From the very early stage of Ancient Savo development I've felt that the target audience will be UnReal World players - and if the reception is good, then maybe Ancient Savo can attract some new players outside the UrW community. Or, in other words - I've always felt that I'm not aiming for big sales, since the game clearly is for a limited audience (not everyone is interested in a slow-paced non-violent survival farming simulator, I'd guess). So I've been hoping that there would be enough exposure to make the UnReal World player aware of this side-project game by Enormous Elk. If everything goes well, I hope Ancient Savo would generate modest sales helping me to permanently being a full-time indie coder. This has been my mindset, so I haven't been putting that much focus on promotion, hoping that the project will gain enough visibility by the very grass-roots word of mouth activity, or maybe eventually someone doing gameplay videos or such.

Of course the visual representation and UI matters - that is one of the main reasons why I decided to have an option for a 3D map in Ancient Savo. As, hills matter - the sunny southern slope of a hill is more favorable for farming that the shadowy northern side. And especially in early summer the lowlands and valleys are more prone to freezing night time temperatures, which can destroy the crops. On a 2D map this can be represented by having darker or brighter tint on the tiles, depending on how much sunlight they get. But maybe the 3D view is the most intuitive way to figure out the geography. I was developing with an basic desktop PC without a graphics card, so that forced me to pay attention to 3D optimization. But at some point in the winter I was curious to test how the performance would be with a dedicated gpu. I had two second-hand graphics cards lying around; one which was so old that it would hardly provide a performance boost compared to the integrated gpu I already had. And the other one was somewhat unstable, I remember removing it as it seemed to randomly cause system freezing or crashing. But maybe I could test it again, why not? So I did - and turned out that the card was maybe even more broken than before, as it killed the power supply of my PC. Sigh. I reverted to developing on my laptop, hoping that eventually Ancient Savo could generate enough sales for me to buy a new development desktop with a modern graphics card.

When I set up the Steam page for Ancient Savo I was thinking that it will take two weeks to produce a trailer video. There was just one little thing to get fixed before that; rounded tile edges. They already were there, but the old system couldn't handle the new 128x128 tile size, and I wasn't quite satisfied with the way the old system worked. I re-wrote the entire system, while also making sure that the optimized 3D graphics works as it should. All of this took weeks. But eventually it started to work well enough, and I went to see my son who has a more modern gaming PC. We tried to record video material, but turned out that there were nasty bugs which manifested on my son's hardware but not on mine. I tried to quick fix them on the site but with no luck, so back to home then. Since I couldn't be sure what exactly was causing the bug I decided to re-write a couple of systems - not just fixing the bug but also improving the 3D optimization. My son tested the new version and confirmed that it works. So, a bit more last-minute fixes and I drove to my son's place. But this time the game failed to launch on his device. Luckily I got that fixed, and we got about half of the intended material recorded until hitting another fatal bug. Another quick-fix on the site and we got the rest recorded.

While I was busy with all the bug fixes there was a surprise message from a Finnish UnReal World player at the UrW discord - they offered to donate a desktop PC with a decent graphics card but without a hdd. What a nice surprise! We started to discuss how to best transfer the PC. It turned out we have some common friends at Tampere. And I was not in a hurry, so we agreed that if anyone is going to Tampere, they could take the PC there, and I could pick it up the next time I visit the city. But that didn't happen before my visit to my son who lives at Tampere. After shooting the video material it was 10pm, and I had arranged to pick up the donated PC the next day. Instead of sleeping at my son's I wanted to have a little holiday trip, so I went driving towards the place where the PC would be. Taking a look at the map I had spotted a nice route via a smaller countryside road, and there was a hiking route near the road. Before midnight I found one of the parking areas connected to the hiking route. From there it was only 300 metres to the nearest site with a fire pit and a shelter. My plan was to set up a hammock and sleep in it, but when I saw the shelter it seemed so cozy that I wanted to try sleep in it. The wooden bench was barely wide enough to lay on my back, and a bit uneasy without a mattress. I placed a folded towel and some of my clothes under my shoulders and pelvis, and that made it comfortable enough to get some sleep. The following morning I went hiking. The route took to Pirulanvuori, which would be easiest to translate as "Devil's Mountain", but that is not entirely accurate, as the suffix "-la" means "a place where someone dwells", so it would be something like "The mountain where devil(s) live". I have no idea of the history of the name, but the scenery was nice =) And there was even a tower to see the view from above the tree-tops.

After the nice refreshing hike I drove to the place where we had arranged to meet with the person donating the PC. From there it was a bit less that 2 hours of driving to get back to my home. But I wanted to maintain my holiday mood, so on the way back I stopped at another hiking route. I took a 3 kilometers path which goes around a small lake. I stopped to cook coffee and to swim. All of which helped to wash away most of the stress and strain I've been accumulating (because of having a feeling that a personal financial catastrophe looms, and I don't have a plan B, the only plan is to finish Ancient Savo believing that it would generate enough sales to keep me afloat with my partially self-sufficient way of life - so every day off from coding feels a bit like luxury I can't afford to have, but then to keep me coding I also need to keep my brain functional, and sometimes that requires a day or two off from any cognitive processing).

