All these while I was doing some background research on the game industry in general and trying to collect nuggets of information that might help me enhance our business. For that reason I have been keeping quite all these days.

As you might have already noticed, we have changed our forum layout again, trying to bring it as close as possible to the original site to maintain a flow of navigation for new visitors. Also, I finally completed Arevan: The Bitter Truth’s official strategy guide which is available here. I also plan to add a FAQ section to my website so that players can solve certain kinds of problems on their own quickly without having to post in our forums or mailing us. If you have any other suggestions regarding the website you can think of, then do let me know…

I would like to drop a note of heartfelt thanks to Indinera and Titaness for arranging an interview about my indie career. It was quite a surprise considering I haven’t shattered the world yet . You can read it here (they have used my username over_cloud9 for addressing in it). Currently I’m dabbling on 3D game development in Bangalore, with assistance from my co-developer Manjith from Phantasm Games. He has come up with a AI rich tank strategy game, Armoured and Dangerous, which I had been marketing in between. We have been thinking of doing a joint project in 3D, but we are both neck deep into our own stuff. Let’s see how it proceeds in near future.

Coming back to the topic, ‘Life of an indie’ is a series based on my own experiences and that of the things I have observed other indies struggle with. This series will not be updated in a series , instead it shall be episodic depending on the outcome of the research that I’m conducting. My aim is to not become another industry veteran in gaming dishing out general opinions, neither to claim or pose myself as a veteran in the first place. I have taken independent game development seriously enough to consider it my profession, so an honest narration of my experiences might give other upcoming developers some idea about what they are going to get in this career. Instead of whining about what I don’t have and what cannot be done, I thought of doing something about the things which have long posed problems to indies. This is my current piece of research going along with the ongoing projects, and my aim is to overcome these problems sooner or later. But this will not be a one way or a quick process, I need your feedback to get a better understanding and for bouncing off ideas. I might try things which others didn’t attempt in fear of the untested waters, so I need to do a lot of experimentations which might sound off beat or weird. Some of the experimentations might fail as well, but as long as it serves the purpose, I don’t mind taking the extra step forward Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Many things are happening, so much that I had not been able to even update my website like I used to. Had been busy promoting Arevan last month apart from the 101 others things I got myself into. Instead of moving over to my next game project, I thought of doing something new this time. I want to experiment with 3D gaming, and will be shifting my base to Bangalore for a couple of months for that. Honestly speaking, after working with RPGmakerVX, I am not satisfied with what it can offer. There are so many limitations to it…though I can’t complain much as this is the best I can get from a customizable commercial engine. So before I move over to my next project, I want to expand my horizons and learn something new this time.

In my older blog post, I had discussed how I had planned to market my game. In this post, I shall discuss which of the methods were success and which ones were failures. I shall discuss it with respect to the points I had mentioned in the earlier blog posts for the assessment of it’s performance.

• Primary release of Arevan on my site, Amanda’s and Indinera’s.

This had worked really well. There is nothing else that I need to say. Both of them have been simply awesome in their cooperation and have generated a lot of sales for my game.

• Sending press releases to game sites.

Press releases were a huge boost in promoting the news of our first release. Since we’re new to the indie scene, identifying ourselves in our niche was an important step. That really helped us gain exposure and visibility in gaming industry, particularly in India. Many Indian studios, sites, and game related companies took notice of our site and were eager to cover it. 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 »

Sorry for putting up a hotch potch of news together every time rather than sticking to the topic . But like every time, I’ll do that again ^_^ . So before I move on the Arevan, I’d like to announce that we got a new logo last month! Things kept me quite busy, thats why couldn’t update at that point. Here’s our new logo, tell me how does it look like ;P -

You won’t see this logo right now in our website mainly because I’d like to introduce it with the new website look. Like I said last time, we’ve changed our servers…but with a side effect. Few of our page updates and forum posts vanished during that process  . We got new website designers who are working on the new look of the website and I was thinking of releasing the game only after the website is completely overhauled. A new beginning to everything…

Oh! Coming back to the game…Arevan is almost complete now. The game will be up for beta within a day or two. I’ll put it up in Arevan’s forum, so you can check it out when it gets updated. Rifle100 shall do the primary level of testing to catch the basic bugs before it is up for others (and more because I can nag her constantly which I cannot do to other members ). So that may take up a day or two more. Then once the testing starts, the forum will be locked for hiding game related spoilers from other members Read the rest of this entry »

Last few weeks have been very busy,especially with the puzzles…I’m still struggling hard to make them be different…really don’t know how successful I’d be in that. Thats why currently can’t post many games on my site every week like I used to do. But yes, every week, there will be at least one new RPG game for you, that is for sure .

Anyway, coming back to the game updates, work had been a bit slow. But I’m trying my best to get everything ready for beta testing by the first week of September. Thats a hard deadline I kept for myself . So far I also had to take care of a couple of things, like getting a new logo and website layout for my site.. Oh yes, if you got my newsletter than you must be knowing that I was thinking of a major overhauling of my website. But I’d been postponing it only for one reason- I don’t want the existing links to each page change. Redirections and 404 errors can slow down things, so I’m really contemplating what I should do. Also I’d be changing servers as my current server isn’t able to cope much with the traffic (strangely). Any way, I’d prefer being cautious this time then be sorry because I won’t get much time to redo much once the game is out. Read the rest of this entry »

Hiya friends! As I was going through some of my older blog post, I recognized an unmistakable tone of whining in them….the realization became more clear because I had been reading Juuso’s blog  and that he discussed with examples how the game developers are master whiners LOOOOOL! It was a good and funny read and I was alarmed by the fact that I’m becoming one that perfectly fits into this definition! So I instantly thought of focusing on the positive things in life – for example zombies can’t eat cheesy pizzas but I can! And that I can poke and disturb my sister to wake up from sleep but she cant’ (mainly because I wake earlier than her Muahahahaha), and so and so forth. I was amazed by the mood lift I received on thinking how I had an advantages on many aspects of life like these and that definitely contributed to some intense working last few weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally I have progressed to a satisfactory extent when I can show you some screenshots, sneak peaks and the introduce to the story of my game.Though normally I discuss everything here,this time I have posted the game snapshots on the main site for others to view it as well.Here’s a link to that page- http://www.overcloud9.com/games/our-games/arevan/

You can discuss what you think about the game in the forum or in comments here,whichever you wish.As this is my first game,I thought my customers deserve a treat in here.So I have launched a “Customer Loyalty” program which offers to offer this game for free to our recurring customers. To view more information about it,click here.

And I have another small news-we’ve launched a newsletter system by which we can keep you updated about the latest games releases,updates,etc at Over Cloud 9.I’ve planned of setting it up as a monthly notification service whereby one can receive a summary of the games and walkthroughs released on the end of each month.If you wish to subscribe,visit this page. Let me see how I can keep up with that.I’ll remain crazy busy this week as I have loads of pending stuff to finish and speed up the development process.By the way,I have received all my character images from my artist Niki,and they are beautiful.Niki has become my sweetheart,she did an awesome job and will be working on our title screen from this weekend.What else?…umm…nothing more for now,got loads of stuff to take care of.