So I’m releasing a game soon. In December, to be exact. Here’s some stuff I did and learned after telling myself that Foe Frenzy would be a Small Project until it suddenly became the first game I’d ever release as a commercial product.
In Discord #
After deciding that I’d only be selling my game on itch.io, I quickly realized that that might not be the best of ideas in the long run, because few people actually know about the platform - despite it being pretty great.
So I decided to also sell the game on Discord - the Skype-Teamspeak-IRC-hybrid that recently also became a game store. As it turns out, this was surprisingly easy: All you have to do is pay $25, go through a really well organized checklist that is provided in Discord’s usual jokey writing style and submit. Tada! Your game’s on Discord now.
By the way, in case you actually want to see what Foe Frenzy’s Discord store page currently looks like before release, you should join my Discord and check out its #ff-store channel (on Desktop). It looks pretty snazzy!
Oh, also: #
As it turns out, Discord has a game SDK. And Achievement support. And Lobbies, and Multiplayer, and Invites.
And surprisingly, integrating all of that with Foe Frenzy wasn’t necessarily the breeziest breeze ever, as I didn’t really have any example implementations or anything of the sort at hand, but it worked out in the end!
Foe Frenzy will have full compatibility with Discord’s Multiplayer features. What does this include, you ask?
- After hosting a Multiplayer game from Foe Frenzy, you can invite your friends to play with you through the simple click of a button: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">You'll also be able to easily invite people from inside the game! pic.twitter.com/f3dixbwnxD</p>— Ell (@Ellpeck) September 14, 2019</blockquote>
- When receiving an invite, you can simply click the Join button which will launch the game and instantly send you into your friend’s online lobby: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">SOMETHING IS COMING pic.twitter.com/ZWVUuRDhD3</p>— Ell (@Ellpeck) September 14, 2019</blockquote>
- From there, you can play online without needing to expose your IP, fiddle around with your router settings or really do anything else.
- And have I mentioned… you’ll be able to use these features even when buying the game from itch.io, you’ll be able to combine Discord and IP-based multiplayer, and you’ll even be able to combine online multiplayer and local multiplayer! So many possibilities!
So yea. That’s pretty exciting.
Music and Trailer #
So for a rather long time now, I’ve been watching a YouTuber called ThinMatrix develop his own game, and simultaneously listening to the amazing music for said game, created by the lovely Jamal Green.
So after some contemplating (and a lot of anxiety), I decided to send him an email, and quite quickly, he replied and said that, yes indeed, he would love to create the soundtrack for Foe Frenzy. So that’s what he’s doing now, and it’s super awesome.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the announcement trailer for the game which features the awesome trailer theme that he created:
So the moral of that is basically: If you like an artist and want to cooperate with them, don’t be scared to message them - the worst that can happen is they say no, and the best that can happen is that they create an awesome soundtrack for you!
The whole platform issue #
If you read all of my blog posts, you’ll know about the previous one I made about me trying to figure out how to get a MonoGame project to work well cross-platform without having to upgrade to the not-yet-well-supported .NET Core.
As it turns out, all I had to do was actually use versions of .NET Framework and netstandard (which is another build target that can be quite confusing to people that aren’t used to the whole .NET environment and the weird state it’s currently in) that actually, you know, are compatible with each other. So after sorting that out, I made a little tool that allows you to easily pack any .NET Framework application with Mono without having to even do so much as break a sweat. So that was quite handy.
Oh God, what if no one buys my game #
Obviously, I have a lot of anxiety, as my Twitter feed, the #feels channel on my Discord and my therapist make pretty clear.
So a feeling I have almost constantly is the fear that my game won’t go well. That no one will care, that no one will buy it, that no one will enjoy it, that it’ll be rated horribly, that YouTubers will make fun of it, that… honestly, so many more stupid fears. And obviously, the release hasn’t happened yet, and so those fears are still there. But the best advice I can give is to just power through those fears if you also have them, because, as with the e-mail, the worst thing that can happen is that they come true - but the best thing that can happen is that they won’t. So, really, the only way it can go is up.
But also, in case you do buy the game once it comes out, and in case you also like it, please tell me. It would mean the world to me. Thanks so much.
Also, thanks for reading. <3