Back at home I started editing the material. I'm not so very skilled with video editing, and I had to start with installing software on my laptop. Well, but after a little bit of work I got Ancient Savo trailer video published. I continued with upgrading some promotional material both at itch.io and Steam, until it was 1am and I needed to sleep. The following morning I woke up at 6am, felt okay and went to work for money. Luckily, I had only a very short working day, as after that I felt head-ache and other such symptoms of not sleeping enough. The next items on my to-do list is to set up the donated PC and then to continue development with it. There are still a few minor bugs which need to be fixed, and I hope it won't take too long, as my fingers are itching to get back to developing the actual game content, like the AI running the other families of the player clan.

As Discord is the main medium of communicating with the Ancient Savo beta-phase players, I tend to have Discord open in a browser tab while coding. And to some extent I also follow libGDX server, for that is the framework I use. As I have often mentioned, I am heavily introverted and somewhat autistic, so that social interaction isn't always easy for me. And for the most part I find it energy-consuming so that afterwards I need enough time to recover in solitude. Yet, sometimes helping other indie coders gives me mood boost. And sometimes it feels good to share with fellow developers who come from somewhat similar background. For example, at libGDX discord I talked a bit with a person who is involved in a project called DayOff : Moonriver incident - to me the game seems interesting, and I like the atmosphere of the graphics. This led me to think about promoting indie games. Personally I've felt thankful for having the UnReal World player base as more or less already-established potential audience - but what about other indie developers, starting from a scratch? Each and every day more than 30 games gets published at Steam, so merely being one of them is not guaranteed to bring attention for one small indie game, I think. At some point I took a brief look on articles on how to get more audience for an indie game - some of the tips are like SEO optimization like "pay attention have the correct tags as they affect Steam recommendations". And some of the advice feels like a gold-rush scenario for me; as if every indie developer is aiming to make it big, to sell millions - and then there are just that many third parties wanting to siphon their share of your potential success, or your investment in trying to hit the vein of gold. Sure, nothing wrong about that - it just is not the world I live in. Hehe, although at the same time I am deeply aware of the fact that eventually I do need at least that modest sales to enable myself to keep on doing what I love - coding indie games. Oh well - but at the moment of writing this I don't have answers to these questions - in a way I just hope that there is a middle way in between being ignored and making it big time. And herein lies one of the aspects I love in indie - be it indie music or games or other forms of art; that the creation is driven mainly by other forces instead of the budget calculations, and then just hoping that a niche audience will find your niche art - a bit exaggerated, but that is the spirit and the atmosphere.

And I still do believe in spirit and the atmosphere. This summer I've been avoiding a looming financial catastrophe because of close friends and a blog reader giving me a bit of money as a 50th birthday present. Thank you everyone! Not only did you save my day, you saved my entire summer! Without that extra money I would've been deep in trouble trying to get my car fixed, and my current odd jobs requiring the car. But because of the kindness of other people now it looks like I can stay afloat, getting the car fixed, getting the monthly bills paid, keeping up the game development to meet the planned September release at Steam.

Ideally, I would love to pay salary for people doing (part-time?) work related to my indie game development. To run a game studio, in other words. But currently that is just a dream, and all the external help is based on the benevolence and good will of my friends. This includes things like the title image of Ancient Savo, hand-drawn by a friend. And the musics composed, played and recorded by Erik Torpström of Rogue Analogue. I didn't even ask for music, it was Erik himself who suggested to make a few tunes for my game project - and this is the indie spirit which I love. And not only that, Erik has a friend who also is an indie game developer, with an already published title called Underponder. Not a long time ago Kausemus, the developer of Underponder, contacted me offering to make some 3D models for my game project. To me this feels like filling a gap - for the Ancient Savo project I've learnt the basics of using Blender, and I wrote a little script to programmatically generate trees, but I know I'm not a 3D graphics designer, I simply lack talent on that front. But for the game I'd love to have models for animals, but I have had no idea how to acquire them, other than trying to make some simple models myself. Well, but Kausemus already sent me a cow model, which is just that much better than I could ever make myself, and it makes me happy.

So, what can I do? I would love to pay proper money for people who contribute to my game project. It wouldn't hurt to have a bit of extra money to spend on promotion and marketing. But I'm a starving artists struggling to pay my monthly bills, hoping that the Ancient Savo promotion could be based on grass-roots word of mouth. And, the little I can do is to mention these other inspiring and unique indie creations I've been lucky to get to know of - I know my blog is not followed by a million people, and that is part of the atmosphere and the spirit, being something small, honest and non-commercial. I don't know - maybe some of you might be interested in the games and music linked - and in any case, I do have a feeling that people reading this blog are interested in keeping alive the honest indie spirit and atmosphere, not just in regard of Enormous Elk productions, but hopefully also on a broader spectrum. For us, the small-scale creators who are not major corporations, big marketing is not the thing - the thing is to connect with the people who feel at home with the spirit and atmosphere of this or that indie creation, and want to support it. So, cheer to all of you!