gavinbowman

[gavinbowman]

March - Nope

Ok, apologies for waiting 7 weeks into April to write this, but March was a long year and I didn’t get much work done, so I wasn’t really sure how to approach this.

March actually started out okay, it feels like a lifetime ago, but we started out the month planning to tackle a bit of a UI overhaul on the game and it sort of seemed okay. Then I kind of stopped.

But that’s okay. This is a crazy time, I’m not going to give myself a hard time for not working on a game during it.

I’ve been lucky so far, physically I feel fine, mentally I feel sharp compared to where I’ve been a lot of the last 5 years, and emotionally I guess I’m okay for now. I have young kids at home and that’s hard going for home workers, but they’ve been at home all along, so there’s nothing new there for me. If you’re just dealing with this for the first time, you have my sympathy, it’s a battle for sure.

But I still can’t do the bullshit mental gymnastics necessary to get me to work on this game. Usually I just stack up my lies and justifications in a delicate house of cards and eventually start picking away at something. But right now my brain isn’t having any of it.

I feel like I can find useful things to do until that comes back though. If I can’t find anything work adjacent, I’ve got a lot of shit to get on top of in the yard anyway. I’ve also played a bit of Animal Crossing... I was hoping my kids would be into that so I could play it more, but I think it’s too much work for them. Youngest one likes to watch me fish, which is great. But I haven’t played or done much else.

So I’m just trying to stay safe, well, and trying to chill the fuck out a bit more when I can’t get to my desk (often doesn’t work, but I’m still trying). I hope you’re all doing the same.

[gavinbowman]

February - Not bad

Made some decent progress this month, if you’re following any of us on twitter you’ve probably seen that one of the boss battles is starting to shape up. There was a bunch of structural things in the game that weren’t there to make this work the way we wanted, and there were a bunch of things that just needed to be added as custom things. It’s all going to need a good pass over and tweak for online support before we call it done, but it’s functionally about 99% of what it needs to be, and probably about 80% in terms of art and overall UX.

This sounds like it’s still a long way to go since it’s just the first boss fight and we’ve been working on the game since the dawn of time. But I hadn’t touched it at all until late last year, so I’m just happy to see some positive progress on it at any time. And I’m hoping that future overhauls won’t take quite as long, partly because of reuse, partly because I’ll have some prior knowledge now, and partly because I’m generally feeling better and seeing less extended dead time as the months go on.

It’s weird because as time goes by I simultaneously become more aware of how much work it’s going to be to finish it, and increase my ability to actually get it there, so I think the net movement is very small, I feel like we can finish it and I hope it’s this year... just got to play it out and see what happens.

So another decent month in the tank anyway. I don’t see any massive black spots in sourcetree even. Moving on to try to tackle some of the UI/UX overhauls we need to make this month... I’ve been quite looking forward to this bit, I just hope we can do enough with it to make it feel more polished and gamey without blowing too much time.

Also this month, I became an American, and I got another year more ancient. And I crossed a few things off my annoying non-work list too.

I didn’t play a lot of new stuff, tried out Gato Roboto and liked it a good amount, but haven’t played far, and picked up original Doom on Switch for a couple of bucks and have been having a great time with it. With the kids I got them to try Kirby’s Epic Yarn which went mostly okay but I’m not sure if they’ll play it again, and also fired up Nintendoland, and I think we’ll have a little bit of fun with that, although maybe not until the youngest is able to join in, because none of those asynchronous games seem to work particularly well with only two. When I’m not playing my standard fallback games like BotW, I’m struggling a bit with choice paralysis, there’s too much stuff I want to play and never enough time, energy, or focus.

[gavinbowman]

January

First update of the decade, and I guess it’s not too bad.

This month I got on really well for the first couple of weeks, flicking back through sourcetree updates I guess I was still working on the first boss battle experience. There’s so many small issues here, and there’s been so many improvements that are kinda needed to make it feel like a solid interesting battle as well as eventful and meaningful. It’s been a lot of work just thinking about what to do with it, as well as hacking away at the various systems to allow for everything it needs.

It’s still got a way to go, but hopefully the various changes I’m making here will help us with the other bosses too. I think we’ve added a couple of extra attack patterns as well as pretty drastically modifying most of the existing ones, either visually or mechanically or both... so hopefully the impact will be felt whenever we get to doing another update.

After the first couple of weeks, my parents came to visit and the rest of the month was a write off and I don’t even know anything right now. But I’ll get back into it over the next day or so I’m sure. We took the kids to Disneyland for the first time and various other things came up, and I’m trying to push through the general new year housekeeping, gardenkeeping, and bookkeeping tasks that seem to want to destroy me. Starting to think about the first kid going to school and all that entails too, so it’s a big headspace time.

I’m really hoping this is the year that we get this game out from under our feet though, so it’s a pretty good feeling to know that we didn’t get off to a horrible start to the year. Craig has a big gap coming up in a month or so too, so that’s going to be a big challenge to me because even though I’m getting a better feel for the game it still feels like his baby mostly and I’ll have to push myself hard to make progress when he’s away.

It’s crazy to think about where I’m at in my head with work now compared to 10 years ago, it was so much easier to just sit down whenever and crank stuff out. I think this has just been a really bad patch and based on the progress of the last couple of years I’m pretty certain I’m still climbing out of it and still have many more gains to make.

