Indie Game Development

One of the many reasons that we pulled the plug on our situation in Santa Cruz (circa 2004) was a huge mortgage that no longer felt sustainable.  Or at least we didn’t want to continue to pay over 4k per month for another 27 years so that we wouldn’t lose our investment (that includes about $600 USD a month in property taxes).  We had bought the place because we loved Santa Cruz and saw an opportunity to get in before the market left us behind.  With both of us earning I also wanted to take advantage of the generous tax breaks that the US government gives home owners on the interest paid on a mortgage for their primary residence.

So we bought in.  We loved the house and continued to love Santa Cruz.  But a few things happened along the way.  My mom got sick and it felt awful to be there and not nearer to my folks as they were going through all of that.  We also kept hearing about the falling price of programmers and other IT workers in places like India - I had to program about as well as 10 east indian programmers to be able to offer the same bang for the buck (ignoring the slight logistical advantage of me being in Silicon Valley) and that really had me spooked.  I also found that the pace of Silicon Valley was starting to take a real physical toll - when I got sick I would often be down for 5 days and returning from Cryptic Studios every Monday night (I was commuting into the office about once a week) was invariably combined with a splitting headache.  Those things, and the growing realization of how constrained my career choices would be over the next 30 years - essentially my retirement age - had Jennifer and I doing a lot of talking.  If you follow this blog you know that we eventually pulled the plug and went back to my hometown of Terrace BC, up in Canada.
So, that’s the long winded reason why we are particularly interested in the US housing market.  As usual, here at the lake for the summer, the NY Times is showing up daily along with various business periodicals like Business Week.  It’s been interesting to go from a fairly hot local housing market up in Terrace - where we read about the US market but it’s abstract - to being here and reading the blow-by-blows daily.  On Friday we started to read about the IndyMac bailout which is also covered online today at CNN - CNN says that your money is generally safe.  They don’t mention the 10,000 folks that the NY Times did over the weekend.  Those people are sharing in a 500 million dollar loss - I’m assuming because they each had more than the FDIC insured 100K in that bank.  A very expensive lesson to distribute your money, if you have more than 100k in the bank, into more than one bank so that each account gets the FDIC coverage.  Seems too much to hope for that none of those people are retirees.

My take on all of this is that the very high housing prices in both the US and Canada are going to hurt our long term competitiveness as too many folks aren’t going to ever be able to afford to buy and properly maintain a home.  If we have to compete in a global economy - and even with peak oil and global warming I think we are going to continue to buy and sell over borders - then our workers need to be on a somewhat level footing with regards to cost of living.  The jobs that leave matter but I think the bigger loss is in the expertise of being able to create the products that end up being imported.

I hope today doesn’t find you too stressed about your own housing situation.

Peace,
L

So, here we are, once again, at the lake.  Pretty easy trip across the continent this year despite having started 6 hours late due to last minute business that we needed to deal with for the units.

It’s sweltering this week but I’m coding away anyhow - I’ve been a bit inspired this week by watching Theodoric playing Peggle on his iPod during the trip.  What struck me about the game - I didn’t even recognize it from the PC version at the time - was that each of the screen elements was very active in its’ presentation, kind of like an old school arcade game where there aren’t many screen elements but each is rendered with loving care.

After hitting the lake about 9 days ago I sat down and started play testing Big$hot with an eye towards initial press releases.  I realized that the hardest thing left was going to be the AI’s so I spent the better part of last week rolling up AI building block code.  I didn’t want to do press releases until I felt confident that I could reasonably predict completion within a couple of months.   During this process I found myself starting to worry about how hard the game would be for the new player to drop into.  Big$hot is kind of like Monopoly with a proper business model (plus credit ratings, an evolving economy, property auctions, cutthroat AI’s and business improvement synergies based upon properties owned).  With this and the iPod version of Peggle in mind I have been spending the last couple of sweaty days recoding the end of month cash dispersal UI so that it’s both more visually appealing and, coincidentally, helps to reinforce what each property does and how much it is earning for the player.  As I hurtle towards a first playable I am, as always, wracked with worry and buoyed by hope.  Worry that the game might not be any good at all and the hope that the game will come out as the experience I saw in my minds eye when I started the project.

Peace,
L

I’m putting the finishing touches on house #3 down at our rental properties. Second major renovation this Spring, following a 6 week stint in house #2 - both houses needed interior walls removed so that insulation could be added, some walls with mold on the plywood had to be removed or remedied as possible. After that a complete repainting and then brand new floors. Almost all of my coding in the past month has occurred after 6 PM in the evening - although this AM I woke up with some tweaks to monthly profit calculations for Big$hot so I am doing a little morning coding before getting to it.

