I've been neglecting this thread a bit, my apologies... alright, here we go!
How do you guys balance work/study/game development/free time?
Well, work == game development. Study, I'm not in school anymore
Free time is mostly game development, too. Generally speaking I'll just work until I feel like I'm starting to burn out then dial it back. Used to be more of an issue until I got a little better at gauging it - it's pretty bad to
actually burn out and takes a lot longer to recover.
How many copies of the game have been sold at this point? Is it still being sold at a steady rate, or have things slowed down since you first launched the alpha?
Wasn't it like 15,000? I think he said 14,500 though, but i'm not entirely sure.
It's up to around 20,000 copies at this point.
Sometime far in the future when the team has moved on to other projects, would you consider releasing the source code for the community to maintain?
Like Star Control 2 and Freespace, I see this as a game I will still be playing a long time from now, and it would be a shame if it ended up incompatible with a later hardware/OS update.
Consider it? Definitely. Can't say what my decision would ultimately be, but at the moment I can't think of any objections to doing it way down the line. Aside from typical "oh noes my precious code" dev paranoia.
Hello, I wanted to know how it looks for you financially. Do you have enough resources to finish the game? Maybe more? I'm just interested. If you don't want to answer that's okay.
(translated with Google Gothars)
(original)
Spoiler
Hallo ich wollte wissen wie es den finanziell mit euch aussieht. Habt ihr genug ressourcen um das spiel fertig zu stellen? Vieleicht mehr ? Es interessiert mich nur. Wen ihr keine antwort geben wollt ist das okay.
Hello! (I wonder if you'll end up checking this thread so far after the fact, but...) It looks pretty good, so I don't anticipate any problems on that front.
Say Alex, what do you use to keep track of all the possible implications a new mechanic has, all the potential interference? The new blogpost was a lot about how you tried to avoid all kinds of abuse, how certain mechanics encourage or discourage certain behaviors. To leave no gaps there, and you don't seem to have, is quite impressive.
Is that just something you juggle around in your head? Do you make diagrams? Or is there some other method?
If it's something more complex, I'll end up either making lists of concerns that need to be addressed (and cross-checking a solution against it), or perhaps drawing some stuff (with actual pen and paper). So, mostly it's just thinking about stuff, with writing stuff down to make sure I don't forget about something. The non-pen-and-paper stuff goes into something that could loosely be called a "design document" that also contains the motivations for doing things a certain way - it's handy to look over while thinking things through. There's probably been upwards of 20 of these for various features.
Another thing that works well for me is, after coming up with a ruleset, to pretend to play it. That tends to expose any potential abuses pretty quick. Even so, it takes lots of iteration to get something into good shape, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's still some room for abuse in that particular design.
