Maternity Game Jam

Glyph Quest is out!  Beating Sproglet to be first out (39 weeks, come on Sproglet!) Glyph Quest is now available for iOS (coming soon to Android).

What an intense few months it has been.  Making this game in such a short amount of time was however necessary, I'm at the point where sitting at a computer is not at all comfortable and Sproglet is not a fan of having the laptop on the bump.  Which means of course that I have no hope of taking part in the Global Game Jam this weekend or the Candy Jam that's happening now (but hopefully I'll have a baby to distract me soon - fingers crossed).

But it got me thinking, I'm not the only game developer in the world to get pregnant, I wonder how many other mums make games during their maternity?  Like a Maternity Game Jam.

Mums making games.

Leigh Alexander has written an amazing article about mums in the industry.  My pregnancy left me unable to find a new job; and yes for those you asking employers cannot discriminate against pregnant ladies, but unless they outright say the reason you're not being hired is because you are pregnant, there is no way to enforce this - and no one is going to do that - but my unemployment gave me the opportunity to make a game that I am truly proud of.  All of my time these last few months has been taken up with working on Glyph Quest and now that it's finished*  I feel a bit lost!

My take away from this article is that although having a baby is gong to make life hectic for a while, but eventually it'll bring a new structure to my days and in this I can continue developing games.  If the experience of these other mums is anything to go by, having children should make me more focused and driven than I was before, and that is only a good thing!

I was never planning to stop making games, but I know I will need to take a break.  It's just very reassuring to see other inspiring women taking on motherhood and games development and succeeding at both.      

*Well we have an update and a bug patch on the way but that's all in Alex's corner not mine!

The final furlong: Sproglet vs Glyph Quest which will make it into the world first?

And we're off! Glyph Quest is in the hands of the app store guardians and we have just reached 38 weeks pregnant, Sproglet could be here at any moment.  So with up to 14 days for submission to be approved and the same wait for our due date, the race is on!

Crunch

For Glyph Quest the last week has been non stop, all cannons blazing, condition one set on the good ship Tiny Flat - crunch was officially here.

Now how in the world did we end up in self enforced crunch?

We've known the due date for the baby for a long time, it just always seemed so far away.  It was next year after all - that's ages away.  And Glyph Quest spent the longest time being just two weeks away from finished, two more weeks of knuckling down would have this bad boy ready to go.  OK so suddenly it's January, suddenly that lofty deadline of 'before the baby is here' is now only two weeks away (well, 'ish') and Glyph Quest still needed that final push.

Players pick to be a Witch or a Wizard.  We still don't know which Sproglet will be...

Now crunch is never really a good thing, crunch when you work from home is equally a terrible idea, crunch when you work from home AND are heavily pregnant is just asking for all kinds of trouble... but then at least I could nap whenever and no one would mind!  For how exhausting it has been (for Alex too, he's been able to put far more hours into this than I could) the pay off has been huge.  Massive leaps in content and polish day by day, getting the task lists down to nothing, and even adding a few bonus bits (yup we are still suffering with 'wouldn't it be cool if...' syndrome).

We had to tell ourselves to stop.  We've being trying to 'put it in a box and ship it' for days now, but keep getting hooked in playthroughs and finding small tweaks we could make.  Finally (4am Monday morning) we pushed the button.  

And the weight off both of our shoulders is lifted, mostly.

The weight of the baby bump is still increasing.

Next Steps

It's all about those chains and reversal bonuses!

So what do we do now?  Aside getting the flat in a state ready for the little one (the housework may have taken a backseat during the crunch...), and maybe taking a day to catch up on sleep, there is of course plenty we need to be doing.  Least of all some sort of marketing push.

We are very proud of the game we have made, and all bias aside it is really good fun and addictive, everyone who has played it so far has agreed with us on this!  But Alex and I can only put it in so many peoples hands, we are confident that if it's your kind of game you will enjoy it, we just need you to find it!

So the website is up and running, twitter and facebook accounts made and of course we are both blogging about the adventure - so that's social media covered.  Now we just need to push these, get a new trailer out, hit up the press and so on.  Simple right?

And then of course there is the possibilities for updates; new play modes (local turn based multiplayer and an endless mode have both come up in 'wouldn't it be cool if'' conversations), Game Center leaderboards and achievements (we are baffled at how Alex and I have got this far and not added achievements) and of course support across more devices (Android, Windows even Vita maybe).

So it seems 'stick it in a box and ship it' is a bit of a misnomer.  I would say the hard work is done now - we've made a game that we both love and want to promote - but now we have to promote it and with all of zero experience in self promotion it should prove another interesting challenge.

