Indie Game Development

Alaric went on a school trip for a week. First time he had been away from home for that amount of time and another event that marks how quickly time is flying past. Unfortunately a bug came home with him and he ended up being sick about as soon as he arrived in Terrace. Next came Theodoric and then Evaric followed. Tuesday night it caught up to me - caught up to me to the tune of 7 lbs in 14 hours. Ghastly. Since then I’ve been doing some reading - I read The Watchmen which was about Kevin Poulsen’s hacking exploits and also a book by Sebastien Junger called A Death in Belmont - Junger wrote A Perfect Storm a few years back and is a very readable guy.

I found myself getting a bit bleary after blowing through a book a day and, since I’m not quite ready to rejoin the living I’ve been alternating between my office where I peck away at Big$hot and lying in bed listening to Duma Key on my Muvo. Sometimes it seems like the world is full of books and games and movies and it seems like there is little point in making new stuff. My friend Joe used to suggest that we should really be cataloging all that we have before we make more… but I’ve been very happy these last couple of days to be curled up in bed listening to one of Steven King’s latest books. Some new works are better than others but there is always room for more.

Peace,
L.

So, it’s been one heck of a couple of months. This was the year that I was going to write two games instead of one and bike up to the golf course every other morning for a healthy start to my day.And then I had an idea. Worse yet, Jennifer bought into it.

Part of the financial life raft we built for ourselves when we went independent - as those of you who read along at home know - was to buy some rental properties. A 6-plex and three 2 bedroom houses to be specific, all on an acre of land in a semi-industrial/rural area on the outskirts of town that is near some schools and a couple of miles from the golf course. So, last month one of the two bedroom houses went empty and I decided to do a more extensive renovation than I have previously attempted. Why not. The rental market is booming, golf season was looming and I am trying to write two games right now. Why the heck not take the place apart and take down revenue for a couple of months. So I did. Tore out a couple of walls, insulated a couple of walls that were not originally so and put in a spruce floor made out of 1×4’s. At this point it’s quite lovely if I do say so myself. And then came the crazy idea. We could live in the biggest of the houses (it has a full basement and carport) and keep this house beside it for offices and recreational purposes. This would free up all of the equity in our big house in town and leave us financially independent. That is correct - even if y’all decided to not buy a single game ever again we still probably wouldn’t have to get a day job. And frankly, that’s a good thing, neither of us is cut out for that sort of nonsense. So, that’s what we have been up to around here. The house is up for sale - Jennifer was up until two in the morning last Wednesday getting the place ready for the realtors tour - and, if it sells this Spring, we are going to come back from NY to another major renovation. NY is always a working vacation anyhow but it might be the only time I have until later in the Fall to actually work on my games!

BTW, watched Hunting Party last night and it’s the best movie I have seen in awhile - that includes the mighty No Country for Old Men. Do yourself a favor and watch it.

Peace,
L.

I’ve been working hard on ASJ-41 for the last ten days or so - woke up at 2 AM in a flu induced fever and had an epiphany about the game design. All of the shell work was still valid so I have been designing and coding up a storm to get a rough playable up and running… which I did by last night. The game is not nearly ready for public consumption but, in one moment, I was able to see a design that makes sense for the property and the market that should be a lot of fun to play and now I have something that I can actually play and begin to poke and prod into something that other people might have fun with. Stay tuned!

Anyhow, in honor of ASJ 41 I present, here, The Origins of Duwayne! It’s a hidden find lurking out on the internet about the origins of the baddest, funkiest hero in all of superdom.

Enjoy,
L

I’ve been neglecting my blog lately. The primary reason for this is that I’ve been busy and scattered across multiple projects, both physical and code, and typically during a spell like this I’m less contemplative. Anyhow, I’ve been back at code this last week and a half - not working on Font Fiend or ASJ 41 which are my announced projects but the other game that I have planned for this year. Another financial simulator is in the works here and I’ve found myself consumed by it lately. I had the idea for this game last summer at the lake and, off and on, I’ve been working on the design for about six months. A month or so ago my dad was pretty sick so I was crashing at his place for a few nights and that was a good time to work on this design because I only had the laptop and wasn’t actively coding - just noodling with graphics and design ideas. At that point I kind of hit a wall because the game was too statistical - only an accountant who loves the columns would have liked that game. However, the last day at dads I had a breakthrough and came up with some good ideas for how to simplify the game play and I felt like I was off and running again. I’ve subsequently hit another wall where I realized that even that design was to complex and have further refined the game play. With this design background I’ve spent the past ten days banging out more code than renovations.