I haven’t played a lot of different games, mostly just rounding out breath of the wild when I get a decent window for it. I think I mentioned before that I played the game purely as an exploration and gathering game, I found all the shrines but I didn’t do any of them... but it’s been so long now and it wasn’t looking like I was going to get a massive amount of hours to go back and leisurely play the rest of it out... and I started running into issues with the DLC bits I was doing because I was so underpowered. So I’ve been playing through all the shrines, I only have 4 left to do now, and I’m more than halfway through the DLC content, so it shouldn’t be too long before I wrap it up and move on. The shrines were a bit of a grind taken as a batch, I should definitely have poked my head in and done all the easy ones as I went, that way I wouldn’t have ended up so weak and there would have been less grindy save/load/teleporting to wrap up the rest. I’ve also been trying some harder fights and trying to level up some of my armor sets between shrines to keep things interesting. Overall despite the grind I’ve been having fun with it. Oh, and I tried the Trial of the Sword a couple of days ago and it’s amazing, it’s the most fun I’ve had with the game in ages. It’s too hard for me though, not having saves between stages is going to kill me, if not from difficulty then from just having to let my kid play some other game on the Switch. I wouldn’t care if the saves died on death or reload or something, but no saves at all on something that’s going to take well over an hour to get through is not parent friendly.

What else... I wanted to play some pinball, my kid loves physical pinball and so do I, but I couldn’t find anything compelling electronically. I need to try one of the switch games with my monitor flipped, because I can’t get anything out of any of those games with any of the available views on a landscape screen. It’s fascinating to me how much I enjoy real pinball tables these days given that I never spent any time with them when I was younger and they were everywhere... whenever we go to arcades now that’s the first thing I look for.

Oh I still haven’t finished my OG Link’s Awakening playthrough, I keep forgetting I have another dungeon to do still.

I guess that’s me, back to work. Thanks for reading.

[gavinbowman]

December - Month, year, decade

So I made some good progress on Monsters & Monocles this month. At the end of last month I was messing around with some environmental hazards or traps, since we need to add more variety there, and that’s coming together pretty well, but they’ll need some work from Craig to really sing, and they’ll still need some tweaking to work fully.

For most of this month I focused on issues surrounding the boss battles. Primarily the first one to begin with, but a lot of the lessons and changes should transfer across to the others. The game has always had bosses, but there’s very little fanfare around them, and none of them really work or sell the game as they are right now. Basically across the board, making sure that from the moment you teleport to the boss level to the moment you transfer back to the airship feels like an experience worth having. Still a lot to do, but it feels good to actually be messing with an important part of the game instead of skirting around the edges.

I barely played any games this month, even with the kids. I’m not sure what happened, it flew by.

I did get to go to the game awards though, thanks to a friend’s tweet being up for an award, so it was fun to be in and around the games industry again, and to spend a good day with game dev friends... I’ve been skipping GDC and I miss it very much.

But there’s not a whole lot more to report on december. How about...

2019?

This wasn’t a bad year I guess. We made two mobile games and they both turned out great, and they both gave us something special that made us feel pretty great about ourselves and what we can do going forward. Dungeon Drop got some solid featuring and a game of the day post in the App Store, which felt very validating, and InfiniBugs got some nice comments and a Touch Arcade Game of the Week post. We hadn’t had either of those things happen to one of our games before, and we hadn’t successfully shipped any games in over 2 years, so overall this was satisfying. And I ended the year in a pretty good place on Monsters & Monocles that makes me feel like we can probably make it good and finish it before we die (preferably long before). I’m still far from my best, but I’m working more than in recent years, and pretty happy, and striving to maintain the closest thing I can manage to optimism.

What about the entire decade?

Ugh.

There’s a lot good I can point to, met some great friends, had some kids.

But still. Ugh.

[gavinbowman]

November - Closure

Well that was cool. We launched the last mobile game we had lined up, Infinibugs, it was pretty well received by people I talked to and reviews on iTunes. And it got picked as TouchArcade’s game of the week, which has never happened to one of our games before. So that felt really great.

This one didn’t get featured, but we unlocked that achievement with Dungeon Drop earlier this year, so we both feel kinda satisfied and cleansed by the two releases on the whole.

I think they both stand as strong examples of the kind of mobile games we’re capable of making, and as our older games get eaten up by the App Store’s doomsday clock, it’s nice to know we’ll have something good and recent still up there.

And that’s pretty much it for all that for us, I think. We launched our first mobile game almost exactly 11 years ago. The market has changed in countless ways since then, and we’ve changed in countless ways too. It was fun to launch a couple of good games, but I just don’t think there’s any way we can make any money from mobile games anymore. So for now, we’ll be focusing on finishing Monsters & Monocles and then we’ll look at what we do next once that’s done.

So on to that. I had another month of decent progress. I’m enjoying the work for the most part, it’s still an interesting challenge taking over someone else’s code base. I’m feeling my way into it still, and I’m still trying to see how and where I would make it my game. If I finish it before I figure that out I don’t think I’ll be too disappointed... but it’s a nice thing to think about to try to understand what it is I’m even making and what I’m trying to achieve with it. I do believe it’ll be done at some point though, and that we’ll get it to a place where we’re happy with what we’ve made.

