Over Cloud 9 website is still running and will continue to run and I am very happy that players are stilling visiting my website. It’s been 2-3 weeks that I am working at my new company and for the first time designing games for iOS. We are basically developing 2D iPhone/iPad/iPod games on Coco (X-Code). And while this is happening, I was wondering about learning either one of the other 2D game engines like Moai SDK, Sparrow Framework, iSGL 3D, GameMaker and even Unity. I need to do some research before I pick any of them.

I had done some basic scripting and coding before, so exercising my programming habits might be of some help if I consider growth in the gaming industry. Now when I summarize my experience as an indie, I realize how much I have learnt in the past 2.5 years and how much I am yet to learn. I did game designing, development, marketing, sound and video editing and sometimes even art while making a game. Honestly speaking, all students who are thinking of taking up a career in gaming should develop and commercially market their own game during their final year as a internship project (obviously after seeking permission of their principal). This is because the exposure and the experience one gains by actually being on the market with other competitors is priceless!

Even though I am not making any games now, I still continue to grow and learn. I wanted to learn the scope of the iOS market and a general idea of development in it.  I think there is a lot that I can do if I can pick up a bit of programming. It is been long that I actually flex my engineering skills. Anyway, I shall post links of the game I had designed for my new company once they go up on the Apple app store.

I joined a job last week as a Senior Game designer at Pune (India). I know this has disappointed some fellow developers, but I seriously needed a change. Financially my business was doing fair enough (33% increase in revenue every year) , but I did not want to work alone any more. I cannot make bigger and complicated games by myself, but I can do that with a team of professionals at a work place. I want to go out of my comfort zone and challenge myself to try something I haven’t done before.

Joining a job means I will not be able to make commercial games unless I leave it, but I can still make free games and put up games from other developers. The website will be still there, with newer games and walkthroughs from other developers being updated frequently like before.

So stay by my side friends. I am on a new path and I want to see where it leads me to.

Just before I start my monologue, I would like to thank Charlotte from Gamercast for publishing my interview on their website. It’s been long that I updated my blog. After “A Sirius Game’, my temptation to go back to 2D game development has been back. Now when I compare the time, cost and energy spent making 2D game to a 3D game, the former is much better from an indie’s perspective. And with the release of RPGMaker Vx Ace, there is some hope of reviving a bit of freshness in the old school RPG world.

This time I thought of dabbling a bit in Photoshop by myself so that I can cut the cost of art in development. More than cost, I would say time and quality. When all of your artwork is outsourced, it is difficult to keep track of submission deadlines by artists and the quality suffers a lot. Since I am not a pro artist or anything, I chose simple anime style art which is easy to create and cute to look at. So far, here is an example sprite I made two weeks back-

Compared to last year, this year I am more at peace of mind and in keeping with my objectives. But in spite of everything, I am introspecting a lot for the last 2-3 months. So far I have developed both 2D and 3D games for PC only, not for any other platform. My knowledge has become stagnant, a by-product of working alone most of the time. I want to learn development on newer platforms and newer engines, get newer challenges. My niche genre of old school rpgs are a safe bet for business purpose, but I want to grow out of my comfort zone. Honestly, I am bored.

My social life has become nil and self-teaching ever evolving new technologies in gaming seems tiring and boring. The problem with learning  a new game engine is during that time I cannot make newer games, which means business is slow. For a self sustaining indie, this is not a feasible option. I can still keep making RPGmaker games as I already have a website dedicated for it, but it is not satisfying me intellectually anymore. It is been long that I stood up to a challenge or pushed my creativity to an extreme. I need a change desperately. I had been playing around with Game Maker and Unity 3D for sometime now and GameMaker seems to be a good alternative for simple 2D games. I don’t know what I should be doing now. Should I carry on making RPG maker game and it will sustain my business easily? Or should I leave my safe zone of RPGmaker games and do a different genre of 2D game this time? Or should I focus more on learning Unity 3D so that I can explore android and iOS market? Or should I take up a day job so that I can learn and earn at the same time? I am procrastinating, unable to make up my mind…

So….. today is the day when I launched this website officially last year. I hardly realized when time flew by so quickly. Feels so great and awesome to be an independent developer (indie), including the successes and the hardships/trials I came across. It feels like winning a challenge of survival…not just survival in terms of life as an indie but also in business. With this glorious year ending, I don’t know what lies ahead in the years ahead. But definitely the successful inspires positive hopes and new aspirations. LOL too bad I’m not a poet, or could have expressed my feelings better with the right words.

