Friday, April 21, 2017

Living an entrepreneur life! What's it all about.



Ok I won't talk anything about games or apps but the lifestyle itself. To tell the truth I haven't been working at a company as full time almost more than a year because the company I was working closed. The economy is not so great in my country recently and the wages are way too low also plus I haven't been lucky enough to find the job that I seek.

Anyways since then I have been working and struggling on game making for mobiles around a year and things are almost going the way I wanted to go but still I am at a better position than I expected. I was right and it wasn't always good to trust the job you are working full time. anything could happen and it happened, I was jobless. So the below links were what I had in those times with me.


https://itunes.apple.com/tr/developer/volkan-kutlubay/id927603440

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Volkan+Kutlubay&hl=en

https://videohive.net/user/volkankutlubay/portfolio


Ok what you do if you are your own boss and especially if you don't have an office to go. Work from home?? I tell you a big NO! If I had the enough resource I would definitely rent a small office even a very small one just because to get my self out home and go there. But until then I go to a nearest cafe around me actually both pictures in my previous posts are shot in there. Yes the one 2 years ago and the one 2 days ago LOL. Nothing has changed then only I had full time job 2 years ago.

What you need to do as a freelancer is you need to create the illusion of leaving your house and going to a full time job for yourself. If you can make some sports in morning go to a walk or jogging. But if you are someone like me thinking bout work a lot you won't be doing that but get to work as fast as you can. So Go out and even home is the only place you can work at, go out first for an half hour walk then come back home. And even at home don't take out your shoes if you can and work like that just like at office. This is very crucial for your psychology. If you can work from your laptop like me go to a nearest cafe around you and work there. Put on those earphones and get to work.

Since I have been a 3d animator for around 15 years and because of the nature of the work I always worked at night time until the morning that was the only way. I continued to do that when I was working on my own but I realised that is not healthy after a year. I put on around 10 kilos and it was in short time by the way. I also got married which put another responsibility in my life. So working alone can be really alone sometimes and you can get into depression. Working at an office sometimes is the thing I miss you know. Even I went to my friend's office yesterday and I saw the office environment I told him "this environment made me feel good". I love socialising by the way going out having beers dancing etc. I am a person of people not anti social so this thing working alone hit me hard. Besides all, my wife is a great person and she supports me all the time so just wanted to mention her so you don't misunderstand from what I wrote above.

Anyways what I did was I changed my programme and now I try to wake up early in the morning. My daily work routine goes like this.

Wake up at 6:30

Get Ready and take my Mac Book Pro

Go to a nearest Cafe

Get breakfast and start working while munching on my breakfast.

Change the office on different days so I go some other shopping malls with my computer which helps me to shift my ideas and thoughts.

Also meet with my friends at lunch time to have lunch which is the most important thing.

Most important to the above is I try to stay healty. I am on a diet right now trying to loose weight and also I go to the park close to my house 3 times a week. There I do jogging and some other physical exercises. Making Sports relaxes me a lot.

The main thing is while we are working we shouldn't forget that we are a human being at the end and we should live our life as we work. I realised I was pushing too hard on my self since I am working on a game which I will send to a publisher which put on me like triple stress.

I make the graphics on my own. I design the levels and plus you need to design between 92 and 100 scenes in a randomised game so the levels won't repeat themselves. Yes the game is a randomised game but also I am planning to add like achievable levels so the player will decide which way to go. I really hope this one gets accepted by publishers. I am going the publisher route this time since I can concentrate on 1 thing at a time and I concentrate on game making which is what I want to do already.

WHAT TO DO?

Ok I will share some other things on what you can do not to feel lonely when working alone as a freelancer. The below list are some ideas I though about so if you have other strategies you are doing as a freelance please share with me.


  • Go out socialise more.
  • Meet with your old colleagues as much as you can and share your current work with them take your ideas.
  • Enjoy what you are doing don't out force yourself but please don't be lazy at the same time. WORK BUDDY WORK!
  • Use Social Media as much as you can related to your work. In my case it is app business and I socialise a lot at a facebook group called BlueCloudSelect created by Carter Thomas.
  • Try to network with other people if you can.
  • You can also start a small consultancy firm to help people with a small amount of money which can help you to get to know other entrepreneurs. Remember the more you help the more you win always!
  • You can start a youtube channel related with your business and share your knowledge. Or do some other crazy stuff in front of camera and at the same time promote your products or even other people's products.
Ok the most important of all is try to grow on what you know. I realised long ago that if you are bored at what you are doing this means your stuff is boring so you need to find ways to make it interesting. Why you get bored is because you are learning and growing as you work on something so your previous  knowledge is not satisfactory and since there is no one around you that you can learn it is all up to you. So self improve try to be more creative. One thing on game making; If your game is getting repetitive  try to add a few extra different enemies there it will just cheer up the game. Also try to add different challenges to those characters. Remember that annoying fishing dude on the cloud in Super Mario? Who could forget that you know. Just be creative and remember your job is to entertain and Game comes first nothing else.

