My First Love [Ep.12]

Developer Notes

Dear all

I have been asked how I work with the game and some very good proposals how to improve it. Thanks a lot.

The game is designed by me. So far I have planned 5 games where ‘Room for rent’ was the first game. ‘My best friend’s daughter’ was my second game and the third game is ‘My first love’.

I do all by myself. I create the images, write the code and story and take the main part of the support.

From the very first day it has been my plan to make a new release every month. So far I have been able to keep it. Some months even had 2 releases.

So far I’m working on release 32 where the first episode of ‘Room for rent’ was release 1.

As you might understand it is a huge job to generate approximately 600 new images per update.

Coding and story writing is a huge job too and especially the implementation of images into the game is time consuming. I work day and night on these games. I try to keep the weekends free but it’s tough. I have a full time job besides this too…. And a family!

Why don’t you hire a story writer?- Sorry I can’t ..the mix between the images, text, coding etc. is really merged so it will be impossible to gain the right expression if I don’t do it myself.

A new episode starts with a brief list in an Excel sheet with the events I want to build in. After that I make the event list with conditions and right story order. When I start to create images the event list will chance. Sometimes I get new ideas or something it wouldn’t work when I start the image design.

During the images production I always find new ideas. The same when I start coding, so all in all its one big mix.

When the game is almost finished my alpha team get the code. Thanks to Cerberus – It’s now working in GitHub so it’s now much more in control. My alpha team proof read the text and always have some suggestions that I try to fulfil. When game is ready for alpha test I have already been through it several times. At the beginning of a game there are always zillions of bugs but the more episodes the less bugs occur – Unless I implement new features like gallery etc.

I’m very lucky as I have the best alpha tester in my team – Lukumo. He is really ‘pain in the ass’

He finds everything! Thanks to him there is always a WT and he makes great support too.

My fourth game will be available within a year or so. The name of the game is “Return to Celavie islands”. You might be able to figure out what it is about.

I’m working on next episode. For me it looks like to be the best episode I ever have made (My personal opinion) I’m looking forward to release it at the beginning of December for my top supporters. It will contain no less than 800 new images and many tasks and small challenges.

Wish you all happy playing

Cheers

/Bob

Image: Meet Olivia – you’ll see much more of her in the upcoming episodes