Guess what, I received an awesome gift from one of my friends who stays far faaaaaaar away from India. She is from Austria and her name is Karin. She and my sister (Priyanka aka Rifle100) were playing a forum game when Karin asked her to translate two lines of English in our mother tongue, Bengali. Priya did that… and…. voila! Karin sent us pictures drawn and colored by children of her school with those translated words! It was such a cute surprise that we both went like crazy with happiness! That is the best gift we have ever received, that also in December when Christmas is nearing! Karin has also beautifully attached the images of those cute little angels. I couldn’t contain my joy and were dying to share it with everyone.  And on the occasion of our year long presence in our niche of RPGs, here are the wonderful gifts. Click on them to get the full view, I have arranged them alphabetically by their names so that none of them are disappointed . Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

Just thought today I’d discuss things other than our business. Have been busy with Arevan’s promotion and stuff all this while, and after the bout of fever, I couldn’t do much updates to the main site nor the blog. May be I won’t be able to do any walkthroughs like I said in my last post, really can’t make up my mind…. Loads of things are pending , yet my mind is desperately craving for a quiet vacation.

Coming back to my personal life, things has become much better after I joined the Rotaract Club of Calcutta in August, 2010. Rotaract is the child of Rotary.org and they organize a lot of social events and activities every week. Being a lazy person all throughout my life, a sudden call for active participation for such events was a refreshing change for me. Take the example of our mini event on 26th September at Bodhi Peet, an institution for mentally-challenged children.  A handful of our members went to visit the institution to gift those children an enjoyable day, a break from their mundane routine! We had a lot of fun, played games with them followed by singing & dancing together. We also distributed food and chocolates. They all enjoyed and spent a good time with us. Here are some of the pics (it was just a couple of days before Arevan’s release and the effects of my over-working is clearly visible. I have grown thin with prominent dark circles under my eyes )-

Our members and the in-charge of the institution (the lady wearing white saree)

This guy was dancing to the song we played while Rajani (in blue salwar) was distributing the chocolates.

Some of the inmates are quite grown up and were able to perform some basic tasks unlike the others.

Our vice president Vishal was passing on the teddy bear and our president Tanuja was clanking the steel thali to begin the game.

There are numerous Rotaract events that happen each month, but we don’t have the pictures of all of them sadly . Here’s another event that was organized on Vishal’s terrace. It’s the ‘Green Pledge’ that was aimed mainly to foster more greenery in our environment.

Harsit, Vishal and Siddhant (from left to right) planting seeds.

The Green Pledge!

Apart from these events, there was Durga Puja from the 14th to 17th of October, which is a big celebration for Bengalis in Kolkata. Yet I feel these vacations aren’t sufficient enough to satiate my desire to break free from my routine for a while . The best thing is that, after all these months of leading a caveman’s life, sitting in front of my laptop 24X7 making games, I could reconnect with my friends during the Pujas after a loooooooooooooong time. They were definitely angry with me not being able to contact them all this while, but I managed to convince them . And then one of them had a baby! <3 I’m planning to visit her whenever I can squeeze some time. So that is all for today friends. Now I’m off to watch some Disney DVDs I bought ages back, but didn’t find time to even unwrap them .