Enjoy your work guys and live fully to the most with high energy. Make Sports, it is a great meditation for finding new ideas.

Happy Creating

Volkan

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Moving on with Buildbox


Hi All,

It has been like 2 years since I last posted and many things have changed since then. I published a lot of games which you can check below and I would like summarise what happened during that time.

https://itunes.apple.com/tr/developer/volkan-kutlubay/id927603440

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Volkan+Kutlubay&hl=en

So I published a lot of games but didn't get enough return from all of them to tell the truth. Only 1 game which I have worked on that around 6 months called "Ninja Kid vs Zombies" somehow got famous at Google Play Only and now the total download numbers are above 100.000. That was a big surprise for me. But the funny thing is those download numbers didn't affect the number of installs at iTunes. Funny tough still I can say not too much revenue is coming from "Ninja Kid vs Zombies" at iTunes so we can say that one app store doesn't help the other in terms of promotion.You can check the game both in Android and iTunes below.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.touchnfun.ninjakid

https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/ninja-kid-vs-zombies-8-bit-retro-game/id1005826249?mt=8

What happened this year is I switched to another game engine called Buildbox. I never thought I would do that because of the price of it. It is 99$ per month subscription model and yes it might sound quite expensive when you hear the price but it is worth it believe me.

I was against it at first I always wrote to facebook posts like you don't need to pay that much use Construct 2 instead blah blah beause Construct 2 was my first Game Engine. It was dynamite by the way it is a great game making tool the only flaw is it is designed more for HTML. So when you start getting into publishing mobile you always have problems with plugins etc. and I actually created Ninja Kid with Construct 2. So I actually owe Construct2 a lot and I can say it is great only I needed something which I had to create a game fast. And there Buildbox came to my life. I said that's it and since I am not a programmer I will go with Buildbox. I will tell more about Buildbox in my other blogs but all I can say it is a simple drag and drop 2D Game Making Tool pure without programming knowledge. Check the official website here.

https://www.buildbox.com/

WHY BUILDBOX?

Ok what happened with Buildbox is I started to concentrate more on Game Design because I wasn't doing any virtual coding and checking if the system works or not etc. so I started to add some tricks to my games which I didn't do before. So instead of solving Problems you concentrate more on designing games which is the most important thing.


Buildbox is really dynamic and you can see the results of your game design in seconds simply by hitting the play tool. And what is great is you see the way it will look in an iPhone6 or iPad etc. It opens up the preview screen with the right proportions so you see how everything will look before exporting and running the game in your device. So this was like a big WOW from me when I saw that. 

Also I realised I learned more on game design because the community was great and helpful and also I saw that most Apple Featured games were actually created with Buildbox. Some major Ketchapp games like Phases, The Line Zen and The Pit were created by Trey Smith who is the owner of Buildbox so actually he created this software to make games and send them to publishers but later decided to sell the software as well. And of course we shouldn't forget the famous game "Color Switch" was created with Buildbox.

You can check the games I created with Buildbox Below.

iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/hopper-steve-platformer-games-in-adventure-world/id1162261386?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/stack-emoji-hopper-game-emoji-popping-mania/id1212310916?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/hero-jump-quest-3d-arcade-hopper-game/id1168406530?mt=8

Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.volkan.codenamejackson

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.volkankutlubay.herojump

So what happens is you just urge to be a part of this community and the way I look at 99$ is like paying the rent of your office. 

PUBLISHING THROUGH PUBLISHERS

Why publish through a Publisher while you could get the whole Pie right? Well for now as many of you might realise the competition is way high for us Indie game developers to compete. Still there are ways and even tough Trey Smith himself says that ASO is dead I still see some people around me getting success by using ASO. But for now I just shifted my concentration from Marketing and all other things but to pure game making and this is what Publishing through Publishers is all about. YOU JUST CONCENTRATE ON GAME MAKING!

I also personally think it is a good challenge as well because sending your game to Big Publishers like Ketchapp, Noodlecake Studios or Appsolute games etc. can teach you a lot of things. Because I am sure they will ask for revisions and what I see is you and the Publisher work on the game together after they accept your game and you polish your own game with their Advice. It might sound scary but look from this point of view. You learn Game Design from The Big Guys! How Cool is that you know!

I never sent any of my games to a publisher but I am working on one of them right now and trying to polish it as much as I can. When my game is ready I will send it to Publishers and see if it will be accapted or not. What I heard is most of the time you get a Publishing deal, you send them the game, they Publish under their name and with your Logo below (check Ketchapp games) and you split the revenue. 

Anyways that's it for today and I will write some more later. Until then please check some Ketchapp games and also other Arcade Games which you think you might create and check yourself how would you go about creating that game and send it to a Publisher. 

So see you soon and Happy Game Making

Volkan

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