Studio Ganzheit

Third phase of the last boss. That effect is 3 seconds long and took a week. One day went to getting a wisdom tooth pulled, about a fifth of another went to helping around the house while my wife wasn’t feeling well, and a day or two was lost to going down the wrong path. I initially exported the floor as skeletal animation from 3ds Max, advancing the animation incrementally — but with around 350 pieces, the framerate tanked. The thing is, what I actually wanted was a shockwave-driven collapse, not a physics animation. Completely wrong approach. So I just made 5 static meshes representing stages of the collapse, swapped between them, and hid the transitions with FX. For the tell effect, I went back and forth before landing on a slightly anime-inspired look. I put some care into the lens flare to keep it from looking too anime. Lens flares can’t afford to look low-res, but using a massive texture just for that felt wasteful, so I handled most of it in the material. I took a crunchy 256×256 lens flare texture, scaled it up with blur, then drew sharp radial black lines from the center in the shader to fake a high-res look. Not completely happy with the quality, but moving on for now.

I’ve been building nothing but bosses for almost three months, and staring at that placeholder tin can for over a month is making me sick. I want to finish this and get into full assembly. That’s how tedious this stretch is — I’m already thinking about the next game and the one after that. I mean, I am working hard, so why is progress this slow. Next up: the boss’s armor plates blow off and embed in the ground, and the player has to step on them to dodge shockwaves and lasers, get close to the boss, and destroy the core. I keep going back and forth — am I overscoping this because it’s the last boss, or does the last boss deserve this much effort? My head’s a mess.

Every evening I browse through the discovery queue and category pages, looking at games with surprisingly (relatively) strong numbers or ones with great visuals but unexpectedly low numbers. If there’s a demo, I play it. I’ve done this about 5,000 times by now. Here are some scattered thoughts from what I’ve noticed.

• It’s hard to find any fixed rules among games that sold in the 1k–50k range. The usual advice — your capsule should look like this, you need an early UX hook — I can’t really see any of that mattering here.
• But around the 10k mark, capsule quality does seem to hold up to a certain standard at least.
• What matters far more is fit. The game needs a point that can’t be scratched by anything else, and it needs to reach the players who care about that. The latter is especially critical. The former isn’t something you can easily manufacture — it seems to be decided when the game is born. It can develop and evolve during production, but even that feels like it was baked in from the start.
• So what’s the most important factor in achieving that fit for games in this range? Luck, I think. If you’re at least posting dev logs and entering Next Fest, luck does come around once or twice, big or small. That’s where the old saying applies: “be ready when luck comes.”
• The “readiness” here seems to be playability and build stability. This is one of the few areas that can actually be improved through effort.
• I’ve also seen games with major publishers and impressive visuals that sold shockingly poorly.
• The ratio of self-published games among those with meaningful numbers was higher than I expected. Just a feeling, though.

So what’s my conclusion?

• Increase iteration speed, ship faster, release more often — to test different game hooks.
• Without dropping quality — so I’m ready when luck comes.
• But then why is this boss taking so damn long.