Coming Soon to iOS
Hey friends! Sorry for missing last week: I was traveling and didn’t have much time to work on my game and/or write a blog. I do have big news though! Space Cats is officially done! I submitted the builds to Steam yesterday and right now I’m just waiting to hear back if it was approved or not. As soon as it’s approved, Space Cats will go live!
One of the most satisfying things this past week was getting my game to work on SteamDeck so if you have one, you should definitely go download it. It took some effort, but now Space Cats is supported on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, with full controller (Xbox) support on all three platforms!
This coming week I’m going to be working on a mobile version. This one will have a secondary skin that you can purchase if you want (the game itself will always be free 😊) mostly because I want the practice of developing in-app-purchases. I’m sure that there’s going to be hiccups and annoying bugs that are going to keep me up at night, but I’m looking forward to the development journey. Deploying to Steam was such an eye-opening experience and I’m really glad that I took the game all the way. It’s so satisfying to have a truly finished product.
Now that I've essentially finished Space Cats, I'm looking forward to other ideas that I want to develop into games. They’ll probably be smaller games since right now I’m focusing on developing a lot and publishing quickly. There’s a lot of value in the fast iteration of products.
This reminds me of a parable I came across a while ago. A photography class was divided into two groups: one group was tasked with producing a single, near-perfect photograph as their semester project, the other group was tasked with submitting 100 photographs regardless of their quality. At the end of the semester, the groups were evaluated—the first group based on the quality of their individual photograph, the other based on the total volume of quality of their photographs. Despite the amount of time that the first group had to produce just a single perfect photograph, the best photos of the class all came from those who were tasked with taking 100 photographs.
To me, this shows just how important it is to practice shipping product over and over and over. There’s a popular saying that has really resonated with me that reiterates this lesson: “Fail fast, fail often”. And not that I believe that we should fail, but I truly believe there is value in working on the iterative process. We have to be brave enough to ship our products over and over again because that’s how we get better.
For my next game I want to give myself a much stricter timeline. I’ll probably do a couple game jams too. And I hope to ship another game to Steam here soon! I’ve had so much fun with Space Cats; I can’t wait to build another one.
PS—go get Space Cats 😎 (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2892290/Space_Cats/)
