It’s almost one year!

October 2022 was my last month as an employed man. In November I started my new and interesting life. This means it's been almost 11 months since I started working on this project. I think it’s time for me to look back, evaluate what happened and think where to go next.

When I started, I set two main objectives for this first year:

• Objective 1: Put together one or more videos that would visualize some interesting relativistic effects.
• Objective 2: Put together a proof of concept of a relativistic game. A minimal, but playable demo that would demonstrate the feasibility of the project.

I think these two objectives are equally important. A proof of concept is clearly a crucial milestone for the creation of a full game. On the other hand, publishing videos on Social Media is one path to an equally important achievement: reach the game’s target audience.

Establishing contact with people interested in the project is valuable for two reasons. First, it provides a rough measure of the potential customer base for the game. Second, it enables early feedback. Early players can inform the development process and steer the project in the right direction.

So… how far are we from reaching the two objectives?

Objective 1: videos on social media

I confess this turned out to take more time than I initially planned. My initial aim was to publish a 10-minutes narrated video on YouTube, with the objective of achieving around 100K views. I hoped I could complete the video in a couple of months, but it took longer than that.

Well, strictly speaking, I haven’t published that video, yet. Surely, I spent a lot of time working on the Physics, the game engine and tooling. But maybe there were also too many new things for me to learn at once: art and graphics, animating, narrating, voice-acting, sound-editing, video-editing, marketing. Instead, after 5-6 months from the start of the project, I stumbled across a music track from Andy Bird. I immediately felt I could create a shorter video around that music. So I did.  My initial intention was to publish the shorter video on TikTok and continue working on the longer YouTube video. After publishing the video on TikTok, however, I felt it was worth testing its performance on YouTube, just as a learning exercise.

The outcome? Well, while the performance on TikTok was ok (6K views), YouTube seemed to plainly ignore my video. After one month the video had a few tens of views, most of which were mine. The picture at the top of this post shows what I mean. I waited for the video to take off, but it didn’t. I thought I had to change my plans. I stopped working on the longer YouTube video and moved my attention to other work. In this time I did substantial improvements to the game engine and worked out the solution to hard problems… well, hard for me. For example, I found a relativistic solution to analytical positioning problem (I haven't published it yet). It will come in handy very soon.

Then, at the beginning of August, things changed. YouTube started to show my video to some people. Not many, really. The video managed to get some tens of views per day. Still, it was great to read comments from people that watched it and found it interesting. I thought that, realistically, the video didn’t stand a chance of reaching the 6K views it got on TikTok. After all, this video was “designed” for a TikTok audience. It was short, followed a music track and had no narration… Fortunately, I was proved wrong. In the middle of August the video started to get lots of views. The numbers were exponentially increasing day after day. The view count reached and surpassed 140K. It’s way more than I expected!

So, what does this mean for the project? Well, it seems there is a wide enough audience for these kinds of videos. I believe there would be a similarly wide audience for a relativistic game, too. This is really the main input I wanted from YouTube and other social media. Does it mean no more videos? Not really. The channel needs some more. The next step on the video-making front is creating the first narrated video. I have a few ideas that I want to explore, but it’s likely I’ll start with a simple short narrated video and see how that goes.

At this point, however, I am more concerned with making progress with the video game. This naturally brings me to discussing the second objective.

Objective 2: proof of concept for a relativistic game

Well, I don’t yet have a playable demo to show, but I am working hard to publish “Demo 1.0”. This won’t even be a playable proof of concept. It will be a very minimal release that will serve to iron out the release process and will enable early testers to flag issues in the game engine. Things like “oh, it doesn’t work on browser X and device Y.” The demo will just allow the player to move on the screen, open the menu and not much else. There may be subsequent point-releases (1.1, 1.2, …) to fix reported issues. We’ll see.

I believe that this first demo is close to publication. Well, I could continue for some more time fixing issues and improving things. For example, moving the player doesn’t feel great, yet. However, at this stage my focus is on the software deployment aspects. I want to just get something out that works sufficiently well.

Once that’s done, I’ll move on to the interesting “bit”: creating something that can be played. I’ll be focusing on investigating and developing a few gameplay concepts that currently only live in my mind. Demo 2.0 will then be the first playable demo. Albeit minimal, it must be able to deliver on the concept: letting the player develop an intuitive understanding of relativistic phenomena. Demo 2.0 will focus on one aspect only, e.g. time dilation.

After demo 2.0, or maybe in parallel to it, I may go back to video-making.

Demo 2.0 will conclude one year of work on the project. Entering the second year, I need to make a more accurate plan towards the completion of the game and how to make this activity financially sustainable for myself and my family.