A day of a developer

Good day!

My wife suggested that I should write about my normal working day. I thought why not, could be interesting to some!

So, I wake up in the morning around 8-9 am, depending how long our kids are sleeping. This in summer time when they are not in the daycare. It's around hour or two earlier otherwise. Needless to say that is great, I get to sleep very well! So that's a huge plus being indie developer.

Alright, so, we wake up, the whole family. Me, my wife, my boy and my girl. And the dog, let's not forget the dog. She usually waits when I get up and so does she! Cute thing.

Once we are up we head to kitchen for some breakfast, well kids do. I settle for a large cup of damn good coffee. We eat and drink our coffees, it's one of my favorite moments of the day!


Once my cup is empty I'm starting to actually wake up which is good. After that I'll take the dog out.

It's around 10 am now, everything is set and my day can begin. I fetch myself a big glass of cold water, it's good to drink a lot. I noticed having some headaches before I started drinking more water, so, drink water people. It will do you good!

I sit down to my computer chair. This one:

Yeah... I will toss it and get a new one. I will at some point, it's killing my back anyways.

Alright, I begin my daily "check-round" which includes my emails, Twitter, Facebook. Google, Steam page, and my Steam statistic page to see how many copies I've sold. If Silence of the Sleep is not on sale then it's usually 0. Sometimes I get lucky and it has sold a few copies! Sounds a bit depressing but worry not, it sells okay when it's on sale so I can pay the rent!

Depending if anything is up I'll try my best to reply to emails and to community. This takes some time and focus too! So it's not like I wake up and start working, there are lots to do before that.

Once I have completed my so called "check-round" I can finally start developing.

Okay, being one-man-band I need to figure what to do. Will it be graphics, writing, audio design, music, coding or marketing? At times it feels overwhelming and I can't focus on anything. I try to pull my head together to get something done, but no matter what I do it's not quite "there". That easily leads to frustration and can really ruin the day. In these situations I just gotta keep my head cool and take the rest of the day off. If only it was that easy...!

Phew! Gladly that does not happen every day!
So when it doesn't I usually boot up the Fusion 2.5 (the software I code my game with), open The Human Gallery and see how it feels. Maybe it's missing audio, so I could compose, or maybe the background feels a bit barren so I could start painting props. Maybe I have scenario in mind and I'll start designing it further.

It's never quite the same. For example today, I did some monster design and code for it, tried to see how it would look in game. But I've been staring at it for too long so it's starting to look a bit distracting. I hate that feeling, is it any good...? "NO! That's horrible!" "Nah, that's actually pretty cool!" You know, one thing can look in so many different ways if you stare it for too long. So I thought I'll take a break from it and try to continue composing a theme song for a certain character. That worked out beautifully! I love the song! It's really my favorite part of the development: Composing.

Alright... what could I do next?
Tried lots of different stuff but nothing felt smooth. Trying to think if I could market the game, but I really don't want to show some of the stuff just yet. Argh! It's only around 1 pm, I need to do something!

Now that a small frustration is starting to grow it's worth mentioning that it does not help if the kids are at home as they can be quite noisy, trust me! That's easily one of the best ways to take away the focus. Usually I try listening to some music while working, but that's not ideal neither. Better than the noise though! :)

But hey! It's quiet now, so I fool around a bit, trying to do a bit this and that but nothing really comes together. So I thought I'll start writing a blog, so here I am typing my thoughts.

It's around 1 pm, usually around these times I'll take a coffee break, and if my wife is at home she asks if I want to eat something. I might or might not eat, but the coffee is good! I love eating, but I usually keep to it and then the food tastes even better. Not sure if it's healthy though, but works for me.

After the coffee break I get back to working, the usual stuff. Depending how smoothly everything goes I might work till the evening, or quit a bit early.

This is pretty much my normal day. I like what I'm doing, but it is by no means easy. It's the mental side that is the most difficult. You have no guarantee that the game will success, no guarantee of the income. You just need to blindly trust that what you're doing is worth, that the prize will be there in the end. But when you develop your game for... 1½ - 2 years, well, it is quite a long wait.