I’m having an easier time making todos for myself, and knowing where to start when I try to change things. And even though I’m mostly focusing on things that annoy me about it’s current state, I feel like we’re making good progress. When we reach the point where we push a new update to Steam, I think it’ll be largely quality of life stuff. But the new stuff I’ve been able to add so far has felt good.

Nothing massive is jumping out to me in my git logs for this month, but I’m starting to dig in to aspects of the UI, and I’m looking forward to giving all that a good overhaul. Fixed a bunch of bugs, tweaked some of the things I added in October... all good.

There’s a lot of big areas of the game that I need to tackle too, but I don’t think there’s any easy fixes there.

Outside of work, I haven’t played a lot of games this month, mostly just stuff with the kids again. I picked up a copy of Ace Combat 7 on black friday though, and I’m actually really looking forward to firing that up to try.

I don’t have a lot else to say this month. Next month I’ll probably roll into a full year eval, and it’ll be nice to be able to do one of those and have launched a couple of games. Thanks for reading as always.

[gavinbowman]

October - It’s alive

OK. As I mentioned in last month’s update, this is it for me now, I just have to work on Monsters & Monocles, make it done, make sure it’s good. It’s nice to have a pretty singular focus for a change.

On the other hand, I still have to worry about how we keep the lights on, and this is a massive project with a lot still to do in a lot of different areas... so it’s only singular in the sense that it’s one game... but it still feels better.

So this month I actually spent a bunch of time working on the game and digging through trying to wrap my head around all the code and how it all interacts. I’m enjoying working in Unity with some visual tools and higher level code, it’s refreshing, I feel like I can focus on important things more. I still tend to pick my phone up and wait for the game to start whenever I hit play, but I’m doing it less than I was at the start of the month.

I’m taking a pretty broad approach to issues with the game, but I’m focusing a lot on quality of life issues, things I notice most when I playtest, things that don’t feel right, or little tweaks that I feel make some significant improvement to the way I feel about it.

I’ve also started to build a more comprehensive personal task list that gives me a pretty good idea of what I’m going to be doing for a while.

The biggest changes I’ve made so far were in the combat rooms, one of the recent builds introduced more of a room based concept as opposed to the original organic mansions, but the way the rooms seal for combat had some unfinished areas that I’ve started trying to clean up because they annoyed me a lot when I played. I’ve also started trying to add beam based weapons for players. This has drawn some attention to some layering issues that I need to work out, but I think I know what needs to be done there.

There were a bunch of small changes too, like little timing or positioning things or sound triggers that I felt needed a tweak.

It still doesn’t 100% feel like it’s my game, and it feels weird talking about changing stuff, but I need to get over that and just start ripping into things to bend it to my will if we’re ever going to get it done.

But overall, aside from a shaky week this week, I’ve been working well, making changes, feeling pretty good at the end of the day... even I think making the game better. It’s been great. I forget that this should probably just become my new normal, but after the last few years of whatever the hell the last few years were, it feels weird to end a day feeling satisfied with my contribution and thinking positively about what I’m going to do the next day.

In other news... our next, probably last for the foreseeable future, mobile game, InfiniBugs, is now up on the App Store for pre-order, and will launch on the 13th November. It’s a super retro shooter, it made me happy to work on from time to time over the last few years. It was a bit of a monster to actually nail down to a final product for release, but thankfully Craig was around to give me new art and push me to get it done, and I think we ended up with something pretty great. With this and Dungeon Drop I’m definitely happy to see them on the App Store as a representation of us and our work there over the last 11 years. They feel right.

I’ll probably get a bit distracted around the launch, but hopefully not too much, I’m hoping November will be another good month on Monsters & Monocles. We’re going to need a bunch more of them if we’re going to get this done.

What else, hmm, playing... I played the goose game a bunch with kids, that was fun. My eldest is getting a little older so I’ve started trying some of the lego games with her and we’re having fun occasionally, but they’re not sticking for her just yet. Still go back to Mario Party or 3D World the most. We tried out NSMBU because I enjoyed playing that solo, but it didn’t really work out, it’s a bit hard and the coop experience isn’t as well thought out as 3D World, maybe they changed the structure a bit for the Switch version. We’ve been looking forward to Luigi’s Mansion 3, so we’ll definitely try that over the weekend.

As always, thanks for listening, if you were only here for me to complain about how much my life sucked and I didn’t get anything done, I apologize for this month’s progress.

[gavinbowman]

September - Launched!

Ok, let’s get the big bit out of the way first... we launched a game. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like that long ago that I was popping games into the app store on a fairly regular basis... but this month’s Dungeon Drop launch was actually the first in over 2 years. And I think there was over a year prior to that one to find another. So those days are clearly long gone. And it’s been a trip.

But hey, Dungeon Drop is out, and we’re really happy with it. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s a free download on the App Store now.

The launch experience was a fun one, we’d had September 19th lined up for a while as the release date, and then a couple of weeks earlier Apple announced that Apple Arcade would launch on the same day. Bringing 50-100 premium mobile games that players could play for free with a trial subscription, or enjoy completely for only $4.99 per month. All starting on the same day as our little game. What do we do? We had a lot of suggestions to move the date, and we were pretty split on it for a while there, but we ultimately decided to go with the original launch date.

