Dream | Gamedev Brain

Games Are a No Brainer

Posted on August 17, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’ve heard it over and over again, business is hard. I think peoples definition of hard is really the problem here. Business is easy to succeed in. Trust me. It’s not hard, just be smart and start something that a place needs based on a places needs, not on your love for the thing you are starting. If you do that then you have a successful business.

If you just say I love knitting scarfs. Then take that love and just open up a shop for knitted scarfs near you. You are bound to fail. Why? because you had no business thoughts that lead you to open that shop, just love and passion for the knitting of scarfs. I know you love it, but it still won’t make a terrible idea work.

The cool thing about game development is that it is location less. It is entertainment and it can be priced well for global sales. Gamed development is also a nice production model as well. You can make a great game for very little money and produce copies of that game, for nearly free, forever. The math works out great. The only things you have to do is execute a game and get it to release. That is the part that is harder. Remember business isn’t hard, it’s just work, and it takes some thought.

If you have not seen the game I am a part of here are a few links…

Facebook – Like us on facebook

ViolentSol.com – Homepage

IndieDB – Indie Games Community with news, screenshots, and video

Why Work Hard?

Posted on August 14, 2015 by magicrat_larry

What comes out of hard work? I wondered this years ago and never really answered it. Hard work in itself gives you nothing. It is not something that by itself makes anything happen. You have to be smart about what you are working hard on. With the correct focus hard work can make great things.

How you choose what to focus on is the key to success and the American Dream. Choose wisely and you will never be disappointed. Don’t listen to people. You don’t have to work hard on something you love either. What? Why would you do that? You can work hard on a smart idea that is not something you love and be successful at it. Hard work gets you that. The key to being happy though is to find something you like more that is still smart.

You cannot just work hard at the thing you love and expect great success. The fact is the thing you love is probably dumb to work hard at for business success. Find the next best thing that makes good sense and go for it. I’m lucky, the one thing I love to do is make games, and here I am making one and it makes sense for business success.

If you have not seen the game I am a part of here are a few links…

Facebook – Like us on facebook

ViolentSol.com – Homepage

IndieDB – Indie Games Community with news, screenshots, and video

Once You start You Just Can’t Stop

Posted on August 10, 2015 by magicrat_larry

You know you are having fun when you cannot stop. I’ve been going at game development for over 2 years now every day. I’ve worked probably 50-60 hours a week for that time, combining my day job and my game development “hobby”. That is a long time to have that work load.

I’m starting to feel it now, but I just can’t stop. It’s the, “just one more thing”, problem with an addictive thing you love to do. The Civilization of life. I love developing games, and I am seeing that I love developing a game studio just as much. Seeing something come out of nothing is a great experience and you all are making it that much easier.

There are awesome things coming from us in the near future so stay tuned and enjoy it as much as I am.

If you have not seen the game I am a part of here are a few links…

Facebook – Like us on facebook 🙂

ViolentSol.com – Homepage

IndieDB – Indie Games Community with news, screenshots, and video

Do You Love Me?

Posted on August 8, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’m throwing it out there…

Do you love me? lol, This is crazy, we just met. Making this game is fun. It’s like you are falling in love every day, but just with a product, a dream, a vision, and the people who enjoy it. What a journey this has been.

OST Indie Games started off by making a game-play demo for a space agency tycoon game. It should be a cool game whenever we get to it. We then made a twist to a game called “Goobers”. It was a light game with a shallow story about an alien guy. We worked on a game engine for a long time and finished that up relatively recently. We had a few more twists and turns and ended up shelving that project and started looking at a project we called “Worlds End”.

That project was ambitious, so we narrowed it down to a top-down survival sci-fi game. It was not too exciting until the time when I was writing the proof of concept for the shooting mechanic and was throwing together art, but could not get a head to look right for the character. So I just threw on a cowboy hat. From then on I was in love. We switched his gun to be a laser pistol and even more love was there.

To me the cowboy hat, made me love the game you are seeing today, Violent Sol Worlds, It turned it from a crash landing survival game on a planet, to you are an early settler on a distant planet helping spread the human race across the galaxy. We all started to run with it. It was amazing how quickly things came together from that point on when love was involved.