What’s interesting about this is that I’m enjoying the actual coding of the game far more than I usually do - usually my favorite part is dreaming up a new game. But this time I’m finding that the actual moment to moment coding of the beast is very satisfying. I’m attributing this to the fact that I spent some time last year looking at and thinking about how I write code. I wanted a code process that was easier to pick up and put down - more modular - and along with this, something easier to just add new code chunks to. I thought this would require a grand new paradigm, a fancy WYSIWYG editor and all the rest… but what it really took was a few simple nudges to the way I have coded for just about forever. I took apart my finite state machine code and made it simpler to add new states, each of which have a service, construction and destruction function along with a text name so that I can bring up a browser at any point and readily jump from state to state. Since states within my FSM sometimes require a certain game variable state this does mean that I occasionally build a ’setup helper’ state for test purposes but this simple modification has made it much easier for me to think of my code in terms of being independent modules. I also spent a week and moved over all of my string handling code to be completely unicode based, including writing a bunch of string handling code so that porting my games would not rely upon Microsoft string functions which might not be available on other computers. This simplified some code and also clarified the model under which I add text to my games - this was as much a matter of code cleanup as sitting down once and for all and committing to a text model so that when I think about what is going on with any of my programs game it is easier to grasp. This might seem simple and obvious but since I am dealing with libraries that I wrote a decade ago there was some inertia to letting go of some code and porting processes for devices which, realistically, I’m not going to support anymore anyhow. Typically I add text to my programs with an independent text file filled with tags and text string pairs for easy language translation, since the code cleanup I turfed a bunch of 8 & 16 bit code in favor of always expecting the text file to be a 16-bit unicode file. My last process change is, frankly, almost embarrassing to admit. I’m not a guy that enjoys going back and cleaning up my code - but I write code as if I am. This includes a very sloppy habit of letting my file modules become unwieldy because I don’t subdivide them very often (read never) which has the very bad side effect of making projects hard to step back into as time goes by as finding code becomes harder. All of this little nudges along with the cleaner FSM model and a design that feels really solid has made it really easy for me to be very in the moment for long stretches of time during the physical act of entering code into the machine.

Lastly, and this is not a code thing but something that has really increased my enjoyment of the process, I have been using Font Fiend, Icon Workshop and purchasing stock photography from Fotolio.com to create better looking demo art to hand off to Matthew once I have seen that a design idea has gelled into useful code. On it’s face this change doesn’t have much to do with the practicality of getting projects done because one way or the other Matthew ends up touching up most or all of the graphics… but it does. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it changes my mind set from one that says the UI work I am doing is going to be in flux until Matthew is done - this has the side effect of letting my be lax about UI cleanup on first pass because I work under the assumption that I will be coming back and doing rework anyhow. The second, related to the first, is that because I’m dealing with prettier graphics during my mockup phase I can have faith that code refinement that I am doing during the mockup phase is more likely to stick. This causes less rework and rework is costly not only because you are going back and doing work again but also because there is typically so much code in a game that you can’t carry around all of the code in your head during development so going back to code costs you not only the work to redo but a substantial amount of time to re-immerse in code that you haven’t touched in a few months.

Anyhow. Renovations are going slowly this week as the computer keeps pulling me back in. Hopefully I’ll have a demo. to share soon enough. I’ve also promised a playable demo of ASJ which is currently in a state with a roughed out shell and a game model that shouldn’t take months to make playable so that’s got to happen in the coming weeks as well. Remind me to post a review of the Asus EEE that I bought last week, I’m not one prone to device lust but this is one sweet bit of kit.

Peace,
L

So, we have been back in Canada living the indie. developer lifestyle for four Christmases. Every single year home the World Junior Hockey Championships (best under 20’s in the world who aren’t yet owned by a club that won’t let them go) have been an absolute blast to watch. Phenomenal hockey which has been capped every single time with Canada hoisting the gold. Unbelievable run. My hat is off to the Canadian juniors and the entire system that keeps producing such great young players. Wahoo, way to go guys!

Peace,
L

Last winter Jennifer started taking the kids up to the local ski hill while I stayed at home to work on the house (and play just a little online poker…).  Somewhere along the line I decided that I wanted to start seeing the kids ski and, with the house more or less under control, I picked up some starter gear at the local ski swap last Fall.  Very glad I did.  Spent last Saturday mastering the bunny hill - partially because the lift lines were insane - and then graduated the big hills yesterday.  The local Shames Mountain is a short drive from Terrace but it feels like a universe away.  The mountains are often shrouded in mist and it feels like you have traveled to some exotic, desolate and fierce place - I’ll post pictures in an upcoming blog entry so you can get the idea.
One of the other reasons that I didn’t ski (or play indoor hockey) last year was that my old soccer knees had been giving me a bit of trouble for the entire summer of golfing.  I’m very happy to say that a year of moderate knee brace use for physical activity has left me in much better shape for taking part in medium impact sports.  It’s not February yet but two new designs in production and skiing on my horizon makes spring seem moments away.

In other news Canada is going for their fourth straight gold at the WJC again after downing the US 4-1 in what was their best game so far in the tournament.  Will be glued to the tube at 11 AM PST tomorrow to cheer on the kids.  Go Canada!