And it worked out well I think, we got one of the best feature spots we’ve ever had for the game in the App Store, I think probably our first US feature since Slambots in 2013... I guess maybe a lot of developers avoided that date and left us some air to work with? Either way. It got featured. A few people told me they liked it, and few even told me they bought the premium upgrade. So that was a great feeling, mission accomplished for Dungeon Drop.

Our next iOS game launches mid-November. We’ll post it for pre-orders later this month and share details then.

We hadn’t really used the pre-order feature prior to Dungeon Drop, but it turned out to be really useful for sharing the game info before launch. We didn’t need a separate web page to direct people to, or even really a video, people could just see the screenshots and app preview on the App Store for themselves. We did post a trailer for Dungeon Drop on Youtube and a couple of twitter videos or gifs, and those worked out well too... so we’ll definitely do that again next time around.

Anyway, I’m less concerned about that launch now, having seen Dungeon Drop get some play and positive response I feel happy with where we’re at with what we’re putting out. Now we need to turn that around and apply it to Monsters & Monocles.

Oh god. What the hell have I agreed to. Finishing this up is going to be a big thing. Ryan is a smart cookie, so fortunately the code is clean and organized. It’s just that there’s a lot of it, and it’s all Ryan’s and not mine. It makes more sense than mine would have, but I don’t instinctively know where to find anything yet. I managed to poke at a few bits, they seem to do what I expected them to do, and I think I can massage all the things I don’t like into something we’ll be happy to launch. I just feel massively overwhelmed right now. There’s a lot of layers to everything, there’s 3 different platforms they launched the game on, there’s the single player, local coop, and online multiplayer cases to consider in everything. And then there’s the stuff that Ryan wasn’t really finished working on when he left... some of those things are hard for me to distinguish from things that either weren’t done at all or have been finished for years. For now I’m really just trying to build a big picture of it all in my head without running off to the mountains first.

I think what I’ll be looking at this month will be a long overdue UI overhaul, because I feel like that’s going to be relatively painless to address. I’ll just need new designs and artwork from Craig and I think I can shuffle everything around and give it a nice new lick of paint there... and hopefully that’ll start to make it feel more like my game. In game, there’s a fair amount of broken or less than great camera stuff that I’d like to get working, which should give me some exposure to the NPC systems and what state those are in, and then I’d like to get things like the player death sequences cleaned up. I’ll be having to touch a lot of systems but I feel like I’ll build a pretty good understanding of a lot of it that way.

I’m hoping a lot of the existing systems like the map generation, basic physics and controls, and the network play, are largely sound for most of what a finished version of this game needs to be. Some of the npc/meta stuff will need an overhaul to create a roadmap to 1.0, and some of the systems like the enemy behaviors, weapons, characters might just need expanded on as they are.

Hopefully. Since the game is out there anyway and there’s only a few people reading this I’ll try to talk about it in a more open inside baseball kinda way as we try to wrap it up. I’m always more open on emotional or general aspects of how things are going, so it’ll be fun to try to be more open in addressing specifics. No promises though, I’ve never really tried this before.

Speaking of generalities, this month wasn’t bad really. Launching Dungeon Drop was a huge distraction that I kind of allowed myself, and then I got horribly sick taking my kids to a soft play place and lost a bunch of work there too. But I’ve had much worse months, and after pushing through finishing two games in a row I probably should cut myself some slack. I’m spending some time working in the same room as Craig this week, which helped a bunch with Dungeon Drop, although it’s kind of difficult with Monsters & Monocles since there’s so much to do and I’m so far off the pace on mastering the ins and outs of the project. If nothing else, having someone next to me gives me a good push to try something anyway.

Aside from working, I’ve been having a blast playing the goose game with my kids, they just laugh hysterically while the goose is horrible, and it’s awesome. Probably one of the best games to play with kids. I finished up Mario Rabbids Kingdom Battle. That was great. My kids enjoyed watching some of the earlier battles and the story sections, but they got bored easily when the battles got longer and harder, and during the longer exploration bits. That’s actually kinda like me, tbh, although they did a great job of keeping the later battles challenging without becoming a huge grind or massively difficult. The difficulty probably spiked most in the second half of the second world and the first half of the third for me... There’s some extra challenges to play, I didn’t do those, and there’s more coop levels we didn’t play, those are fun too. Haven’t tried vs mode. 100% campaign and most of the collectables was about 30-40 hours, so a decent length, but my switch obviously can’t pull out kid aimless wandering or repeating time, so I don’t know exactly how that is. I could have shaved off probably 5-10 hours just by not wandering around looking for hidden chests, which mostly don’t add anything to the gameplay or give you any useful boosts, and involve a lot of back tracking and kind of boring wandering around (you’re wandering around beautiful worlds, but it’s mostly linear and you’ve seen it already). 

Other games, we’re still playing Mario 3D World, but the kids are definitely tapping out on it a little, but it had a very good run. They love watching Captain Toad, so I got to play through the first couple of hours of that, it’s adorable, I hope I get to play the rest. But they like to try to play and it’s too hard for them, so they get annoyed. We’ve played a bit of Mario Kart, but they don’t really try to stay on the tracks yet, but I feel like they’re going to love that when it clicks. And weirdly they watched me play Twilight Princess for about an hour last night and both seemed to love it, so I might actually get to make some more progress in that. Although it’s rough going after Breath of the Wild, the rigidity and the camera especially make it feel it’s age, even in the HD remake. Off on my own I’ve been picking away at an old copy of Link’s Awakening with the hope of finishing it again before I eventually play the remake. It’s such a great game, I think it may have been the first Zelda I actually played through, since I never had an NES of my own.

