creator who's going to phish thousands of dollars off of people is not willing to spend a few hundred bucks to block the SmartScreen? Your system is flawed. So, because of Microsoft's great idea of who makes viruses, I don't have any links to my neat little installer to encourage people to have a start menu button and play my game often. But anyway, now that you understand, if you have administrator rights, and you want to help me oppose Microsoft, you can download the installer. You'll click "more details," then Run Anyway. And then you'll add one to the count of people who have run my installer.
Speaking of distraction in development, I've come to the second (actually third, thanks to my rage on Microsoft :P) topic for today, development process. Here are some of my thoughts. Every project has a number of changing features. First, and most discussed other places, is the fact that a project NEVER gets finished, it only stops being worked on. It's true. There's always that other bug, that improvement, that streamline. You simply have to give up, and say this is how I want it. No more changing. Another thing I noticed with Dash (which was the first game I spent less than a month on that I knew what I was doing with, and that I had a very clear vision on) is that productivity is clearly associated with a Bell Curve. Why, you ask? In the beginning, there are a lot of bugs, and things to keep in mind, and everything must be done sequentially, and you can't test too much. Everything goes very slowly, and it's not too exciting. But once you have a decent framework behind it, it gets very fun. There's more things you can work on at once, and you can always add more features. That is, of course, until you start fixing bugs and have added all the features in your head. Then it starts descending very quickly again. You have to search for bugs to fix, and you have to fix them. There's no choice as to what to fix. So it goes up and down, and kind of trails off, with constant, not-so-much-fun development. That's why I stop working on projects so soon, and why I'm announcing that I'm working on Revenge for no more than a few months from now. I haven't been working on it lately, but I want to fix a few things, add an ending, and be done with it. Move on to more fun things. 5be a new flash game, I'll have to think about that. So those are some thoughts on development, and feel free to Play Dash!
