Glad I'm Indie

Back when I was working on My Japanese Coach for the Nintendo DS I wasn't allowed to go back and double check things.  We were on a tight schedule and even though I had been putting in extra hours on my own they didn't want to keep paying me to be a language expert anymore.  They were paying me to be a programmer.  So in the end, what happened was most of the lessons were just first pass.  I couldn't completely organize the dictionary because of time constraints as well.  And since I never had the chance to look over how the characters were being written many of them were wrong.

For Japanese Arena: Kana I'm able to take my time.  I spent the last week reading through all my textbooks and dictionaries finding whatever information should be taught when teaching hiragana and katakana.  I've got the first two lessons in the game, but I will be updating those.  In fact, I plan on doing several passes on all lessons.  I'm just grateful that I'm now able to make sure that a game is correct and interesting without being pressured by management that threatens to fire me for doing what I was told to do.  I am going to do this game RIGHT.  I am glad that I'm an indie.


In other news, I've recently been playing King's Bounty: Armored Princess.  It's a strategy game where you travel across the map, get into battles and level your hero up.  I was excited about the fact that you get a pet dragon to help you out.  I love pet systems.  I've rather soured on it now.  It's way too imbalancing.  There's a stats screen at the end of the battle and once I switched it to show more I started realizing that my dragon was doing around 50% of the total damage from my side.  Even with five troops each attacking each turn.  It seems like I should have chosen the warrior class instead to use more of their dragon-boosting skills, since my spells aren't too useful.  One thing that bothers me is that whenever I'm playing, I get the urge to got to GOG and buy Heroes of Might and Magic III and IV.  That seems to tell me that no matter how much fun I'm having, I know that I've played something more enjoyable in the past and in the end, I'd rather be playing that.