Okay, I’ve gone on long enough, back to work, I’d better get going on something so I have some good Monsters & Monocles progress to report next month.

[gavinbowman]

August - Done

Well that’s that done, we finished and submitted the other mobile game we were wrapping up, and now we’re free and clear to focus on Monsters & Monocles until it’s done. It’s fucking terrifying, to be honest, it feels good to be making a clean break from the mobile code base I’ve been tinkering with for what seems like forever, but I’m inheriting a massive codebase that someone else worked on for what seems like forever, and I have to find a way to take control of it and wrestle it to a reasonable conclusion before my electricity gets cut off.

I’m excited though, it’s going to be fun playtesting with a controller instead of a touch screen, it’s going to be fun having C# code and a bunch of GUI tools instead of an Xcode window. And it’s going to be fun interacting with the players and hopefully not being raked over hot coals too hard for my decisions or mistakes.

But right now I’m just bracing myself to run screaming to ryan as soon as I crack open the project. I’m all set up to start I think, I need to install a bunch of secondary tools and sdks to do a real build I’m sure, but I should be able to start poking at it at in Unity already. I got my license reactivated last week to prepare. So I could just go and do it, like, right now. Oh man.

Anyway, two mobile games in the can, the first one will be coming out this month, and we’ll probably let the second one stew for a couple of months, maybe launch in November. And amazingly we’re happy with both of them. They’re easily the best mobile games we’ve made in years, they have a nice feel and flow, and they look nice too thanks to Craig’s efforts. If those end up being the last mobile games we ever make we’ll be pretty happy with the way we went out there.

There was a third game we were going to try to wrap up before switching over to M&M, I’m not sure if I mentioned that here or not... but when the time came for us to try to move it along, it just felt too far away from the standard of the other two, and after doing the whole mobile finishing cycle twice this year with these other two games it felt like a step too far. And Monsters & Monocles has been calling us. It’s time to get back down to work on it. Like, right now. I mean it, I’m going to go and do it. I am. Honestly.

So what else this month, little bit of gaming, still picking away at the last world of Rabbid Kingdom Battle. It’s still fun and I like that they didn’t go too long and epic with the last world battles, there must have been a temptation to just throw a bunch of extra shit at the player, but it’s been fairly manageable. My kid tapped out around the end of world 2 though, she just pops in to watch the story parts now. Kid gaming time is mostly still Mario 3D World. I managed to sneak past the post game level that was holding us up in my own time and we were able to breeze through the rest of those levels. Need a bunch of stars and flags to unlock the final world though, and she’s not too into replaying any of the harder levels where we’re missing them. So I might have to do some more after hours work myself if we’re going to see the 100%. She still loves that game though, and I can totally see why, it’s so accessible and the multiplayer coop is just so great with kids. She keeps deleting the 2nd & 3rd save slots and playing through the earlier worlds again because the levels are a bit more fun. I really want to start playing Fire Emblem, but I want to get Kingdom Battle finished first so I can swap out the cart for something else.

And that’s me for another month. Feels pretty good to have something else finished, and to have a new thing I can get to work on. These updates should become more Unity and Monsters & Monocles focused from here on out. We probably need to embrace some more modern communications tools too... maybe step up our talk about the game on twitter, we’ve talked briefly about doing some video updates or streams about where the game is at and the progress we’re making, but I’m not sure if logistically it’ll be hard for us to pull that off well while actually working on the game full time and being parents. We need to look into that.

Anyway, thanks for reading, now I’m going to go and work on this big massive game I need to finish. Like, right now.

[gavinbowman]

July, Yay(?!)

Well holy shit, I don’t know how long it’s been since I could say this, but that was actually a full month that pretty much felt like a month’s work. There might have been a shaky week there in the first half, but either way I’ll take it. I didn’t really feel up for it, I’m tired, but we managed to push through that and get a solid amount of work output. Even managed to check off a bunch of little irritating things that had been mounting up for a while as well.

So work wise, we wrapped up all the store materials and submitted out first mobile game in well over 2 years. It was rejected, obviously, but we solved that relatively minor issue fairly quick and it’s now approved pending release when we’re ready. So that’s great.

We also pretty much finished our second mobile game in well over 2 years. This one still needs some tweaking and finalizing certain elements, and all the marketing and store presence stuff needs done, but it’s effectively done to the level we wanted it to be. And that feels amazing. Barring some disastrous missteps in August, I expect to be talking about Monsters & Monocles development in my future updates for the foreseeable future. Next month it’ll probably just be “And I finally took a look at Monsters & Monocles and holy shit Ryan what did you do?”, but it’ll be a start. So it’s taken us a lot longer to get here than we thought, but I guess rehabilitating yourself takes time. I can still get a lot better, I’m far from my best, but I’m super happy to be making solid progress and actually wrapping stuff up again.

And I think that’s all I’ve got to say on work for this month.