Hopefully we'll have created enough of a buzz before baby arrives.  Sproglet vs Glyph Quest - place your bets now!

Why getting pregnant meant going indie.

As I write this two very significant things are happening; first, I am eight months pregnant with my first baby and second, I'm about to submit my first independent game with +Alex Trowers to the app store.

Right there are two things that should probably never be attempted at the same time, but then I didn't really have much choice.  So how did I end up here? 

Good News and Bad News

Way back in May 2013 my personal life started moving in a different direction to my professional life, without wanting to bore you with all the soppy stuff, the decision was made that I would re-locate and move to Brighton from Plymouth to be with Alex.  So I handed in my notice and prepared to walk away from my wonderful creative producer role at Remode Studio, it wasn't an easy decision (I'd miss the people first and foremost) but also it wasn't all that hard, after all the opportunities were fantastic.  Brighton is a hub of game studios and there was always the option to commute to say London or Guildford.  And so the job hunt began in earnest.

A month later I find out I'm pregnant.  Now this wasn't planned but, it wasn't an unwelcome surprise!  Alex and I needed little to no time to decide that we would see the pregnancy through, the timing wasn't great but starting a family was something we both wanted (and in fact still want, we're not there just yet).  And although I knew this wouldn't help my getting a new job I was still optimistic, I was after all still perfectly capable, willing and wanting to work.

Of course what had happened was I'd become unemployable.   

Rejection is never easy, even when you know that it's not a reflection on your skills, personality or passion.  There is however a limit to how many times you can be told to 'keep in touch for future opportunities' before it drains the last of your self esteem.  And of course it only got worse, the longer I couldn't get a job, the closer to the inevitable maternity leave I was getting.  Eventually I gave up.  We decided that we would wait until after the baby for me to find a new job and in my extended maternity leave I could have a crack at some personal projects, make some indie games and have a stab at learning Unity.

So that was the new plan and a very exciting plan it was!  I had been hoping to get some Unity under my belt for a while (programming is not exactly one of my strengths), and making a game myself from inception to product was something I had been itching to do.

And then the plan changed again.  Alex had to leave his job.  Suddenly the game we had been pottering around with in our spare time was promoted to Plan A, and we had to make it work. 

Glyph Quest

Don't be fooled that Unicorn is not your friend.

Glyph Quest started as an experiment, a simple puzzle game for iOS we would release to see what the process was like as neither of us had done it for ourselves before.  When it evolved from experiment to career choice we knew we had a very hard deadline to make and a lot to learn and produce.  Alex took charge of the code (he's a self confessed non-programmer but he's a damn sight better at it than I am), I took the role of art monkey, and between us the game design continued to evolve and grow into what is now (very nearly) the finished game.

So there we are working from our tiny one bed flat in Brighton (ah yes did I mention that we are soon to be moving house too?).  It's not the most ideal of set ups, although my desks proximity to the kitchen fridge has proven useful (it's within arms reach, yup I'm practically working in the kitchen...) and the further along the pregnancy has got, the greater the need to be as close to a bathroom as possible has become (did I mention this flat is tiny?).  So things are nice and cozy, the biggest challenge we've found to this games production has been reigning the design in.  It turns out Alex and myself are the worst for 'wouldn't it be cool if...' and by worst I mean best, we are very good at coming up with great features, mechanics and tweaks.  But we are a production team of two and as such there is only so much we can do before our time to actually produce this game is up, having a baby on the way as your deadline is a milestone that can't slip.  Once the baby is here that will certainly mark the end of any production time, at least for me (did you know it's possible to have to spend up to 12 hours a day breast feeding in the baby's first week?  No, neither did I...). 

I've had many challenges with this pregnancy (if it could er on the side of complicated it has), 3am hospital trips, crippling back ache, pre-natal depression.  But this blog post is not about that.  Despite all that pregnancy has thrown at me, and for that matter every other bit of bad luck and timing, we have made this game.  I have continued to work right to the wire to make this happen.  I couldn't get a job when I was looking, I wasn't desirable at the time, so now I'm an indie.  It's sad that I had to go through all this to get here, and no doubt I'm not the only person who's given up with trying to fit a job description and gone it alone, but that's what had to happen.    

By the end of the month I will have achieved two life goals. I have wanted to have children for a long time and now I've found someone I can share that with and very soon we will meet this little person who will change our lives forever.  I have wanted to make games for longer than I've known I wanted to be a parent (after completing FF7 in 1998 if you're curious), and soon I will be releasing my first independent game.  It has not been smooth, easy or painless, but it will hopefully enable me to continue to work for myself.  Well, for my family.