Peace,
L

Real E$tate Empire has been selling quite well on the Reflexive game network since landing there on Dec. 18th. And the game continues to sell a few copies from the Rusty Axe website everyday. That said it has never reviewed particularly well by game reviewers, end users have typically been even harder on the game and nobody has ever given the game a glowing review or said this is their favorite game. People say the game is too hard. That it’s too short. They complain that it isn’t profitable to fix everything on a house and sell it. Some days it is downright brutal to read the reviews.

So sometimes you have to just not read the reviews or you might pack it in. Because, for all of the complaining, the game does resonate with a certain core audience who continue to seek it out and buy it from a website that doesn’t see a trickle of what the big guys get. That’s not to say that I can’t learn something from what people have to say but, as a designer, one has to be careful to remember to make something that works well for some people even if others might not get it all. So, I’m listening to what people have to say and taking it into consideration for future titles. My next financial simulator is going to be a midgeon easier to play in certain regards and the game will last over a longer time period. But it’s still going to be a financial geeks toy rather than fodder for the Portal Top 10 lists. I remember my boss at Atari talking about arcade teams who would often create a couple of games that were critically well received but didn’t earn money and how, sometimes, those teams would find their legs and figure out how to make games that people wanted to spend money on. Invariably the teams then wanted to make more games that made money because, at the end of the day, it’s not about pleasing everybody but it is about pleasing those people who are willing to pony up their hard earned sheckels for a ride on the shiny new toy.

Off to lick my wounds at a neighbour’s house party,
L

Friday night is date night here at the Feddersen household. Last date night (warning, the following details of our crazy, debauched night life might not be suitable for all audiences) Jennifer brought home a video called “A Crude Awakening”. ACA is about peak oil, a topic that fascinates me. The film talks at length about whether we have either hit that point in history or whether we soon will and what we will do as we start to use up the remaining half of the oil left on the planet. I’ve been thinking about peak oil for a couple of years now. Questions like what will happen when the six billion people on the planet become nine and we can no longer feed six holds a grim fascination for me. Is there any other way to grow enough food for those of us on the planet when cheap petroleum based fertilizers and cultivation tools are no longer available? Will cheap airplane travel become a thing of the past along with all of the things that go with it like fresh pineapples jetted in to northern climates? Will we collapse in on each other as we scrap over decreasing resources in an over-populated world?  Will resource rich but militarily weak countries such as Canada become targets - see what’s happening with the Northwest Passage and the increased Russian presence near Norwegian oil fields in the North Sea for hints about how that might play out.  Or will we all become some kind of peaceful agrarian society peddling our bikes around villages and living local lives but with all of the neat things we have invented?

As a father and somebody who cares deeply about this topic and about what will happen to our planet if the global warming folks are correct I think a lot about this topic. I would like to write a simulator that allows people play with variables and have meaningful discussions about what the next 100 years have in store for the planet and all of the living creatures upon it. I’m not sure I can write such a thing - individual simulators about things like rising oceans are one thing but a simulator that encompasses all of it and further makes it into a balanced game… well if any of y’all are capable of writing such a thing then please drop a line when it’s done. I’d love to play it.

Happy holidays,
L

The new and greatly improved Font Fiend UI is up and running.  I’m exhausted and need to take a day or two off so I can come back with fresh eyes and perspective.  I think it’s pretty close to ready to show the folks at indiegamer.com again but I might hang on to it for a few days while using it to work on my new financial simulator and see if I can shake a few more bugs out of the beast.  The new UI is much cleaner and more efficient - being able to drag color and alpha channels around and see the updates in real time is sweet.

I’ve spent part of my surfing time this week looking at models for the new game.  It’s a business game set in a city and I want to have an impressive looking cityscape for my virtual game board.  I’m leaning towards bright and shiny instead of the soft colors we had for the casual market targeted Real E$tate Empire.  Speaking of REE, it will be available on Reflexive on the 18th of this month, I’m really looking forward to seeing how it will do on a network that sees quite a bit more traffic than the Rusty Axe website.

Very cold here tonight - probably -20 or below with the wind chill, not many walks are being taken these days!

Have a good weekend,
L

Tower defense games are the shiznad these days around here. I played Attack Of The Creeps by Galago Games today after finding it on the Manifesto Games website. AOTC is quite different from The lost castle that I was blogging about last week in that you can’t build new units to increase your resource production, AOTC is strictly about stopping critters, in a variety of maps, from crossing the map. AOTC starts out with some quick tutorial notes and then gets you going with an initial build phase followed by a realtime build and defense game - different from TLC which has seperate build and build/defend phases. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes into a fairly elaborate maze defense I discovered that the initial laggy cursor (how about a hardware cursor folks?) gets downright unusable as the screen fills with critters and defenses. I watched helplessly as the creeps finished me off while I was unable to really do a thing to defend - maybe an uber machine wouldn’t have this problem so the game may still be for you. Another problem with the game is that the tutorial scheme will, mid-level, drop a translucent window over top of your playfield to remind you that you can upgrade towers - a handy reminder but not nearly as handy as actually being able to see the playfield… Without these failings AOTC might have got my cash as they have a very friendly $9.99 price tag - check out the game at Galago Games.

Happy Gamin’,
L