Ah sorry for late posting…I couldn’t manage time since Arevan’s release yesterday. Check it out-

Arevan: The Bitter Truth

Finally, delivered the baby (read Arevan)! Whew! Haven’t slept for ages…feel like going into the ‘hibernation’ mode or sleep for a century! The phase-based testing was a success! Caught all the major bugs…bugs kept cropping up at each phase. In fact the testing stretched to 4 phases and I would like to thank all my testers who did an AWESOME JOB! I’m so happy to have found them ^_^

Also I need to get the official strategy guide done in two weeks because I promised to do so. You must have noticed that I  also changed the looks of my site. Well after my web designers ditched me , I had to take up things in my own hand. And I’m glad that I did because I would have never realized that a little bit of tweak here and there can completely change the overall look (saved me money). Bought some images from Vectorstock, did some mixing and matching in photoshop and Voila! I hope you like the new layout <3 Read the rest of this entry »

Hmm…like every time, I will put all my updates in one post such as this one. But yes, my every post has a central theme which I discuss elaborately. I’ll put the unnecessary stuff first, and then we shall proceed with our topic of discussion.

Arevan is being beta tested. I divided the testing in three phases. The first phase is purported to catch the primary bugs which can cause the game to crash or not function properly. When the 1st group of testers were done,  the 2nd group started. The second group caught the bugs that were missed by the first group, played the opposite options in the game (unlike the 1st group) to get to a different ending in the game,checked grammatical or spelling mistakes and mainly fine tuned the game. The third phase,which just started yesterday, is supposed to check whether the bug corrections have led to the creation of unknown or unwanted bugs or not. The plan went well so far, but had started with series of disasters. One of the testers blew up his computer for some peculiar tech problems of his machine and had to wait for 5 days before he began testing. The other tester fell ill..and another one struggled to download a large file (that was mainly my fault). Anyway, things got settled then after …but thats the reason why things got a bit delayed. I thought of releasing Arevan on the 25th of September, but I had to extend the time because of these delays and to get the game bug/error free completely. So if things go as planned, Arevan will be released on the 29th of September, 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

I think a better heading to this post would be ‘Life without my laptop’ xD .Today I got back the system,everything is working fine now.Loads of emails to reply,things to update and check,etc,etc.These few days felt different without my loyal companion though.There was a time when absence of a computer in life really didn’t mean much in our lives.And that was mainly because we didn’t have a computer or laptop to work it back then .But now the scene was much different.Work has become so much easier with these machines doing half of them…I mean I sound like an old person,but I can’t help but observe the difference that I felt in the absence of something so mundane.

But without my laptop I could do things which I normally don’t find enough time to. Like spending time with my loved ones,reading newspaper,watching a TV(in absence of youtube),hanging out with friends and all these really didn’t feel like life can be boring without gadgets.All right,let me cease my age old rantings and get down into doing something fruitful

The game progress has been halted because my laptop is giving me troubles .When I bought it three years ago,it was shipped with original Vista.But few days back suddenly a pop up comes up saying ‘Activate license’ and the wall paper turns black with this thing written in one corner of the screen-”‘This copy of Windows is not genuine”.I was shocked because in these years it didn’t give me any operating system related troubles.I spoke to the people at the service center,they said I have to submit the laptop and the recovery DVDs there for them to check.Now I won’t be able to work for around a week .Very disappointing…but at least I can complete the dialogues of my game in my diary.Ok ok I admit I have to put things into pen and paper because I’m not left with any option.I’ve got to visit the internet parlour to check mails,so won’t be able to reply to mails as promptly as I used to. Read the rest of this entry »

The fever of RPG games started ever since I played Aveyond 2 for the first time.I remember googling ‘games similar to Aveyond’ in most of my spare time then.I did happen to come across many such RPG games in the process.
Last year I thought of writing my first walkthrough on any RPG game.And the first one to come up in my mind was Eternal Eden (because I was playing it at that time ).After that, there was no looking back…That walkthrough brought an invitation from Gamezebo to write for them.But due to tremendous pressure of handling my job and delivering walkthroughs on time led me to discontinue working with them.Commitment is important for me,and I was embarrassed as how to couldn’t perform as expected.My personal life also faced a lot of torment at that point.Eventually I left the job also and started Over Cloud 9.Well the website was a continuation of my RPG walkthrough blog and some people who know me from the past mistake it to be a blog (technically it is as it is hosted on wordpress,but not in terms of an entity anymore).I don’t mind as long as they find it helpful as that is what it is meant to be.And now I’m full fledged into Over Cloud 9! Read the rest of this entry »