And even still I would not want to do anything else!

Graphics production

Hello readers! If there are any.

Long time, sorry!
Had a small "burnout" or something like that. Gladly nothing too serious.

Aaaanyways, back to business. Someone asked about graphics a little while ago. I thought I could write a little bit about the subject. So, today I'm going to share some of my SUPER-SECRET working methods!

Okay, I was already done with my graphic asset when I figured: "Oh darn, I could have taken some screenshots for the blog" So the "making of" is not perfect but should give the idea of my methods.


THE BOOTH?

I need this... what do you call it... restaurant booth? Not sure that is correct. Anyways, since it would be quite symmetric I thought I'll use Adobe Illustrator for the shape. This is totally optional, you can do this in Photoshop or even Paint. I decided to go with Illustrator for that so this is what I made:

Alright so there you can see the booth, the one you sit at, right? Does not look much yet, so I'll just copy and take it over to Photoshop. I would make the body wooden and the cushion would be fabric.

I select the center part and apply a pattern to it. Here I'm using my own wood pattern/texture.

TIP: Take your time to create amazing textures/patterns, I use them A LOT so it will reflect how your assets are going to look.

Okay it should look somewhat like this:

I think the texture is a bit too dark and has too much contrast in this case so once I apply the pattern I rasterize the layer and open the levels editor (ctrl+l). I adjust it a bit to make it not stand out too much. After I'm happy with the contrast I open the layer style panel and add a small inner shadow to it.

Once I'm done I repeat the steps for the wooden part at the bottom, but I'll make it horizontal instead of vertical.

Okay that's done! Let's move to so called cushion part of my beautiful to be booth.
I select the red area and apply a gradient to it:

After that I rasterize the layer again. (I know it's not very common practice and I usually avoid rasterizing. But if you know what you're doing then it's fine. I always keep a backup of my base assets so I won't alter them.) Or do I? Mmmm....

But let us continue!
It looks a bit... lifeless don't you think? It needs something, maybe a soft base-texture would liven it up a little? To do so I open the layer style panel again, go to "Pattern Overlay" and choose something that looks like a fabric. Photoshop has some cool default patterns, I'm using one of those here for the base. I select the pattern, drop it's opacity to around 40% and set the"Blend Mode" to "Color Dodge" and it looks something like this:

It is starting to shape up! Though it still needs something, really does.

By now you might figure what to do next: Rasterize and open the layer style panel again. It's time for round two. Add a small subtle "Inner Shadow" and select the "Pattern Overlay" again. I use my custom texture here, it gives this dirty feel to it. I want it to be subtle though so I play with opacity and try various blend modes.

This is how it looks now:

Not bad!
Since I'm going to keep this rather simple I'm not going to brush more details to it. This will appear in the background so I don't want it to bee too detailed... excuses! :D

Okay, let's give it some color. You can create adjustment layer or just bring up the "Color Balance" panel and start tweaking. In my current world, I create all the assets gray-scale and color them in game with colored mist and lights. Though in this case I want to have a little color for the cushion. So I pop up the "Color Balance" and start tweaking the colors.

Once I'm happy with the colors I might want to sharpen the asset a little bit. You can do this by going Filter -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen...

I don't use it always though, and be careful if you use it. It's a good way to ruin your assets making them too sharp. Usually it's a good idea to stay somewhere between, same goes with the contrast, colors and everything. Don't over-do them! They might look pretty for a little while but trust me, it is the long run that matters!

I also cook a normal map for the asset if it's near the lights in the game. But yeah, this is mainly how I work with the assets. I also do lots of drawing and painting, but for symmetric assets I rather go with Illustrator.

After some tweaking and adding normal map and shadow this is how it looks in the game:
















Overall being one man band, I need to produce everything quite fast as I'm responsible for coding, music, writing, marketing etc. Being aware of that is a strength and so you must plan your methods smartly. I'm personally very happy how everything looks. It's worth the effort, and hopefully people can appreciate that!

Thank you for reading! :)