Feeling stuck.. [some 4am thoughts]

The development of Tales of Akash 10 started off quite nicely. I wasn't really going to program a sequel but something in me kept going.

Going commercial with Tales of Akash 9 v. 1.0.3 was a major leap, as now I feel obliged to continue creating content for the game project. I might still release a free version for testing and offer a support pack with extras. Currently the game is in ver. 1.1.0 but there hasn't been any sales. Maybe people are just happy playing the free ver. 1.0.2 or something.

I have some very preliminary statistics of how the game succeeded (or didn't). First of all there was this sudden surge of visitors to my site after hinting the commercial version. I reckon most of these came from the Indie Game Devs-group from Facebook, but as to how they found my site is another question as I didn't link it.

Mainly using this blog as a platform to release updates and announcing releases, I tried making a modest FB ad but my payment info got declined, bummer. Last time when I was using the ads I got the payment through and the Meta Advance+ or something was in full motion, driving traffic to my debut album (albeit free, but I saw it as a chance to get booked).

I've been very pleased with Meta Ads as they offer something traditional advertising doesn't, and that is optimizing the ad for certain age groups for example. Although I'm under the impression older people tend to read more newspapers and watch the TV, but it does come with it's downside and that is the cost and using a marketing agency. Of course people who have worked in marketing know that the ad air-time can be used to fine-tune it to the target audience, say people working 9-5 watch the TV after 6pm or so.

I met this former DJ and co-worker I've been doing shows with, and after all these years he told me he has a degree in marketing. Very interesting, I thought. I might consult him in the future, not in a serious, professional manner but just to ask a few questions in case I happen to meet him in person.

So, high on caffeine and cigarettes I'm arming myself for the day with this rather stream-of-thought blog post. I'm most likely going to work on the game, I was very happy with what I put together yesterday but now I feel like the project is going nowhere. I don't even have any interesting images to post, just bits of code that have been added as modules which are boring to even look at.

I can't really stress how effective the tools of the today are. Back in the mid-2000's Borland C-compiler was proprietary (never bought it though) and these days you can download Visual Studio Code and GIMP for free and get coding&designing with all the features people couldn't even dream about.

But writing this makes me feel old. I noticed something and that was a Reddit post in r/heroes3. In case you didn't know Heroes of Might and Magic 3 was one of my favourite games when I was young. I was absolutely compelled to see the scenery, the depths of the Underworld and all the fancy units of the different races.

HoMM3 is a turn-based strategy game with RPG (role-playing game) elements. It's a very vast game and I'm not sure whether it's suited to people as a young as I was but I did do pretty well in the game. Or maybe I was just high on sweets or something. Anyway, I'm looking to implement some of the mechanics from Heroes 3 to my dungeon crawler, as per my last blog post.

One thing I noticed about the game is that it's insanely difficult. Maybe the patched Complete edition I bought from GOG.com has been altered in some way, after all it's been 25 years since I played the game. Other than that the familiar weapon prefix/name/suffix/tier-system in my RPG is in part copied from Diablo II. Most of the game is what you'd expect to see in a classic like Dungeon Master, but mentioning my game with all these masterpieces is somewhat whack and I feel like I'm just name-dropping.

Well, most of the game is about, or at least rewards, advancing aggressively into the enemy/uncharted territory and capturing castles but I usually take a more sophisticated and careful approach, which is probably why I keep losing. Someone had this theory and it stated that young people tend to take more risks.

So yeah, the troop thing is what's bugging me at the moment. It works fine and all, but I feel like the project is going in the wrong direction. The post on r/dungeoncrawler got some attention but didn't really drive any traffic. What makes it even more difficult to read the statistics is that my music projects are on this site as well. After releasing ten or so singles the visitor count from Facebook saw a whopping 3,100% rise, not something I was expecting. I'm still trying to figure out the nuances of the Wix dashboard and all the marketing tools.

Then again I do feel like spamming social media blindfolded, hoping to make it one day. Maybe it's just part of the process, who knows. After all there's no right or wrong way, I guess.

Another thing is I keep spreadsheets of nearly everything that's going on in my business. Livestream viewing or social media in general is either no longer in vogue or my advertising has failed miserably. The thing is I didn't even advertise, as Instagram removed the direct linking to livestreams, which is a bad thing. That, or maybe I'm just getting old. One idea was to create an online event or make a flyer but that too can be sort of intimidating and knowing myself I don't have the discipline to be on air at the golden hour.

I thought I'd put up a screenshot of the current state of the sequel. Well, it's all written in Python and no matter how readable the syntax is even a seasoned programmer wouldn't probably catch my drift.

A teaser of the world map with added emblems for troops

The world map looks sort of crude but I may do some minor adjustments to it. Added is now emblems for troops, the spear represents Human Pikemen, whereas the bow & arrow means Elven Rangers, and the axe is for Dwarven Axemen. I've been implementing this mechanic in the game, as well as the aforementioned chakra system.

It's very slow because there's a lot of code in the game. I may even have to up the level cap to 6 or something because the game world is much larger than the previous game (from which I copy&pasted the source code and modules, so it's basically the same engine, only revamped).

But, this draft has been on my blog folder for a couple of days now but it's still relevant. Let me know what you think in the comments!

-ef