Finding time after funding

I promised I wouldn’t put myself into this position.

Don’t worry I thought, you can always find a bit of time to scribble a few thoughts down in a blog post and keep the shop-front open. Well that all went to pot once the Kickstarter campaign launched. This is the first blog post in four months!

We funded successfully, did I mention that? Probably not. I’ve been a bit distracted of late. Yes, WE DID IT! We absolutely smashed our Kickstarter goal and even hit our first three stretch goals too.

This gave us the funds we need to complete Lucy Dreaming to a good standard, add voice overs, publish on mobile platforms and even translate the whole game into German too.

Woohoo!

Preparing for, and running, a Kickstarter campaign from scratch is hard HARD work, especially when you don’t have an existing brand or fan-base to start from. I spent hours and hours on social media making sure I personally engaged and replied to absolutely everyone who showed their interest and support for the game (and even a few who didn’t).

In the end, this tenacity paid off and we were able get stuck into the development.

Then I burnt out slightly.

I took a few days off to be with my family (you know, those people I had just been saying “Uh huh…Mm hmm.” to while I feverishly tapped away on one of the seemingly endless number of messaging apps I had immersed myself in).

After that, I fleshed out the game’s narrative into an order that made a bit more sense to me (things had occurred to me throughout the campaign and various interviews that I wanted to apply to the final game), and then started getting the nuts and bolts of the publishing and UI sorted out.

This involved setting up an Apple developer account and figuring out the process for publishing the demo onto iOS in preparation for the mobile porting that was coming.

I also worked on integrating gamepad support for the game because, well, you never know!

I have also built the UI for the full game in all of the languages I am hoping to publish in the future. These have not been funded via Kickstarter, but I want to make the transition as easy for myself as possible when the time comes.

The other thing that I wanted to sort out was the music. I have now chosen a composer who I am confident can capture the atmosphere and tone of the game, and we have also agreed to provide some additional music settings in the game which allow players to choose between Adlib Sound Blaster, and a Roland MT-32 style music.

Since then, we’ve been working on the numerous puzzles, scenes and characters that will appear in the game. I will post about those separately.

Tom x