Haven’t been playing a massive amount of fresh games, still picking away at Kingdom Battle and Mario Odyssey on Switch with the kids, playing Outrun and Virtua Racing in the odd minute when I’m not totally wiped out at the end of the day but can’t handle anything longer. I also play Mario Party with the kids still when we have a good window. Every time I fire that game up the lack of any DLC drives me nuts. Extra boards, more river mini games... pretty much anything would magically separate me from my money.

Finished 100% of the main game content of Mario 3D World with the kids, it was a blast, but the post game levels are too hard for them to enjoy so I’m not sure if I’ll ever get to those... they get annoyed even just watching me play them. Loved that game though, I hope they bring the multiplayer back to mainline mario games because it’s absolutely perfectly balanced for playing with younger kids who are just starting to wrap their heads around gaming. The time limit sucks though, that was absolutely the worst thing about that game. The levels are beautiful to wander around in and explore, but the time limits on a lot of them don’t allow any wiggle room for it. It would also have benefited from Mario Odyssey’s overhaul of the lives system, the death and continue cycle feels kind of pointless because there’s not a huge penalty for it. I hope they remaster 3D World for Switch (or 3D Land even, which was equally awesome), more people should get to enjoy this game and experience the joy of the coop mechanics. After a few years of having to play the first level or hub world of a few games only, it was really nice to be able to play a whole game with my kids, and it’s really cool that they’re still into it. I don’t know how many hours we’ve put into it, but I’m sure it’s been a lot.

[gavinbowman]

June, ok

Alright, that wasn’t too bad. I had family visiting for most of the month so it was a bit stop starty, but I was working at the start of the month and I was working again at the end.

Everything that was outstanding on mobile game #1 got wrapped up, all it needs now is a description and hitting submit. I keep trying to figure out why I haven’t done that yet, but I got nothing.

#2 is coming along well too, should probably be wrapped up by the end of this month... then we’ll take a quick look at #3 and see if we can push it to the end or should just get back to Monsters & Monocles already. It’s all good anyway, we’re getting stuff done.

I didn’t play a lot of games, Virtua Racing landed on switch last week and I’m having fun with that alternately with Outrun when I have a quick window to play. Most of my game time has been with the kids lately too, Super Mario Party is popular, we’re pretty much running out of moons to look for in Odyssey, and we actually finished 3D World recently... haven’t moved on, they’re not ready to let go, or 100%’d it - the remaining bits are a bit too hard to be fun for them, but playing a game all the way through was a great feeling. I hope it’s the first of many. I cleaned up my old 3DS for my eldest to play nintendogs, and that’s been fun, although the wonky voice detection is tough to explain to a 4yo. But she’s spent a bunch of time playing the silly face raiders game and I guess it’s giving me some window into why AR gaming is a thing at all.

I made it down to E3 for one day, but I hardly got to play anything. It wasn’t super busy when I arrived but the lines were still nuts, and it filled up as the day went on. I was glad I made the effort though, it’s always nice to have a poke around and soak in some enthusiasm. I played Luigi’s Mansion 3 though, and aside from an issue with secondary aiming on the pro controller it was freaking awesome. That was always going to be a day one for me though, so no great surprise there.

Heading into the summer I feel like I have a lot to do around the house, with the kids, administratively... but it’s probably not as bad as it feels... and I feel pretty optimistic about blasting through with a good showing of strong working days. Nothing on the calendar event wise for the rest of the year either, so it’s actually pretty nice just having a clear run through. Last year I had 360idev, leap con, and unite, in the last 3rd of the year.

Okay, let’s get back to work and get these games out. Catch you next month.

[gavinbowman]

May, I guess

Holy crap, another month went by. I guess I was late last month and that’s making this feel super soon, but damn anyway.

I’ve been getting on pretty well now. We’ve pretty much finished up one of our new mobile games, and we’ve got a pretty aggressive schedule planned to wrap up everything else we have in development on mobile and get shifted over to Monsters & Monocles full time as soon as possible.

That feels like it’s been the status quo for about a year now, but this time I’m pretty sure we’re close. Game #1 is pretty much all uploaded on iTunes connect even, I just need to write a description and do whatever other busy work is necessary, videos, screenshots, icons are all done. It’s nice to hit a milestone of some kind after so long. It’ll feel pretty good soon just hitting the submit button and being verifiably done with it. For now though, we just really need to navigate through the rest of this plan, work our way around some summer family trips, etc... just get to the point where all we have to work on is Monsters & Monocles and get to work finishing that too.

It’s been a long road for us these last few years, anyone who saw my 360idev talk from last year will understand, and it’s nice to feel a little more ourselves and actually be producing stuff.

Hopefully by next month’s update we’ll be pretty close on the rest of the mobile work too. Otherwise it’s going to be a long summer.

[gavinbowman]

April - Late, Yikes

Okay, getting a bit behind again with the April round up. Truth be told, April kinda sucked, I didn’t get a lot done, but I did have some progress to show for it.

I’m late because we spent most of last week in Vegas for MAU, a mobile app services focused conference, and I’m only just catching up with myself. I also had to fit in a trip to see Endgame (wow).

