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  February 1GAM 04:44 PM -- Mon February 18, 2013  


This is a work-in-progress clip from my February 1GAM. It's not really called Knighto, that's just what I named the folder I put it in. It has no name as yet, or point. I'm still busy all the time with Growtopia but I thought I'd do something just for fun, which is almost a new concept to me. So I pixeled a knight (really badly, actually... I don't like doing top-down stuff!), without any idea of what I wanted to do with him, and just kinda went from there. So what we have so far is a knight running around "Super Dungeon Room", swiping at blobs like he's using a windshield wiper instead of a sword. It's kind of fun just because of the massive splatter factor.

I can't say if this will ever amount to anything, but each little bit I add inspires me with ideas for what it could be in the end. I don't really have time to make anything, but hey, pecking away at this is a better way of amusing myself than TV or video games, I think. It's almost productive!

Of course I should be working on Dr. Exploro if I'm going to have a side project, but I needed something small and simple, just to mess around. Digging into a major game while still hacking on Growtopia every day is a real brain burner, whereas this thing is... I don't know, fun I guess you call it?
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  One Flu Over, Got Beaucoup Rest 11:19 AM -- Tue February 5, 2013  

It's been a rough couple weeks! My wife came home with the flu, so I took care of her for three or four days, and you know where that's going... I ended up laying around exhausted and coughing for the next four or five days. Even once I thought I was better, I relapsed into more fever the next day. Now I think I really am all better, but it's like I just lost a week and a half of life, and I'm still so tired! Spent the whole time just watching TV (when I was conscious).

I don't know what you care about that, I just felt like I wanted to explain where I've been for the last couple weeks! Got back into Growtopia work in the last couple days (still coughing though!). Lots of big updates are coming there! I want to keep some as surprises, but I can tell you the trade system is done, awesome and rock-solid, and being tested now, and there are dozens of new items that are going to appear in the game at various points in the next couple weeks (some use technology that isn't in the game yet, so they can't be enabled until updates come out, and others may have... other reasons? for not being added just yet).

So it's February! I'm supposed to release one game a month! That is going to be really tough. Growtopia remains all-consuming. It also continues to grow! This past weekend we hit a new record of 1500 users online at once.
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  Growing Like A Topia 02:09 PM -- Sun January 20, 2013  


All those little flags are players!

So it's been a crazy week. Only a week? Maybe it's been two crazy weeks. It's been crazy! Growtopia set a new record yesterday of 1,000 users online at the same time (it went beyond that, but 1000 sounds nice, and we didn't reach 1,100... that I know of!). So as you can imagine, it's kind of exploded. What's really scary/crazy/cool/whatever about it is that we are doing terribly in the App Store rankings, and we're getting almost no press coverage. Now that doesn't sound cool, and it's not. But what's cool is that we have this immense, ever-increasing growth of players, despite not having the press in our corner or anybody big talking about us at all. It's purely organic word-of-mouth growth. We have had brief mentions on some of the major iOS and Android sites, but in each case it was just one little quick "this game is coming soon" and nothing more, so we're definitely not riding a wave of PR here! Relatively speaking, we don't have very many players, but the ones we do have are online for hours. We have made the most addictive game ever.

So the craziness isn't just sitting here and marveling at the numbers rising. It's more the craziness of constantly battling hacks and fraud (don't try either one, the system auto-bans people who try! And hoo boy, do we get emails about it!), constantly helping people, constantly monitoring issues as we resolve problems with the server and its ability to handle such a ridiculous number of players. And of course developing the major updates that we want to get out there anyway. There are a lot of core game features we still haven't even put in! Wish we had time to really focus on the new stuff, because that's the fun part.

I had so many plans of other games to work on, and other things I wanted to do with my life (I am trying to study music! That's the educational goal I came up with), but Growtopia grows and consumes every inch of my life. I literally wake up and turn on the logs and do my first checks. Anything else I do, I come back every few minutes to check the email, logs, etc. When I go for walks with my wife, or we eat together, Topia is the topic. It just always changes to that. There's just so much to be done with it, and so much to think about, it's really overwhelming. I wouldn't want to live like this forever, but it's very exciting for now. And I'm not the one who's really working hard - my partner Seth is doing all the serious work. I just make goofy little pictures.

I think I'm gonna have a real problem with 1 Game A Month, because I can see the rest of this year being consumed in a frenzy of Punch. Build. Grow. And you know, that might be okay.
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  Growtopia for iOS is out! 11:18 PM -- Thu January 10, 2013  


It's really fun. I am on right now, along with 166 other people! It is one majorly busy world. Well, many many majorly busy worlds.
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  Growtopia: Soulmates 07:03 PM -- Wed January 9, 2013  

Growtopia is coming out in two more days (on iOS that is - it's already out on Android). Check out our second teaser video:


That tagline is pretty Hamumuey to me! And I had nothing to do with it. The game has really taken off already, just on Android. Today all day we've had over 100 players at a time consistently. That's nuts! A real testament to Seth's network code that it functions so well through the craziness.

