UIBuzz - Software and game development

Peter: 00:00

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the UIBuzz podcast. I'm your host as always, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwitham.com. This episode is a catch up.

Peter: 00:10

It's been a while. I've been crazy busy as always. I'm sure many of you have, what with the summer and everything else. And here I am in Texas, and it's crazy hot in the summer as always. And you just never feel like doing anything.

Peter: 00:24

This has been a problem for me because even though you're inside and it's air conditioned, you know outside it's crazy hot and at some point you've got to go out there. But I've been combating that by just creating little things for myself to work on. And something that I've got a new interest in is just creating projects to explore a concept. And in particular with game development, but with app development as well. And I'm going to talk about that a little bit here.

Peter: 00:55

And I'll probably be doing some live streams on this. For example, I've spoken about this before. I love idle games and those kind of progressive games. A common thing in those games is you control a character and things move towards your character and you do something, right? Maybe you shoot them or you gather up things or whatever it may be.

Peter: 01:18

But the idea is that you are moving around and you need to detect where the player is and have an object constantly rotating and moving towards the player. And then of course when it gets to the player it's got to disappear. And that's what I mean by kind of some of these looking at some of these mechanics and saying, how do you do that? Let's just make something to do that. And not only has it worked out great for livestreams, but it's also worked out great for just building up a folder of projects that are these concepts, these ways of doing things that I can just refer back to when I need to rather than, you know, I must make a game and it has to be a full game and now I gotta make these mechanics.

Peter: 02:05

And this has turned out to be a good development exercise and it's turned out to be really thought provoking because I'm sure we've all seen an app or game and we've said to ourselves, how did they do whatever it may be? And this is a great way to go and do that and to figure it out and to answer that question and learn from it or maybe develop multiple ways of doing it so you've got options without having to feel like you have to come up with the complete project. And I think this is working out really great for me. If it's not something you've thought about before, I'm going to recommend it, right? Because I'm sure we all have, I know I do, those folders full of untitled project 52, whatever it may be.

Peter: 02:55

And this might be a good way of turning that around and making them useful by just making it a project that solves one problem. And then later on, if you plan it right, maybe if you do it as a class or struct or whatever it may be, you may be able to take that code and then apply that to whatever project you're working on that needs it. Maybe it's a sorting algorithm or something like that. And so it's also a great way of building up a library of reference items that you can use for other things. So that's one of the things I've been doing.

Peter: 03:31

The other one is I just flat out refuse to quit on my projecthack.net game. And I'm laughing to myself as I say that because the amount of times I've said, Nobody's playing this game, Peter. Stop doing it. Stop working on it. And yet I can't do that because I play it myself and I love playing it and I still believe in it.

Peter: 03:57

So I took the step to basically prove this one way or the other. And I removed it from itch.io and everywhere else. The game now is in production with a decent back end that I'm paying for, so it does cost me. So if you want to buy me a coffee to help support the game and other content, that would be awesome, right? Peterwidom.com/bmc You don't have to, but it would certainly help because these costs add up quickly.

Peter: 04:27

But I've put it on projecthack.net. So if you go to projecthack.net, not only did I do a major revamp of the website as a motivational thing for me, but also to bring it more in line with the look and feel of the game. But you can go there and you can also go to projecthack.net/game and play the game. It is what I'm calling fully production released. There is a lot more I want to do still, a lot of content and things like that.

Peter: 04:57

But I figured, look, I'm just going to put it out there and call it production done and see what happens. Not to say it's complete, but to stop pretending like it's a beta or pre release or something like that and to just put it out there. Because I'll be honest with you, other than a couple of test players, nobody's playing the game. And it's really depressing. But I love playing it myself.

Peter: 05:23

That's kind of the problem. And it's a great problem to have because it means I'm always working on it. But it's also sad because there are player versus player aspects that need other players, right? So anyway, I put that out there and I've got another major update with missions and everything else coming soon. But this is my way of saying to you, at some point, you just gotta put it there and say, okay, you know what?

Peter: 05:50

Enough screwing around. Prove it to yourself one way or the other and make a decision. Now, of course, putting it on my website where hardly anybody goes is not the greatest publicity in the world. But at the same time, I don't want to pay the $100 to put it on Steam where I probably would get hopefully at least a few players. But it also means at that point, my cost of running this game has gone up even more and it's far from complete.

Peter: 06:22

So I don't want those reviews that it's like, hey, look, this is crap. There's hardly anything in it. Or it's only good up to a certain point and then there's nothing else, right? It's very difficult. Anyone who's ever made games will tell you is when it comes to the content and things like that, it's very difficult to know when there's enough that you say, I can release this and it'll be good for maybe six months.

Peter: 06:48

And then that buys me time to put more details in and more content. That's very tough. And the way that I've done this one right now, because it runs on the web, I can instantly update it with content. Like I say, I'm adding this missions feature now, and I can just edit the models and add some data and away it goes and add new features without having to push client app updates. You can play it on any device, any platform because it's on the web.

Peter: 07:15

And I feel like this is the best way for me to see if anybody is going to play this hacking game. And if nobody does, okay, we'll figure out whether this is enough to keep me happy just playing it by myself and having to pay the cost every month to host the database on the back end, or whether I should just go a different route and just face the reality that it's total failure, which would be terrible. But that's what I've got here. A couple of things for you to think about. I'm sure you've been wondering where I've been at.

Peter: 07:49

And yeah, I've just been super busy so much with the day job and life things. And then on top of that, like I say, the summer being 100 degrees plus, every day you just get to a point where you're like, Oh, I don't want to have to now sit down in the studio and record something. But at the same time, like everything else, I love doing these podcasts and I wanted to get one out. But I didn't want it to be just useless crap. I don't know, maybe it is.

Peter: 08:19

Let me know in the comments. You never know. But I will be focusing more on some of these. And like I say, I'm going to do these live streams. Maybe they'll turn into YouTube videos.

Peter: 08:29

Maybe they'll turn into podcast episodes with lessons learned and tips or whatever on these techniques and these concepts. But I am still active, still putting it all out there. And it's just been publicly quiet for me for a little while because I needed that space to just organize some things. So I hope you appreciate that the episodes have not been as regular as they normally would be. That's it folks.

Peter: 08:56

Reach out to me, peterwitham dot com slash contact, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Of course, I would massively appreciate it if you feel like you want to play a hacking game or sort of a progressive idle type game, and you go to projecthack.net and try it out. Of course, I would be immensely grateful if you would buy me a coffee, peterwitham.com/bmc, just to say, you know what, dude? Keep going. You got this.

Peter: 09:25

Keep pumping out all the different content. It means the world when folks do that. And I just really truly appreciate all of you that have. Thank you so much. Just those few extra dollars is enough to say keep doing what you're doing, dude.

Peter: 09:41

It really helps. That's it. Have a great one. Speak to you next time.