September 2019 Review

timbeaudet

  • Total income: $290.60 without personal investments
  • Total income: $3677.63 with personal investments
  • Total expenses: $636.97 + unspecified amount
  • Total hours: 133.50

September was the first month of the year that did not exceed the hours of the previous month. At 133 hours a sweet spot was reached in September that lies between 100 and 150 hours for a month. Early in the month efforts were spent preparing to pitch

Turbo Boom! to publishers. This involved the follow tasks:

  • Creating more polished levels
  • Taking great screenshots
  • Writing and polishing the pitch deck
  • Creating a press-kit
  • Writing the actual pitch email All of this material has to be fine tuned to be attention grabbing in the first moments while still being informative. Considering I had 5 or 6 responses, some with reasonable content, it makes me feel the pitch was actually looked at. Financially September was costly with Turbo Boom! upgrades for the vertical slice build that occurred at the start of the month. This included music, sound effects, shader upgrades, levels and a

teaser video. September was a higher than typical month for non-personal income as well, I think some remnants of the birthday month bash and 24-hour stream played into this with a delayed twitch payout. For a more detailed breakdown of finances, support Tim Beaudet on Patreon

After the publisher pitch was completed and sent it was time to begin focusing on levels and content for Turbo Boom! Time to get the game complete with a horizontal slice being due October 15th. Dizzy changed schedules late in the month which at first glance allowed significantly more time for indie developments. However this change has caused some sleep upsets; some mornings have been missed entirely, and many others with very late arrivals. My general mood has sunk drastically, perhaps another cause of sleep issues. The mood sink is most-likely caused by creativity drainage with level creation; creating levels that are somewhat unique from one another, simple but challenging, and keeping the player engaged has been difficult to say the least. Still random experiments in what works and doesn’t. The Alakajam event was used to create new levels and some creativity was inspired by the theme, “Towers”. This resulted in at least a few fun levels. The autocross level inspired by Aliske was also pretty fun and different, if a bit more difficult to create.

What was Learned

Mind the Pressures of Streaming Streaming 98% or more of my indie adventure is nice for viewers and sharing all the ins and outs of being an indie game dev. However some things are super boring to stream, like sending pitch emails for 3 hours. The problem, at least with a full-time job and other life requirements while streaming as much as I do, is I procrastinated and never sent the pitch follow-up emails due to the boring content and not exactly making time off stream.

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