P.S. I have a few more iTunes promo codes if you want to play it on iOS right now... WJYAWJYJXRTH - JETFXRXFTAX6 - FHKYPHYAYERX - Grab one and say you got it in the comments so nobody else tries to take it! You just click on Redeem in the iTunes store and enter that code.
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  Looking Forward to 2013 02:41 PM -- Tue January 1, 2013  

So the game market is a terrible mess. What do I intend to do about it in the coming year? I'm not sure. For the most part, it's a catch-22: I don't have the resources to spend time on a large game and take the chance that it might be a hit (a slim chance, in my experience). Yet plugging away on little games doesn't seem to be breaking me out of the rut. For a couple years now, our savings have depleted (sometimes very fast, thanks to dog cancer) bit by bit, and we're heading toward a real deadline where there's just nothing left and something has to give. That deadline is in a lot less than a year, by my calculations. So whatever happens in the coming year, something is definitely going to happen.

That thing might be me getting a job. I don't know how to get a job, and I certainly don't want to get a job, but that's one way to return to stability for sure.

That thing might be the magic of Growtopia exceeding my wildest dreams and actually making life comfortable for the first time since the 90's when playing in the stock market was just plain free money. That seems like a nicer thing, but also not the most plausible.

As far as an actual strategy going forward, it's called throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don't feel like I have any grasp on how this business works these days, and every bit of success I've had in 5 or more years has always been based on a random opportunity that cropped up because of something I did. So if I do a lot of somethings, then a lot of opportunities should randomly appear, and that should turn out well. That's the theory.

These are the actual plans for the year to do this throwing of everything:
  • First, I'm participating in One Game A Month, more as an inspiration than a hard-and-fast rule. I will definitely try to release some new game each month.

  • Second, there's Growtopia of course, which is my January release, and I'll be continuing to update that throughout the year.

  • Third, I'm making Dr. Exploro (hopefully my February release), and I actually plan to make 2 versions - one is the level-editor-focused fast-action game I have mostly finished, and then I hope to later on do a Robot Wants Kitty type Metroidvania thing with it, something where you explore different tombs and then buy better powers at your archaeology camp in order to be able to explore them further.

  • Fourth, I may be doing more Boys' Life games if the opportunity arises. We'll see about that.

  • Fifth, I'm hoping that Raptisoft will finish the project he's been working on for a year or more and get back to Robot Wants Puppy iPhone! That's extra nice because I don't have to do the work, he does.

  • Sixth, I'm going to attend GDC in March, which I hear is full of random opportunities and inspiration.

  • Seventh, I would like to sit down and make something in Unity. How many years have I wanted to do that? Learning always seems like too much time away from actual productivity, but if you never take time for it, you're still making DOS games!

  • Eighth, I have the crazy notion of trying a Kickstarter at some point. I think the gold rush there is long past, but it's free to try, if you're willing to spare the time. The idea of knowing in advance that the money is there to pay living expenses for the year it would take would make creating something like Dr. Lunatic 3 or Loonyland 3 a perfectly reasonable opportunity instead of a suicidal gamble. The catch here of course is that you need a big fanbase to begin with to actually put in the money... and apparently a lot of free time to run the Kickstarter. It is no hands-off money machine. So to even do this, I'd have to be financially comfortable enough to take the time off to set it up. Irony!

  • Ninth, I intend to find a way (still working on it) to cut games partially out of my life. Instead of going workworkwork,gamegamegame,sleepsleepsleep, it would be nice to reclaim that spare time and put it to creative pursuits. Not more work, but more worthwhile time-usage than playing games. Creativity, exercise, family, education.

  • Tenth, specifically, I'd like to spend some of that time pursuing an education, most likely in business, so that I have some clue how to run one. It might be useful information if I were to, for example, attempt to run a business of some type.

  • And lastly, I know that no plan ever survives contact with a new year. Mysteries will abound in 2013, and I will pursue them if they seem promising. I don't know what I'll have done by the end of this year, but I can declare with near-certainty that it won't be what I have in mind. Every year is like that: new opportunities, projects that fail and require reevaluation, personal crises, and just plain surprises. You can't plan a whole year, so I'm just taking it a week at a time. This week, I work on Growtopia.
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  Looking Back At 2012 07:22 PM -- Mon December 31, 2012  

Well, this is the last day! I had to throw out my Page-A-Day calendar, and I'm very sad about it. It was all logic puzzles.

