Another busy day today, building the first Future Snooker and Future Pool games for Steam, and testing. All has worked well and have added lots more features to Future Pool including the Fast A.I. play option that was present in Future Snooker. I've also added French and German text to the stores, largely using Google Translate, darting the text to and from each language back and forth to check it. A check on the French Wikipedia revealed that 8 ball pool is called Blackball in France, and 8-Ball with a hyphen in Germany.
The most annoying aspect of programming nowadays, something that never happened 10 years ago when I used to develop games, is the eternal problem of my games being blocked by anti-virus software. Each new build is auto-deleted and locked away by my anti-virus software and I need to verify it and check it every time, which involves an hour wait. Apart from that, everything seems to have worked to plan and both games are very good to play.
I did think that perhaps my store graphics don't really do justice to the games. Is it apparent that these games are snooker or pool games at all, apart from the text? I recall the old Arkanoid box artwork and think that I should have done something like that instead. It's a bit late to change things now, as most of the work of the past week has been making these graphics, the 20-30 different images that are variations of them.
Testing underway. I'm keen to move on as, however proud I am of these games, they are ignored by the world like most of my creations and might be a waste of my time. The process also makes me sick and anxious. My stomach is locked like a vice, as though I've eaten concrete, and I've not felt hungry for days. I feel weak, have palpitations and prickly skin, dizzy spells, can barely sleep, and my skin is turning white and vampirish. This is the sickness of the programmer. I can only cope with a few days of this at once.
It is important that I do my best however, and make games of good quality, so on I must push at optimal speed.
