I certainly can't blame you there. I've gotta say, it's a rewarding experience, but it is a lot of hard work. It's going to be exciting when we finally ship it to the eShop and have people playing it. I'm really hoping people enjoy it and help support Chessa and I doing this again for a more traditional game.
No doubt, development in general is full of surprises. Once you think you've nailed something down, something always seems to spring up and force you to make changes.
A big adjustment for me with this game is the finality of it all. Once I release it, it's done. I can patch it and stuff, but it's a shoipped product. Everything I've ever worked on is a living piece of software that's maintained and improved over time. It's going to be stressful to arrive at a point where I consider something good enough to go to prod forever.
I think that's a pre-Wii U launch dev kit. I can't really describe or take a picture of mine due to an NDA I signed with Nintendo, but if you dig around you'll find what you're looking for.
It'll be an interesting future for sure. Unfortunatel,y focusing on the game has hurt the site more recently because I haven't had much time for PixlBit proper. I'll be looking for a way to amend that soon though so that both can prosper going forward, or even better, be enriched by the co-existence.
Haha, don't worry Joaquim, the reviews will be great. I'll use my mad-industry connections and ask them to do me a favor and score PixlCross 6/5 stars!
But seriously, I'll hook you up with a download code for being the best Media Manager around.
Chessa is definitely more the creative type, so she's focused on making all of the puzzles, doing the visual design for the user interface, playtesting all the puzzles she makes, ranking and grouping all of the puzzles and ensuring that the game "feels" good in general (aka, Quality Assurance).
As you mentioned, I'm doing all of the programming. I set up the web site, configured the dev kit, handled all of the "paperwork" with Nintendo, and have done all of the research on how to move forward with releasing the game.
Thus far it's been a great split of the responsibilities. She gets stuff done that I'm not interested in doing and vice versa. I assume that when we move on to our next game, I'll play more of an active role in the design aspect of it since all of the legwork around publishing will be a known quantity and the dev kit is already all set up and ready to roll.
You know, I really don't think I'd be that angry if people pirated the game we made. Maybe if we weren't making any money at all I would, but I'm guessing most people who steal this stuff weren't going to buy it to begin with.
And of course this is the real Wii U system seller. You watch, after PixlCross hits the eShop, those Wii Us are going to start flying off the shelves :)
We're huge fans of Nonogram games which was part of the reason we decided to make one ourselves. If you do manage to grab a Wii U and play it, we'll be excited to hear your thoughts!
We're totally stoked. It was unreal opening up the box from Nintendo with a dev kit inside. Going to be even crazier when it's done and released. Can't wait!
Sounds great, thanks Peter!
