What do you think?
Rate this book
Rogue Potato: The Making of SanctuaryRPG
Making a videogame was something I’ve always wanted to do. But I was stuck in a cubicle, being slowly crushed under the relentless gears of the corporate machine, with no hope of deliverance in sight. I was ready to give up and accept my fate as a mindless drone, condemned to writing memos and repairing software bugs until I slumped over and died at my desk.
Then one day, I got lucky.
Daniel Doan, a college student on the other side of the world began to work on a small indie project for a programming course he was taking. Sensing the opportunity of a lifetime, I decided to join forces with him.
We were going to turn his tiny, text based roleplaying game into a retro ASCII epic.
Only, it was a lot harder than anyone thought it would be.
Thousands of hours were spent coding, drawing, and testing, followed by gratuitous consumption of alcohol, vicious hangovers, gallons of coffee and even more hours rewriting code, stuffing in new art and obsessively retesting the game to make sure that it could pass for a functional piece of software—instead of the unplayable, half-finished mess that so many indie games end up as.
The process was not just it was also fraught with anxiety, conflicts, and more than a few unexpected catastrophes.
Along the way, we learned so much about what makes a game worth playing—and also what goes into making a the exhaustion, the heartbreak, and the root vegetables. We hope that by showing what goes on behind the scenes, you’ll gain a greater understanding of what it means to be an indie game developer.
There are many retrospectives which offer only saccharine frivolities and self congratulatory platitudes. They don’t delve into the sleeplessness, anxiety and endless frustration that accompanies game development. They are relentlessly, mindlessly cheerful, for fear of offending the sensitivities of their readers.
This isn’t one of those memoirs.
Then one day, I got lucky.
Daniel Doan, a college student on the other side of the world began to work on a small indie project for a programming course he was taking. Sensing the opportunity of a lifetime, I decided to join forces with him.
We were going to turn his tiny, text based roleplaying game into a retro ASCII epic.
Only, it was a lot harder than anyone thought it would be.
Thousands of hours were spent coding, drawing, and testing, followed by gratuitous consumption of alcohol, vicious hangovers, gallons of coffee and even more hours rewriting code, stuffing in new art and obsessively retesting the game to make sure that it could pass for a functional piece of software—instead of the unplayable, half-finished mess that so many indie games end up as.
The process was not just it was also fraught with anxiety, conflicts, and more than a few unexpected catastrophes.
Along the way, we learned so much about what makes a game worth playing—and also what goes into making a the exhaustion, the heartbreak, and the root vegetables. We hope that by showing what goes on behind the scenes, you’ll gain a greater understanding of what it means to be an indie game developer.
There are many retrospectives which offer only saccharine frivolities and self congratulatory platitudes. They don’t delve into the sleeplessness, anxiety and endless frustration that accompanies game development. They are relentlessly, mindlessly cheerful, for fear of offending the sensitivities of their readers.
This isn’t one of those memoirs.
61 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 18, 2017
1 person is currently reading
11 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
No one has reviewed this book yet.