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By Kevin Corti, co-founder/development director

We’ve been meaning to start a developer’s diary but have been so busy doing ‘developery things’ we hadn’t found the time.  That all changes here and now as we lift the lid on all of the totally interesting and crazy amazingness that happens here at Soshi Towers.

OK, enough of the #forcedexcitement – we’re getting quite a few followers these days and we thought it would be interesting (for at least three of you guys) if we shared some insight into the trials and tribulations involved in getting a start-up games studio up and running……so here goes!

GAME PROGRESS: Our MusicFestivals Game (play it now at facebook.com/musicfestivalsgame folks!) continues to be refined. We’ve got a gaggle of new features and some major (player feedback-driven) changes in development/testing right now and we will be releasing these over the next few weeks. We’ve been very encouraged by the response we’ve had to date even though the game has been in a pretty early stage.  I for one will be eagerly watching the analytics screens once these new changes get pushed to our production servers to see if the engagement and retention numbers increase as we believe that they will.

VIRUS BADNESS: This week was made a little interesting by a wee bit of virus infection ‘fun’ that took us the best part of a day to resolve. Cliff ‘the only iPad’ Dennett remained productive whilst the dozen of us PC users disembarked down to the pub for an extended lunch…ahem…team meeting. When you are feeling the pressure to get urgent improvements into your live game, losing a whole day of productiveness is more than a little frustrating. Lesson learned – good anti-virus and security practices are not a secondary priority!

GAME HACKS: I and Adam Russell, our Game Designer & Head of Especially Appalling Puns, spent much of Wednesday attending the very excellent ‘Meet The Games Press’ event that the fab people at BSPA (Birmingham Science Park Aston, our very nice landlord) organised. We got to hear from and chat with a bunch of gaming hacks (their description not mine!) including Will Freeman (Develop editor), Alex Wiltshire (EDGE), Keith Stuart (The Guardian’s games journalist) and Matt Martin (gamesindustry.biz editor). Some truly useful and interesting advice was gleaned from the guys that was particularly targeted at start-ups and smaller games studios. BSPA are regularly organising similar events here in Birmingham – follow @launchconf / #launchconf for info.

We also hope to be announcing some new commercial partnerships soon including some major artist involvement.

Stay tunes and don’t eat too much chocolate over Easter J

Kevin (@kevcorti)

Follow us at @soshigames & on Facebook

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