It’s time for a new update. He is ready. He keeps repeating himself: don’t worry. You have nothing to blame yourself for. He takes a deep breath and walks towards the awaiting crowd.
“Hey there everyone! Howdy? Ready for your Developer Diary dose?”
Everyone is staring with their arms crossed. Glances of blame and disapproval rain all over him. He tries to merrily pretend that nothing is wrong.
“What’s up people? We have these awesome new things coming up, you can’t wait to hear! Without further ado, let’s get started!”
No reaction. It was a feeble, pathetic attempt anyway.
“Oh come on you guys… we have been busy! It’s… well… making games it’s not the easiest thing, you know? And having to sustain an indie studio, you know… with everything we do, finding the time… we need to do some paid work, we need to pay rents…”
The shame is too much. Silent reproach lingers, so heavy his chin goes down.
“I know… we didn’t post much recently… well, it’s just… uh…”
The crowd opens up, revealing the barren wasteland of the Red:OuT Twitter feed and the Facebook page. A #screenshotsaturday tag lies half-covered in sand and dust. Eyes get watery, he dramatically drops on his knees. The sky cracks, a deep voice rumbles from the depths of the Earth.
“You have been busy, you say, but we know the truth, for we are the Internet! Our eyes are always open, and they shall show everyone what you really did!”
“Stop! Wait!” he tries to say. “We had to relocate to a new office! There was a lot of work involved! Here’s proof!”
“We worked our socks off with the moving, rewiring, assembling chairs and tables, we were just… using the quadcopter to test the volumetric space!”
The last statement is so ridiculously bold to confuse the audience for a second. He gets back on his feet.
“Alright, we were just having some harmless fun. Look, we actually worked on Red:OuT too, especially on the splitscreen support, the track props and the track editor! I know it’s not really flashy and all, but a lot of work went into the cogs of the game. Look here! Split screen works and it’s a ton of fun!”
“But wait, there’s more!” he cries while flipping a notebook open, frantically looking over his notes and scattering post-its everywhere. “There’s… Ah! A prototype for the reactor flame and the ship’s trail! You can see some of it in the video! Look, right there! It’s a prototype, but it already kind of works.”
“Oh, not to mention the work on the camera! We will soon have different presets, and we are working on each of them to convey the right feeling, and most important, the field of view now changes according to your speed! We also never stop working on the steering, our players found it too responsive to keep the ship straight, and we will keep tweaking. We added a certain degree of roll when steering, too. Here, perhaps you can see it better here.”
Something clicks in his mind.
“Our players!” he yells triumphant. “Yes! We have been to the Milan Games Week Indie, and the Lucca Comics and Games! Lots of people played Red:OuT, someone loved it, someone thrashed it! Everything we thought needs improvement was actually criticised, so we definitely know that we are on the right track! And not only that. We spent some time building up material for the press, and it paid off indeed! We totally ended up on PCGamesN first, then on RockPaperShotgun, and even Kotaku!”
The crowd murmurs. Someone is shifting weight. They already formulated their sentence.
“Would you kindly look into your bit-powered, web-shaped hearth and find some compassion for a small indie team going through hardships?”
And that’s when the crowd unanimously say…
What does the crowd say?
Continuate così, spero veniate a qualche fiera più a sud appena potete 😀
dove sei? cerchiamo di spostarci dove serve 🙂
Io vivo a Salerno. Mi piacerebbe molto poter provare Redout, sembra davvero molto divertente! Vedere poi anche l’ambiente in cui lavorate, fa davvero venire voglia di sviluppare videogiochi. Spero ci aggiorniate al più presto sullo stato dei lavori!