Kings’ Corners is the third game application that I have released to the iTunes App Store. Before Kings’ Corners the games that I had released were mainly casual indie titles that no one cared about except maybe a couple human beings: my girlfriend and my mom. No animals were reported to have liked these games.
The difference in creating a game independently versus doing it through a company is that when I do it for a company, it isn’t just for me, and the solutions and issues that I face can’t just be solved in any way that I see fit. Dramatic, involved code shifts and changes must go through the process of scrutiny and analysis, which means no more working in my underwear.
This is something I definitely was not used to – I had become accustomed to waking up at 4am, heading to the computer completely naked to sit on a cold soft chair to knock together some code in order to fix a problem.
The benefit of developing a game independently is the freedom involved in working by yourself. The downsides to this freedom are (1) the potential lack of self-discipline, and (2) the missing external scrutiny that comes with others overlooking what you’re doing and spotting areas in which you can improve your work.
Often you require more eyes than your own two (I’m assuming you’re human) to give you enough perspective necessary to tell you that what you just coded is akin to a long-time heroin addict’s thought processes.
My process in building this game included
- Writing up a plan
- Not sticking to it
- Realizing that I should’ve stuck to it
- Sticking to it
- Separating the code as much as possible in order to maintain some sort of coherence, simplicity and readability (i.e keeping things easy to update)
- Thinking that I can put a little less effort into keeping things easy to update because I probably won’t have to do too much updating
- Being asked to update consistently
- Having to go back and make sure the code is easy to update
This process went on and on and on, until Kings’ Corners eventually appeared after 16 weeks, fully formed and ready to touch (like a newborn baby’s skull, if such a thing cost $1.99).
Overall the process was very fun, exciting and involved, and I definitely learned a lot from the entire experience.
