TL;DR

Who: Franklin Zheng, 28 year old Software Dev who is making his first published hobby game

What: Random thoughts about developing a hobby game, sorted by tags

Where: Right here! And at https://betakyros.github.io/Meexarps/

When: Once or twice a week, 30-60 min of writing per post

Why: Marketing and education

Hello, my name is Franklin Zheng. I’m working on a game called Meexarps, a Jackbox style game that focuses on learning about your friends. The idea for this blog started because well, to be frank, I decided to do some marketing. I also feel strongly that in order to pay for your attention, I should offer you something of equal value to the ad that you’re seeing. Watching a couple indie game marketing videos, they emphasize that the game itself is supposed to make the ad worth it. But honestly I don’t feel that way yet ><.

Anyway, this first post will serve as a table of contents for future blog posts. I’d love to hear some feedback on individual posts, as well as what you’d be interested in reading about! Please comment below! I’ll also jump around depending on what I feel like writing about. 

1. Why me? What do I have to offer you?
2. Why Meexarps?
3. Deciding a theme from gameplay mechanics
4. Core Values and how to apply it to game dev 
5. Why make games? Content creators vs content consumers
6. Getting people to work for you for free (not just for games!)
7. Solo Deving, some lessons learned
8. Making your first “game” vs making your “first” game (making projects for fun vs making projects to publish)
9. Backend vs UX vs UI (from a backend dev point of view)
10. Leadership (How the idea of servant leadership helped frame my relationship to my volunteers)
11. Managing motivation (spoiler alert: discipline and compliments)
12. Developing a multiplayer game
13. Taking shortcuts
14. How to name a game
15. How to work with your friends
16. Cutting scope
17. Deleting features :(