Slackibrating!

Today is my wedding aniversary and I actually remembered :). This means I won't be working on Powargrid tonight, since I'll be taking my wife out to dinner. Which is slacking through celebrating, a.k.a slackibrating.

On the non-slacking side of things, I've taken next week off from my dayjob so I can get some more Powargrid work done (and perhaps catch up on some lost sleep too). With that in mind, Michiel made some tweaks to the dialogue system yesterday (which I couldn't have made myself), which allow me to finish the dialogues for the factory mission. So that's at the top of my to do list for next week.

In other small news, some more people gave us feedback on Powargrid last week, and it was all positive :). On top of that, we understood that they did't just play for a few minutes before forming their opinion, but that they actually played through a significant number of the available campaign missions. It's great to get confirmation that we're building something cool.

Also, I've noticed that slowly but certainly I'm getting more comfortable with the idea of marketing our game. Having read quite a bit on the subject, I already knew that marketing is something that is both necessary and doable for indie studios. And that, if it's done right, marketing is also beneficial for the people you're marketing your game to (instead of being annoying). But knowing these things are quite different from actually talking and writing about Powargrid.
This blog was a good first step, followed by joining Twitter (as a studio, @WeeFreeStudio, and personally, @Fuddleclutch). And demo-ing our game at the Dutch Game Garden was also very cool and insightful. So I'm quite confident that by the time we finish Powargrid, we'll have the skills to set up a marketing campaign to match the quality of the game we're building. It's probable we'll write a separate blog post about our marketing experiences once we collect some more of them.

Finally, here's a development picture of the Factory Mission that Michiel Tweeted last night. It features a delete button for destroying buildings and the option to use more power than you actually have. I'm sorry to say that we won't let you wield that kind of power in the actual game ;).

No, you cannot has this button!

Anyway, that's all for this short update. I'll be sure keep you posted on the progress I make next week.

- Willem -