Love makes everything easier, marketing flows, work just gets done, and magic seems to happen. I hope you love Violent Sol Worlds even a portion as much as we do. It is a great game to work on and we cannot wait to get it in your hands to play. It will be an even longer journey to get there but our team is ready for it. When you love what you do, you can’t help but do it.

If you have not seen the game I am a part of here are a few links…

Facebook – Like us on facebook

ViolentSol.com – Homepage

IndieDB – Indie Games Community with news, screenshots, and video

You, Yes You, Never Stop Amazing Me

Posted on August 3, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I used to get up as an indie game developer and start coding my game. Now I get up and start marketing my game. When did that happen? When did marketing win as the leading task of the day? Seems like it was a smooth transition because I did not notice it until now. I think the community might have fueled the move though.

Let me explain. I get some awesome responses from people about our game that is in development – Violent Sol Worlds. I think that feeds the want for my brain to get more, so I have slowly turned into a marketer first and a programmer second. Never in a million years would I have seen that coming. It is wonderful though.

Before now, my interactions with people over the internet has been basically them yelling at me about my mother. You know, the XBOX live crowd. But now that we are building a community around a title we all love and want to see built the interactions are much more loving. I truly hope we keep this up and you all keep motivation high for me to keep engaging on this level.

All your praises, follows, and general encouragement have been amazing. You all blow me away, and make me feel like I can do anything, even knock out a shark.

If you have not seen our game – Violent Sol Worlds check it out.

Life Is Hard

Posted on July 29, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’m writing this during the middle of the day. Why you ask? Because life is hard. See I had to change my daily schedule due to the difficult nature of life. It happens. I get it. What I hate the most is when this stuff makes people truly believe that the world is almost too hard to succeed in.

There are two types of people that think life is hard. The first is the “Life is so hard, I can hardly stand it” person and the second is the “Normally life is easy, but I make my life more difficult because I interact with the world” person. I am the second person. If I wanted to I could lay back and have a simple life. I have a good job, a great family and I generally enjoy everything about my days.

I personally hate that, oo life is good, feeling and always push myself, and the world to the next level and feel satisfied doing it. So The other people, sit around waiting for an excuse to explain why they do not do anything other than what they do today. I hate that. Don’t be one of those people, please!

Do something that is hard. Make life hard. I took my normal life and said I need to do more with it. So I started fitting more and more in and now it is bursting at the seems. Not because life is hard, but because I choose the difficulty level. I choose to be a game developer chasing a dream after work. I choose to play with my child whenever I can. I choose to get up early and sleep less. I choose how difficult my life is and my life is hard and I love it.

What’s Your Game Development Dream?

Posted on July 28, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I had a nice conversation of Twitter yesterday with @berit_anderson, yeah I’m calling you out. In that conversation I was asked the following questions, “What is my gamedev dream?”, and “What would be an ideal setup for you?” Let me attack each one of those this morning.

What is my gamedev Dream?

Well to begin with, it is on my bucket list, actually the final item on it, to create a game and sell it to at least one person I do not know. Sounds dumb, but it’s a dream. Starting with that I think it has evolved from there. I am a computer programmer by trade, so I spend my days coding to save companies money. It’s not terrible, it is kind of fun usually. In the end though I am working for companies and providing value to an entity that is not a living breathing person, so I am changing the lives of people through proxy of the company I happen to be coding for.

What I believe games are is a means for me to directly change peoples lives without a proxy. In games people feel emotions, and generally get happier. What a better way to spend the last portion of my career, fulfilling my bucket list and making the world a happier place, one game at a time.

What is my ideal setup?

I have already done business before, so I really don’t want to do it again. What I want is my current job to turn into game development. I work for an amazing company OST and they have showed interest in creating games after Aaron, my partner in crime, and I told them “They have a game development company, they just don’t know it yet.”

So Ideally, we work for OST full-time on games. Right now we are in the attempt to prove to them that we are not nuts, that there is money in it, and we are the right people to attract that money by making great games.

Conclusion

I want to make games, to make peoples lives better. I do not want to be the accountant of a games company. I want to concentrate on making high quality games that people will enjoy for years. So I work my butt off trying to make that happen, daily.

If you have not seem our project on IndieDB yet, here is my shameless plug – Violent Sol – Worlds