MAU was a bit bonkers for us. I feel like we’ve kind of in our head said goodbye to this as our day to day industry, even as we finish up our latest batch of apps. I think we know we made the right call to pivot and that our future probably lies elsewhere. But to have all this physically manifest around you for a few days is quite a trip. It’s impossible to recognize all that as something that grew out of the small one and two man shop mobile app development scene that we came up through, the scale of the companies and the services, and the money floating around is crazy. I’m glad we went, it was a nice break from our desks anyway, and it’s interesting to get a window back into where that whole space is at now.

Back at it though, desperate to give myself something good to write about in the May summary. Cheers!

[gavinbowman]

March - Huh?

Oh boy, I almost forgot to write up March... that’d be a disaster. (Actually it’d be pretty sad for me anyway, I’m on a pretty long streak of posting at least once a month)

I kinda can’t remember anything much happening though, which is kind of depressing. I must have made some progress at some point. I must have done something. But the time has passed anyway and here I still am, still trying to finish stuff, still looking forward to getting started on Monsters & Monocles.

Yep, March is just a mystery. I did spend a bit of time playing Mario Odyssey with the kids, they’re starting to allow me to play and look for new stuff instead of just repeating fun tutorials they like or forcing me to watch them run around, so we’re having fun with it. That’s a nice feeling.

My 360idev talk came online and it doesn’t seem awful. I think I triggered myself a bit by listening back to it, but I think I got over it.

Snuck out to watch Captain Marvel with Craig too. That was amazing. I don’t get to see many movies these days, so it was just nice to get out and enjoy something like that.

And I guess that’s it for March. Holy crap I hope the rest of the year is better than that was.

[gavinbowman]

February - Almost forgotten

Hey, I had family visiting when the calendar flipped over this month so I almost forgot about this. But hey, it’s still early March and I’ve been later before so I’m not going to cry over it.

February mostly continued the trend of recent months. I’m getting on okay-ish. I’m trying to strike a good life balance and that’s hard but important. A big part of me just wants to lock myself in my office until I figure all this shit out and get back on track, but there’s a good chance I’d die or be institutionalized before that happened and even in the best case scenario my kids will be in college wondering what happened to me. So balance it is. And this month I probably spent more time with the kids and family than the work.

But the work is still happening, we will clear this mobile deck soon, get the apps lined up for release, and we’ll get on with trying to wrangle Monsters & Monocles into a finished product. As is customary for me, I’m mostly excited about getting to that next stage, but I already have my eye on starting on new stuff after it’s done, so the greener grass syndrome is obviously never going away. But we have two games to just wrap for mobile releases, one mostly just needs all the store stuff like screenshots and some final testing, and one will hopefully be about there too if we get a good run at it this month.

I feel like a bit of a stuck record, but this stuff all takes so much time when you have life coming at you from all angles too. Getting there.

On the play front, I’ve been playing a little bit still, but Tetris 99 just stomped into the gaming space that Smash was occupying, and I’ve barely looked around since. I picked up Mario Odyssey and grabbed a few moons after one of my kids was running around in it, and I feel like I might stick with that for a while and bump up my moon total, I felt bad last year that I never got back into it after the initial burst.

I think that’s mostly me for now, I’ll be back in a few weeks time to say almost exactly the same thing about March!

[gavinbowman]

Majora’s Mask 3D - 3DS Finished everything I think - about 55 hours, somehow?!

Holy crap this game. I’m so glad I finally made time to play it, it’s so good. Only BotW and Link between worlds compete with it as my favorite Zelda game. I wish I’d started it on a big screen rather than a little 3DS screen, but hopefully that gives me an excuse to run through it again sometime.

The time reset mechanic works extremely well, it’s been really well implemented and thought out so it rarely feels like it’s hindering your progress and the repetition you’re forced into is both minimal and usually streamlined. Usually if I got really stung by it I felt okay about it, I felt like I could have done better, did the same section much faster the next time around, and it was basically like repeating one large section once, not over and over again. And the tension when the time is running out and you’re almost done with something big, but not quite, was very enjoyable tension.

The art and theme and tone of the game is the most bananas I ever remember seeing from Nintendo, especially in a mainline franchise like Zelda. It’s a wonderful weird world to spend time in.

I played it a little too completionisty, so when I fought the final boss I was a bit over powered, I’d like to try that again and savor the challenge a little bit. But I was in cold and I didn’t look stuff up very often I just wandered around aimlessly until I organically got it. It felt great to have things just open up or slot into place around me. It feels like a game that in a pre-internet era was designed for 100% completion, there’s nothing too bonkers or counter intuitive, which is really impressive such a large and interconnected world. I’d have liked to have used some of the masks more often, many of them only had one use but that’s a fairly small regret. As an older guy who always forgets what he’s doing in games these days, the checklist feature is fantastic.

I don’t really follow speed running, but this strikes me as the kind of game that I’d love to play again and again and watch played in different ways to try to optimize the route through.

I think by the time this hit the N64 I was playing Dreamcast games all the time, so I never picked it up back in the day, but playing it now I really wish I had. Totally recommended.

[gavinbowman]

January - Didn’t suck?

