Devlog 10

Business

For the business side of the game, lots has changed!

Firstly, I got accepted into TUDublin New Frontiers, an incubator program for businesses that aids them to develop their ideas and set up the basics. This means I have classes every few weekends where I head to Tallaght to meet with other entrepreneurs in order to make contacts and get my business commercial ready.
This affects Next Day! as if I get into phase 2 of the program, then I will be given 6 months worth of wages; these wages will allow me to work on the game fulltime until the kickstarter. 

It also aids me in developing Clarke Games, which is the company that is going to release Next Day! and helps set up the background work to make everything official. Through the program, I made contacts in other game studios and opened up avenues, such as meeting with investors and people in the film industry who have ideas for games.

Art

The art has gotten a major upgrade!

I found a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium for cheap on Done Deal and decided to buy it. This means I can digitally draw and make far better and more detailed art! Below are some examples for you to see the new art I made using the tablet!

I'm not an by trade; I never really drew, but I did take a Skillshare course for Adobe Illustrator, so I know how to use the tools semi-effectively. The way I draw is that I gather reference images, then sketch above them in order to get a more unique and accurate style of what I want. After I use the pen and shape tools to make it into vector art.

Printing

The beta was due last week, and I had to get the game printed and polished; this meant spending €150 on ink and paper, which wasn't worth it as my worst enemy, the printer, decided to not play nice.

When you want to print recto verso, both sides of a page, as cards have 2 sides, the printer won't always align the pages.

This means if you have a double-sided card, one side will be a few millimetres up or down from where it's meant to be. Usually I would print one page, measure the offset, then print again; this usually works. But for some reason, this didn't work this time; every page has a different offset, and even printing the same page twice had different results. This makes it extremely frustrating to print, and I ended up wasting 20 pages just trying to align it. Unfortunately, in the end, it wasn't perfect. This made the beta submission feel cheap, which is not what I wanted, as I spent a lot of time and money trying to get it right.

That said, I decided to contact Graphot, the printer I want to use for the game, and I'm going to get my next prototype made by them.