IMakeLittleWorlds

Thanks! A lot of people outside the industry seem to have this rockstar conception of what it's like making games. The reality is that I spend a lot of my day looking at spreadsheets, or doing the same action 50 times in a row to try to track down a bug. My job is not glamorous, it's intensely hard work. I love it (I wouldn't be doing it otherwise!), but just because you enjoy playing games doesn't mean you'd enjoy making games.

The game has taken about a year so far to develop. I'm the only full-time member of the team, and I do all the design, development, bizdev, most of the marketing, etc. I have 5 or so part-time folks that do art, audio and community management. I can't draw for beans, so you wouldn't want to see what the game looked like if I was doing the art :)

The process was actually pretty straightforward. There's a lot of potential for integration that we haven't taken advantage of yet (like trading cards), but the basic process of getting the game set up for sale was fortunately very doable.

Yup! We're still considering what things will be the best fit, but I already have plenty of ideas for trading cards :)

The game was actually developed in Unity using a visual scripting plugin called Playmaker. I don't actually know how to program, but tools like Playmaker let folks like me make games! The game is basically a bunch of elaborate flowcharts. It's pretty awesome that we live an a time where that is possible.

Thank you! I got some really amazing advice from a teacher about the tutorial. Tutorials are always hard, but trying to make them for kids is a difficulty multiplier. The teacher told me about a teaching strategy called "I do, we do, you do." It's pretty straightforward - when you want to teach a new concept you first show how to do it (I do), then do it together (we do), then let the kid do it on their own (you do). That framework really helped me structure the tutorial in a way that seems to be working very nicely.

Ah, the joys of being a woman in the games industry.