Side tracking

I'm sorry, no specific game update this week. I've been a bit preoccupied over the last week doing some other things.

Not only did a dear friend of mine leave for Canada for 4 months(so jealous!) but I have also gotten myself into organising a gaming event called 'Indievelopment'.
I deemed it important to do a bit of networking on the side and getting to know a few people in the gaming industry. Helping to organize Indievelopment helps tremendously with that. Thanks to that I now have an e-mail list of a few hundred gaming journalists which I would imagine greatly improves my chances of sucessfully promoting my own games in the future.

Furthermore I have been reading a lot of blogs and articles lately about game development and I have picked up a few very useful things. Most importantly, I learned about 'a game a week' projects. Which basically means just that, you make a (simple) game every week for a period of time.
Here's the blogpost for anyone interested:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RamiIsmail/20140226/211807/Game_A_Week_Getting_Experienced_At_Failure.php

I want to start doing a game a week after I have finished FUTransport(which I plan to do within the month of september). All games I make for 'a game a week' will be available on this blog for free, feel free to mail me with feedback on: indiestepsblog@gmail.com
Apparantly making a lot of games greatly improves your game design skills and can make you a lot more familliar with the overall process that goes into developing games. I have to admit that I am very very eager to start doing 'a game a week' which makes it even more difficult to finish FUTransport, but I made a promise to myself that I'd finish that project so I will.

Lastly I do want to announce at least something about FUTransport, since I plan to finish it in about a month. I already made a checklist of what features I would still like to add before I finish the project:
- Buying more kinds of trains(faster trains, larger trains/more capacity, etc.)
- More specific quests(connecting certain towns, reaching certain places)
- Upgradeable tracks, from single tracks(trains wait for each other)
                                    to double tracks(trains can pass each other)
- HUD upgrade

That's about it for this weeks progress report, I hope I can provide you with a new build of FUTransport next week.

For questions, feedback or requests I can always be reached at:
indiestepsblog@gmail.com

FUTransport, the first crawl...

The day I make this blog post marks 2 things: 

• The date I was born;
• The very start of my (hopefully) future career

Over the past few months I have been developing my first game with the skills I learned from college the past year. For a long time it seemed like a distant, almost impossible goal to be able to program my own games, yet here I am.

Even though the game I have been developing isn't by any means a masterpiece, I deemed it important to go through all the steps of game development and finish my game instead of abandoning it. I have made my first version of my game: 'FUTransport'. A game about building up and managing a network of passenger trains. To give you an idea of what it is like, here is a screenshot:

You need to build tracks and trains to visit as many cities and villages as you can. The more you visit places the happier they become and the more money you'll earn. However, trains and tracks can break down which you need to repair all while making sure the towns in your network are getting enough trains to transport all the people waiting on the station.

If by now you are still reading this, then perhaps you are willing to help me out a bit more. Because at this stage the most important thing I need to do is playtest. Since it is generally a bad idea to only playtest your game with a few friends, and an especially bad idea to only playest your game yourself (or so I've heard) I'd like to ask you to take a look at it. 

The game is freely available for download here(sorry, windows only):

https://mega.co.nz/#!fFhiWLBB!XIAHbKuxnXh-hLWlmTWsHGelKGFPZG39i2HzH9PqXZc

Now before you click that link and start to play, remember that if you don't let me know your opinion I'll never know what to improve on. So if you finished playing, please take a bit of your time to fill out this survey and leave any feedback you can:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1c96Zpu0_fUw1YxF9XR_dZIlnOo0SZ1XyIfauYBF6xv0/viewform?usp=send_form

Even if you started it up, hated it immediately and never want to play it again let me know what drove you off because this is all very important information to me. If I don't know what I did wrong, I can't improve.

I will use this blog to show the progress I made based on your feedback, from this prototype to the very end.

I can be reached at:
indiestepsblog@gmail.com