Here's all the stuff Hamumu released in 2012: 11 games ported to the Blackberry Playbook and OS10 (a couple are actually ridiculous new games, including one that has yet to be approved - check them all out here); Nikki Neigh and Tricky Trey finally came out publicly; Scouts Vs. Aliens, Pedro Kicks Back, and Dredd Speed all came out on the Boys' Life website; Made 4 "Pirate Kart" games live on film; released SpaceManiac's updated versions of Dr. Lunatic Supreme With Cheese, and Sleepless Hollow (both still beta today though!); and Indiebusked the very unique Sneaky Brats multiplayer game.

I also worked on a bunch of stuff that isn't yet released - Witch Game, NPC Quest 2, Growtopia, and Dr. Exploro are the ones I can remember offhand.

So, not a lot of chance of income from all that. I got paid for the Boys' Life games, and I made a couple bucks for Nikki Neigh and Sneaky Brats, and I will in theory receive a little money from the blackberry ports (I've already made $11 from sales of those! WHOO). But overall, this was not a money-making year. Which is generally a problem. NPC Quest 2 was intended as my "if this doesn't make me a living, I have to quit" project, but it turned out that I needed money I didn't have in the first place to create it. Now I think Growtopia has taken its place, so let's hope that works out really really well.

This year has been smack-dab in the "blah" column. I like the games I made (the three Boy Scout ones... other than that I only made tiny jam games!), and I'm really excited about Growtopia, but the indie world has become increasingly locked off, and I'm on the wrong side of the door. What it's really become is increasingly unindie - nobody except a select few is making it in an actual independent fashion, it's all about Kickstarter, Steam/Greenlight, iTunes, and a dozen other little app stores here and there. Selling on your own website, which used to be my entire purpose in life, has basically ended. Things are actually spiraling even further in dark directions for indies (hello Windows 8), and at a faster pace all the time. I saw Terraria on the Steam sale for $3.39 and thought "That's perfect research for Growtopia... but that's a bit too pricey for me." We are really far down that rabbit hole people! I don't know where it comes out, and I don't really think anybody does. This industry is changing faster than ever before, and I hope it all comes out well, but right now, it's a tough nut to crack. And any cracking you do is only valid for a couple months before the rules change again. It scares me!

But I guess that's more future talk than past. And that's what I'm gonna blog about tomorrow, when a wild new year appears!
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  Growtopia Teaser Trailer 09:59 PM -- Thu December 20, 2012  


The Growtopia teaser is here! We also finally have a fully functional (well, good enough) website at growtopiagame.com. The game is still in beta and is set to be officially released on January 11th on Android, iOS, and webOS. But you can play it right now on Android in a very fun beta format. The link is on the website. This game is... really unique! It should appeal to the Dr. Lunatic crowd, because it's just a whole lot of random stuff and you can build it however you want. We've got a ton more crazy ideas to throw in there, so keep an eye on it as it continues to update and expand.
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  It's the 17th somewhere on earth... 06:36 PM -- Sun December 16, 2012  

Which means Advent Of Indies has opened day 17 on its calendar. Why don't you take a peek and see what lurks inside!
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  Lotsa Game Making 07:34 PM -- Wed December 12, 2012  

Boy, I'm gonna be doing a "End of the year" post sometime soon, and talk all about where Hamumu is and where it's (hopefully?) going. But for now, let me just quickly dash out some info on quick fun things going on right about now:

This Friday begins another Blackberry Port-A-Thon. I kinda ran out of things to port after the last one, but I'm thinking since a couple of the games I ported (which were accepted!) were Pirate Kart games I made in 2 hours, I can "port" games I haven't made yet! It'll be another fun round of cranking out mini games. I don't actually know how that will go, but isn't life always an adventure?

What's that you say? There's something more important you should be spending your time on this weekend? Why it's Ludum Dare 25, also starting this Friday! Join in and make a game based on [THEME]! Why, [THEME] is the most interesting topic of all. I like every game about [THEME]. You could also vote on the themes, but make sure you vote for [THEME], it's got to win!!

And not at all this Friday, 2013 kicks off with a bang (and continues to bang and/or kick at a steady pace) thanks to One Game A Month, a really really self-explanatory indie game development commitment. I've signed up. I haven't really considered if it's something I'm going to try to do, I just didn't want to miss out on the early adopter XP. XP is always good to have.

On a final note: Growtopia now includes a complete Santa outfit, and the Sack O' Joy is the first clothing item in the game to possess special powers.
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