House #2 got pine floors, screwed down, stained and polyurethaned. Very pleased with the results but the process was quite time consuming, including a 2 week period where the wood needs to sit in the house to humidity match - not to mention that the kiln dried wood still carried a bit of moisture given what the dehumidifier was able to suck out of the air. So, house #3 needed to be done in a tighter time frame - 1×4’s were less viable as well because the cost of a half lift of the material had more than doubled in 6 weeks - next time it’s cheap I’m going to buy a lift and store it. House #3 received inexpensive laminate floors in the back bedrooms - looks kind of like wood and, for the price, is a great way to do a floor in a hurry. But it doesn’t stand up well to water so it’s a poor choice for the living room and kitchen as both of those rooms have doors from the outside. Which gets me to the topic of this rant. You can spend a lot of money on pretty nice flooring materials these days and, as I kind of like fixing houses and having good tenants, I’m inclined to consider this kind of thing. But, and here’s a big one, all of the interesting stuff like hard tiles and rubberized wood strip like flooring have a limited shelf run - at least in this small market where we are doing our buying - before the manufacturers will replace the stuff with newer models. The upshot? If you put some in and need a few more pieces in 18 months… you are hooped. The retailers clever answer is buy a whole new set and replace the lot. Cha-ching. I know you can’t legislate that companies continue to carry and support products but this practice is evil and companies who do it ought to be ashamed.

While I’m at it - if anybody ever makes a car that will take the same parts for 30 years then sign me up. I’m getting old and curmudgeonly and all of this redundant make work and sales marketing crap is getting on my last nerve. It’s time we held folks who are filling our landfills and burning precious resources on fin additions, bumper reworking and pattern tweaks - you know what I am talking about - without offering truly new functionality, to task. Want to get my hard earned sheckels? Make good things and then support them going forward so that the people who buy stuff from you aren’t left high and dry when they need to get those things fixed.

All done ranting for now - I feel a bit better, thanks for listening,
L.

I was renovating down at the units today with CBC on the radio in the background. Oddly they were saying something about the Canucks - surprising because they don’t cover sports at all. Something about a young defence man, 21, played for and won gold for Canada at the World Junior Championships, called up for limited games this year and last. And then on to the next story.

That didn’t really sound good and I went back to work with a sinking feeling. It had the awful ring of tragedy and from what I had caught it sounded like whatever had happened had occurred to promising young Canucks prospect Luc Bourdon. I went home for lunch an hour later and immediately logged on to find out more. Sadly, Luc Bourdon was killed this morning while riding his motorcycle in Northern New Brunswick. This is a guy who had an incredible life in front of him and, in one of those moments that happen in life, it’s gone in the blink of an eye.  I have a feeling there are a lot of Canucks fans like myself who are in shock today. RIP Luc.

Peace,
L.

Dear diary. I know it’s been awhile and you think I’ve been neglecting you. I have been, but it’s not that I don’t think of you often. So, here’s what’s been going on with me.

As you know, it’s been a crazy Spring. Development on Big$hot has been slow with all of the house and rental units shenanigans. I’m very pleased with how house #2 turned out, the wood floors are very pretty and will be a great place to develop games from if we end up selling this house. You’ve probably noticed that my coding on Big$hot for the past few weeks tends to happen after the kids go to bed, that’s because I’ve been renovating house #3 and so this has been my only time to get a little code written. The game is coming along well though and my design focus has been really good - Big$hot should be a much better game than Real E$tate Empire. Hope the buying public agrees.

Anyhow, I’ve also discovered videos on YouTube, here are a couple of favorites:

Bruce Cockburn, bootlegged in 2007, competing with the crowd at times (would like to shoot the guy singing along about 30 seconds in) but, wow. Brings chills - gotta kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight. You can see him in Kingston Ontario on June 14th for a mere 30 clams, wish we were going East earlier this year but at least we are going to catch The Police at SPAC this year. Can’t wait.

And here’s one from before videos were famous. Nothing like watching a great band at the peak of their powers. Roger Hodgson and the rest of the gang from Supertramp performing Dreamer.

Watching this is such a treat - words fail me. Gotta love the internet and having stuff like this at your fingertips. It’s a good time to be alive.

Peace,
L

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