Kana Quest DevBlog 17th Oct 2017

So, PAX is getting awfully close now isn’t it.

I’m kinda going batty just trying to get everything together for the game. But the most infuriating part is that everything I’m doing looks like I’m doing very little from the outside.

When all you are doing is fixing small little bugs you don’t have anything interesting to show. I wish I could show you a bunch of exciting new features but I can’t. The closest thing I have to anything new is a loading screen hint section. 

Anyway. Apart from this the main thing I’ve been working on is contacting press people who are coming to PAX who I think would be interested in Kana Quest. I’ve had a little bit of a response so far so that’s better than nothing. Found one person who was perfect for Kana Quest. They were interested in educational games and taught Japanese themselves. So was able to contact them and get a positive response there.

I also got to contact Meghan O’Neil at PCPowerPlay. That one is big for me as I used to read her opinion pieces in PCPP a lot back in the day. And was the first proper critical thought about games I was exposed to. So without her work I probably wouldn’t have wanted to make games. I don’t think Kana Quest will be her jam, but I do get to say thanks so that’s exciting.

In other news it looks like Kana Quest merch will be available at PAX so if you are interested in a Kana Quest T-shirt, Kana Soft Toy, or Socks, PAX Aus is your chance!

Anyway. Hope y’all have a good day and I’ll see you around. I won’t do a blog post next week, but you will get a MASSIVE one after PAX!

Till then.

Bai

Kana Quest DevBlog 9th Oct 2017

Sorry for the late blog post. I promise I have good excuse!

Here is my excuse –> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wjyHFURurU

I made a trailer for Kana Quest in the lead up to PAX! Speaking of PAX what do I still have to do? Well a lot. We are less than a month out and hooo boy am I scared as all hell! Here is my list of things I still need to get organized.

• Tablet Hire
• Order more business cards
• Pay the official PAX for any of the additional furniture I need.
• Rigorously play-test the new tutorial.
• Find and Squash as many bugs as possible.
• Make a convention mode.
• Try to get into contact with as many media people as possible.
• Organize a convention survival kit.
  • Lots of water
  • Butter Menthols
  • Gaffer tape
  • Scisors
  • Hand Sanitizer
  • Wet Wipes
• Organize shifts for everyone helping me exhibit.
• Set up my Steam Storefront
  • This one is going to be a blog post all to its self so I’m not gonna get into it all now.
• Set up a video loop of some stock game-play footage for the booth so people can always see the game being played.

The thing that is really getting to me is I don’t know what I don’t know. There are so many things that need to be doing, and I feel as though I’m probably making a bunch of mistakes with all of them. But I don’t know what they are. This is also a large part of my own personal insecurities coming out here: I fundamentally don’t trust myself not to make an ass of myself.

Anyway I’m getting sidetracked. Let’s talk about how I made my trailer. Well for a start I used After Effects to make it. It’s the only video editing software I’ve used before so it was a natural choice. I really didn’t want to spend time learning a new tool. I only bought it for one month of use though. I don’t see the need for buying for a year when I’m probably only going to use it for two months in a year at max.

That said, After Effects is awful and I hate using it. I think I just hate video editing in general (guess that I’m not gonna be the next big youtube sensation). And I got to experience some fun little bugs from After Effects.

• Upon installation, After Effects decided that I didn’t need my windows settings. So it just discarded all the stuff I’ve added to windows 8 to make it run like windows 7. Also this just in windows 8 base interface is still awful.
• The phantom youtube music. While I was importing assets and setting up my composition I was listening to youtube music. I hit the preview button and somehow my youtube music got encoded onto my preview. Every time I played my preview the same bit of youtube music would play. I ended up having to re-import some assets to get rid of it.
• Not a bug per say but AE particles suck. Guess I’ve been spoiled by Unity’s particle systems but the restrictions are stupid. For example you cannot lock your particles Z axis, which sucks if you have a 2D game. You also can’t have your particles animate off a sprite sheet. So I couldn’t use any of the particle assets I already had made in the game. Oh, I just remembered another thing AE particles can’t do. You can’t have sub emitters.

That said AE has added a few things that do make life a hell of a lot easier. Namely the graph editor is way easier to use than it was the last time I used AE. Oh and the inclusion of the “shy” layers made keeping my timeline a bit more organized way easier.

Anyway, that’s me for the week.

See you next week.