So I pretty much figured 1000 followers by the 6th wasn’t going to happen. However I was amazed by the number of followers I did in fact gain and mostly the amount of coverage and positive comments that appeared around the net as a result.
The demo will be released.
Just not today.
The problem is that the IndieDB competition pretty much came out of left field and left me nowhere near enough time to turn Waves into a viable public demo (mostly due to the additional UI work required). I was able to scrape the game together into something I could send to the judges but I wouldn’t feel right releasing the game in it’s current state as a demo for the public (The most important judges of all).
My current problem is that my Flash trial has run out and this being my first indie game I don’t have enough cash on hand to pay for a license. Not that paying for a license would magically make me a good UI designer or capable of achieving anything better than “Functional” in appearance.
I’m hoping to improve the UI in the next week or so but the demo may have to wait until after Christmas depending on how things pan out.
There is also the fact that when I was writing the “How To Play” for the judges I even started to confuse myself so I need to do something about that as well.
Extra special thanks go out to the 50 or so people who followed me on Twitter and to everybody who joined the Facebook page and subscribed on Youtube.
Anyway here are some screenshots of various bits for you to entertain yourself with.
Flash for UI …
Why the heck did you decide to do THAT?
NEVER would I, personally, decide to do that.
Probably because UDK makes it easy to integrate flash?
AFAIK there’s also free flash editors out there. Not with all the newest flash-features yet, but you probably don’t need those anyway.
Maybe you wanna give a search a shot?
Another question:
It currently requires a (xbox) controller?
Did you think about alternative inputs, like Keyboard?
You might notice that the controls screen includes a controller and mouse and keyboard controls.
And yes I’m using Flash (well Scaleform really) for the UI because UDK has 2 options for the UI: Flash or making something yourself. The second option is more work and has worse performance. I’m going to try and outsource the UI to somebody who is actually good at this stuff at which point using Flash becomes a pretty big benefit.
Forgin my ignorance, but is the Flash License for Flash Builder? If so is there any reason you can’t use FlashDevelop?
My knowledge of Flash can be contained in small thimble. The Scaleform tools are designed for Flash Professional and there is actually very little actionscript involved in making the UI (it’s mostly visual stuff) and so far I don’t think anybody has gotten a good Scaleform development environment setup in FlashDevelop.
EDIT: I have since discovered that SoThink SWF Quicker should work with Scaleform quite nicely and is only $85 which is inside my budget. I may yet be able to get the menus working with the control pad at least.