iQuest #6: How's it going?

So here's what's up with me. I've been steadily working, but I don't have any kind of consumer previews right now. It's all code, notes and concept sketches at the moment. Progress has been especially slow lately because of school and college applications and things. My mentor and my small team of online friends are the only people involved with development. I haven't been in contact with my mentor much though because I don't really have any questions or concerns for him that I can't answer myself. As for my location, all programming and design takes place in the workplace of course! (AKA my super pro room.)

Recently I have been programming my tool I worked on previously called Brawlbox. I am charging people for features they want me to add to it. Because Brawlbox is used by a lot of people and I'm one of the only people who can quickly and effectively add things to it, I've actually made quite a bit of money on that so far. I only intend for this to be a way to make money on the side, though.

There are a few things I'm still frustrated about. I wish I had an internship working in an actual professional workplace so I could be exposed to that kind of environment. I have no idea of the demands and workflow in the game industry. I'm also frustrated with time. I never have enough of it. It honestly doesn't surprise me when I read about employees of small startup game companies working constantly day and night to get a project done.

If I said I learned anything new about myself or about game development so far thanks to iQuest, I think it would be a lie. I've been programming for five years and writing my game for one; it's nothing new.

I'm on vacation right now so I can't snap a pic of myself hard at work just yet, so here's a picture inside my monster of a computer I just recently built for gaming and development.

iQuest #5: Research Project

I have chosen to research Shigeru Miyamoto for my research project. He is the creator of major franchises like Mario and Zelda and is the head of a branch of Nintendo. I chose to research him because he had and still has such a large influence over the gaming industry even today. You could say he's one of the founding fathers of modern games, as many of his franchises and innovations are still around today as a part of Nintendo's history.

I want to learn what he drew inspiration from for his franchises, why his games are as interesting and fun to play as they've proven to be, and what his process is for innovation. His franchises/games are able to appeal to almost any age group and I think that's a much larger achievement than people understand. When you try to appeal to many demographics at once, you have to cater the content so each demographic can understand or relate. Doing that without negatively affecting another demographic and without making the content itself too generic and unoriginal is an overwhelming task that I hope I can achieve with my games. I don't want to create a franchise that has a very specific audience and doesn't change much at all through each game to appeal to fans of different gameplay styles, but I also don't want to create a game full of boring graphics and an unrelatable storyline just because I need it to be easily moldable to the audience I want to target. Miyamoto's work is something that I can study and learn from, and that's why I chose him to research.