Well, that month went by a little bit fast, it doesn’t seem like that long since I wrote my end of 2018 post here. That’s a little bit scary. But in general things are okay. We’re still making progress. Not as much progress as we’d like, but better progress than in previous recent years. All part of the acceptance process I guess. Our lives (with old man health and kids running around) are not the same as when we started down this indie road, and it’s hard to shake the constant urge to assess yourself based on what you’d have got done 10 years ago when you could painlessly and comfortably sit alone in a corner for 12-14 hours a day. Need to update the grading curve. And on the current curve, January was okay.

I like these mobile games we’re finishing, I think the games we release this year will be as good as any we’ve released over the last 10 years, so whatever happens next I feel good about that. And I’m excited to get started on Monsters & Monocles, I’m looking forward to finding the right balance in terms of time and effort and quality to make the best possible version of that game we can without clinging to it until we die, and then I’m excited to actually sit down and plan out something else. And hey, if any external opportunities come up, I’m excited to work with other people and pay some bills and other shit. So it’s a lot of excitement and positive feelings. I just need to get them to come out earlier in the day when I’m sat staring at a code window.

It’s weird to be excited, because by all accounts indie looks rough right now. And we’re 5 years deep into a wild game that we somehow need to wrestle into submission.

I guess I’m just excited because I feel good about what we’re making and what we can make in the future and after the last 4 years or so of drifting and struggling and trying to feel that way again, it’s nice to have it back.

So okay. That’s not as long as some previous months, I guess I don’t have a lot I want to get off my mind, I just don’t want to miss an update and want to figure out how to channel more of my positive energy into effective work energy.

[gavinbowman]

2018. finally.

Oh man that seemed to go on forever.

Glad to be sitting at my desk for the first time in a fresh year again.

Uhh... In work terms last year wasn’t the worst ever. Wait, no, by a bunch of metrics it probably was our worst ever. So what’s the angle here.

Well back in 2014 Craig and I started trying to do something a little different and a little bigger, and then a bunch of stuff happened and now we’re back where we started, but older and less healthy and with more kids. Knowing where we’re at feels like a good thing though. Maybe the fact that that feels like a good thing means the last few years were really bad... I don’t know how to read it. But it feels good either way. Craig and I will make some new games and try to sell them seems like a pretty simple and clear forecast for 2019.

First up we’re finishing a couple of iPhone games. They’re in good shape, December was another month of some kind of half decent progress there. It’ll feel very good to have them out and it’ll give us something relatively fresh to talk about probably for the next six months or so.

As soon as we’re done with those, we’ll get to work finishing Monsters & Monocles. Hopefully that’ll finish this year. If not maybe we’ll throw in another small game or two to keep us sane, but we’re optimistic. It’s going to be a massive challenge for me because I have to pick up a codebase from someone else. Ryan is smart though, so I’m sure it’ll be a much nicer codebase than any of my others. I’m looking forward to it really, it’s a good game. It still needs a lot, but it has a lot of promise and I think if we can actually wrap it up somehow and get to work porting it either later this year or in 2020, then we’ll probably feel like we’ve salvaged something from the last few years.

We didn’t release any new games in 2018. It looks like I did 28 updates to existing games that I don’t remember at all because they were so long ago. But those were all largely simple updates that removed all advertising. We also shut down a bunch of games, probably something like 40. It felt really good by the time I got done with this stuff, around half way through the year. It felt like a fresh start. The legacy stuff that’s still running is relatively buildable for minor fixes or new hardware issues, but it’s effectively done, it’s not significant revenue generating or headache generating, and we’re just moving on. We only have about 20 products on iOS and about 9 or 10 on Google Play, and we have Monsters & Monocles on Steam early access. The only product we have that I sometimes have pangs of regret about cutting loose is Linkoidz on iOS. It just wasn’t in any state to do an easy 64bit update, and it generates no revenue, so I’m trying to let my head overrule my heart on that one.

Aside from that, I travelled a little bit in 2018. I went to MAU in las vegas and had a fun time. I’d probably do that again given the choice. I also went to 360iDev in August as a speaker and gave a fun talk about the last 10 years, which felt kind of cathartic and like a bit more closure on the last decade for me. And we went to a couple of events here in LA, for Magic Leap and Unite. That was fun. I think I’d probably do Unite any time it’s here. We skipped GDC this year (and will probably do the same again in 2019, because we need to get a good run at Monsters & Monocles if we’re going to get anywhere with it). I’m really missing all my friends who I haven’t run into at any other events and I’m hoping we’ll be in good shape to attend in 2020. I also skipped E3 this year because I’d just moved and didn’t feel like figuring out travel or being away from home. I’m planning to be back there this year. It was interesting last year because most of the events I went to I didn’t know a massive amount of people, so I had to be a little more social than usual. This felt like a good thing for me but it was also hard work because I’m not that social at the best of times and I haven’t really felt that great about anything I’ve been doing for a while, which has made me less motivated to engage with people in case they ask me what I do and I start throwing stuff at them or something... but I did feel a little better this year... and the last couple of months especially I feel much better about it, and it’s going to be great to actually be working on Monsters & Monocles and be able to tell people that that’s what I work on and talk about it a bit. Unless they don’t ask, which is also cool because it’s much less stressful getting to hear about what others are doing.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Unless something good comes up that changes our plans, that’s what we’ll be doing this year. And that’s everything that I remember happening in 2018 with me in the work sphere. And Happy New Year, and thanks for reading this stuff, writing it is always helpful to me.