Hey there lovely people, its been about a month and a half since I launched Speed Squared. 

I've had multiple hotfix updates, learned about the speed-running community and even found out that my game was stolen!

A lot has happened and now with the holidays out of the way I think its time I share some of what happened and what I've been thinking lately.

Some good things happened!

A couple of days before I released the game I decided to try a more scattershot approach to publishing my game by releasing in 3 different platforms, which has been a very very interesting experiment. 

Itch.io

Itch.io hit the ground running, I made it to the first page of platformer tag and new and popular for the first couple of days. This was very surprising and I managed to accumulate about 1.7k views, 70 downloads and about 1.1k browser plays in the first two weeks, after that it dropped really really hard to about 16 views per week. 

Considering the amount of projects that are uploaded to this platform everyday and how popular it is, its no surprise it went down hard relatively fast. 

Game Jolt

I remember having my first approach to indie games through this Game Jolt back in 2012-2013 and discovering a bunch of creators I still follow to this day. I was excited to come back and finally release something there feeling like "Look mom I made it! I'm a real gamedev now!" but found out a very different platform from what I remember.  Today's Game Jolt is much more focused of a social media site for fan creators and less for smaller indies, it looks like a nice community but I honestly don't have the energy to deal with making a name in another social media platform. 

Speed Squared in Game Jolt was definitely a blunder, as for January 20th I've gotten 186 views total and 2 favorites so... yeah. 

Gx Games

GX Games on the other hand had a slower start than itch.io but it managed to keep a longer tail, it peaked at 192 player on its second week and after that it fell down but kept an average 60 daily sessions. I didn't have much faith on this platform but I'm noticing that this one might bring the most visibility to my games. 

But a couple of weeks after I wrote that last part I noticed that I started getting more and more users on GX Games suddenly jumping from 68 average plays to 622 and rising every day this week. I've been very confused about this because I honestly thought the game was done at this point and I stopped promoting it out there.

What has happened that brought all this attention to this game and on this platform so suddenly? I wondered as I opened Opera GX and saw their GX corner. 

This page is the default home page when using the Opera GX browser, it features gaming news, releases and promotes their own online game platform GX Games. What this means is that Speed Squared is being put in front of (potentially) 30 million opera GX users out there. WHAT?!

And on top of that currently speed squared has been played for a total of 8 months, I feel kind of humbled about this, thank you so much.

A community spawned (?)

A couple of days after publishing the game I was approached by a group of folks that were playing Speed Squared in a more competitive way, they made the speedrun.com page for the game and a discord server to discuss speed running. 

This is definitely something I didn't expect to happen and had to do a lot of adjustments to the game after receiving all their feedback on the game and the speedrun platform but I must say it was awesome talking to these guys about optimizing runs and getting WR.

Post your runs here: https://www.speedrun.com/Speed2

Join the discord server here: https://discord.gg/nRJU4CpU

So guys thank you a lot!.

Things I learned

Definitely Speed Squared has been a teaching experience for me about how game maker studio works and finishing a game, lemme tell you about what I learned and some problems I faced.

Start working with version control

As much as I hate Git command lines and some of its weird behaviour, it definitely saved my ass multiple times during this project. If you use git and don't want to deal with the more complicated stuff I would recommend you to use the github desktop app, its pretty much fool-proof and hides a lot of the moon-runes from you. 

I assure you, you'll fuck up something in your project at some point and will need to go back to a previous state, I remember re-doing all the player character like 4  times and was able to do this safely only because I had older commits to go back to. 

At some point I even branched the code to experiment on the GUI, when that was finished I merged back to master and my game was always safe.

This was the right move!

Whatever you do, your game must ALWAYS be in a shippable state

This was my mantra during the whole project! 

For example, after I finished the first version of the player character and the spikes I started making levels in the objective of polishing this two mechanics as much as possible before moving to the next thing, when I finished I had 8 levels focused only on these mechanics and even though short, it was a complete experience. 

This thinking pulled me in a direction that allowed me to focus in what the game was about from the beginning and every time I thought about a new mechanic I accompanied it with a set of levels that allowed me to explore those mechanics as much as possible. 

I think this went right!

Screen resolution / window size

If you're making a 2d game for the love of god make sure you choose the right screen resolution and make sure you match your window size to it. This was going to be just a little experiment so I didn't put a lot of thought about how the game was going to look in full screen and I chose a kinda random resolution of 640x380 and built the game around it. This was a mistake because the proportions are not the same of a 16:9 screen and because of it being so low, most of my more detailed assets and fonts lost a bunch of quality. 

This is why the logo at the beginning looks so pixelated. 

This could have gone better.

Making GUI is hard man

I'm not proud of my GUI work for this game lmao. 

The GUI tools from Game Maker Studio are not the best in my opinion, there's a lot of features that I'm used to work with in Unity or even Unreal which don't even exist here so there is a lot of coding, tweaking and adjusting that needs to be done by hand.

My game wasn't about its GUI so I didn't spend to much time here but I think I definitely need to study more how this thing works in Game Maker.

BTW doing keyboard/controller GUI navigation was an absolute pain in the ass, 0/10 I hated it.

If your game is free it is gonna get stolen

Sadly I found my game's online version uploaded to multiple sites and monetizing it through ads without my consent . 

Minijuegos and Miniplay are the worse offenders.

 What makes me the most angry about this is that not only they stole the game and monetized it but they didn't even bother to adjust their iframe to fit the game and their whole "achievements" system is doing weird stuff to the game causing it to restart and making the players lose their progress. Their meddling in my game led to a much worse experience for the players.

I never implemented a save system for the webGL version of the game for a reason, I'm very clear about this in the description of the game and provide a link to the downloadable version that does have it. These players would know that if they played my game on my website.

How does this happen? from which one of the three platforms I published did this build get leaked? If you have any idea about this I would appreciate any help!

Whelp if you made it all the way down here, thank you for reading, play Speed Squared if you haven't already and comment down below if you want to share some of your experiences!

See ya next time!