The troubled development continues.

How is it being an indie game developer?

At best it's a dream come true. When you really get into the flow... it's amazing.
Seriously, being inspired and seeing your art and audio combining feels awesome.
















But when the flow breaks it can get "ugly" so to speak. When I first started developing The Human Gallery, everything went smoothly. I remember creating the very first tech demo, and I saw the potential in it. Slowly I started adding more to it and I thought it looked incredible. I was so excited about everything.

I kept working, and it was a time to list on Steam Greenlight. I had a demo for press and YouTubers ready. I did send it out and was so excited to see what would come.

I noticed a few YouTubers playing it and saw that the game looked nothing like it was supposed to. It was squeezed and flickered way too much. I had to ask a few YouTubers to take down the videos, it was a painful thing to do. I felt horrible! I also instantly pulled the demo offline, meaning that the press and various YouTubers couldn't get it anymore.

Ouch, I had just started my Greenlight campaign back then, what a blow!
Well, even when THG didn't get a lot of attention, it still got Greenlit in just a week! That was extremely encouraging and I could rest for a while. I knew the potential is there.

I started looking what was causing the bug and found out it was my code with one of the shaders that took care of the aspect ratio. Well, I fixed it only to notice it broke something else. This went on for a few months! Seriously, it was driving me nuts. Good bye inspiration!


I had to make a decision, I would pause the development of The Human Gallery. Since I'm coding my game with Fusion 2.5 I did report the bugs and limitations I found for the developers of the Fusion 2.5. While I would work on something else, something a lot more simpler, hopefully they would fix these bugs.

That's when I started creating DISTRAINT. And damn I absolutely loved making that game! It was so easy, the art-style, the code... everything was so smooth it was incredible. Though towards the end I had a little stress as the time was running out, but I managed to do it in time.

After releasing DISTRAINT I took some time off from the development. A little while ago, I thought it would be time to pick up The Human Gallery again. I checked if the bugs I had reported earlier had been fixed and those were! Awesome, no more crashes or problems with the aspect ratio. I was excited!

I updated some of the code and decided to give THG demo a go on my wife's gaming laptop. I was excited to see its performance as THG is not the lightest of games.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The performance was great, smooth 60fps, but the game was all messed up. The intro looked all bugged, it was filled with graphical bugs... Oh my not again.... This seems to happen with specific Nvidia cards, GTX 960m, GTX 750 etc.

This is a tough one. I don't know what causes this. It can be a problem with Fusion, shaders or even specific Nvidia cards (drivers). What I know for sure is that my code is not to blame here and that the development didn't pick up as I had hoped. This is highly frustrating as you can imagine. I've been fighting more with the problems than I've been able to develop the actual game! Well, I'll try to figure out where the problem lies this time.

One thing is sure though, I won't develop the game any further before this has been solved!

But yeah, being an indie game developer is awesome, but at times it can get extremely tricky and frustrating, especially if you're creating something ambitious! :)