Hello everyone. It’s certainly been months since the last blog post. Between enjoying holidays, then being busy as we return, to falling ill somewhere in the middle… I haven’t got time to make blog posts. With SparkLine v1.5.0 released a week ago, I finally have the time to blog again. We really do have a lot to write about.
This post title is as generic as it gets. No witty title to think about at the moment.
It finally arrives, 3 months since the last update featuring the Orzmic collaboration! Let me list you all the things we have changed:
There were certainly more changes we’d like to provide, but that’s more than enough for a single version update. This may not be the update with most songs added (1.3.0 takes that cake) but it’s certainly our biggest one yet. At this point, we can consider that SparkLine’s technical development to be almost complete. The occasional bugfixes aside, we’ll just be updating content (songs).
This post was supposed to be published before SparkLine 1.5.1 (bringing mostly QoL stuff and bugfixes) is released, but here we go.
It has been 7 months since we released SparkLine and ultimately, there are things that worked out… and there are things that didn’t. Ironically, where other games get progressively harder, SparkLine is getting easier to play. The introduction of Simple Mode will be where SparkLine’s long-term future will be. New charts (especially normal and hard ones) are made for that mode.
Another important thing to note is to have a team that can cover all angles required. Up to v1.5.0, I was the UI designer so you can imagine that it wasn’t the best. I was also doing that in addition to a lot of things (charting, coding, UI implementation, etc) so ultimately, some parts ended up had to be brought up to standard in later versions of the game.
I am happy that there are people who like the previous UI but I think today’s UI is a lot better. It’s certainly more thematically consistent, at least.
Place people in roles where they excel best, and whatever they do there is probably better than a generalist that had to work on many roles (like myself up until quite recently).
Taking the theme of this year – The Year of the Dragon, let’s talk metaphorically a bit.
Let’s not mince words – we are still a Koi Fish in the big pond called the gaming industry. In Pokemon terms, we are a Magikarp. In Yakuza terms… oh boy, do I have a lot of memes to show you. It has been 19 months since WizDream Games is founded, with SparkLine developed some time before that by myself.
As you can see in the section above, it’s probably not the wisest decision to start making a game yourself and building the team midway through. We can’t turn back the clock, so perhaps we had to stumble and learn things the hard way first.
Today, we are a team of 7 internally (including myself), with many additions being recent ones. In addition to this, there are also people working with us on a freelance basis. I do less things overall but nonetheless, my responsibility is only increasing.
For one, there are more mouths to feed. But more importantly, these new members of the team decided to entrust their present and future to us. Of course we can’t let them down.
If we make a new game today, it starts from a team of 7 instead of 1. That is of course a huge head start compared to the days before. Will it be enough to finally climb the metaphorical waterfall? I think yes.
From SparkLine, we gained so much invaluable experience and it’d be a shame if we never get to apply it. This of course, means that we are working on new projects! I can’t wait to show you what we have been working on, but maybe we can announce it in 2-3 months time. That’s about all I can say for it at the moment, so stay tuned for further info!
This unfortunately means that updates on SparkLine will slow down as we divert our resources to said new project. We do have some good news for SparkLine itself, but I’ll wait until we have something to show before I say it.
It feels like a new era is dawning upon us… We’ll move at our own pace towards the promised land.