Author: Gianfranco Berardi

Categories
Game Development Games Marketing/Business

Announcing: Toytles: Leaf Raking, Now Available on iOS

I’ve finally gotten around to porting Toytles: Leaf Raking, my family-friendly leaf-raking business simulation, to iOS so now you can get it for your iPhones and iPads.

Download Toytles: Leaf Raking on the App Store!

Download on the App Store

Toytles: Leaf Raking

I originally created the game in 2016, and I’ve updated it a few times since then. My original announcement for the Android release of Toytles: Leaf Raking on Google Play was met with some enthusiasm (thanks, Mom), and I have been slowly making improvements and plans for newer features since its release.

I was quite proud of the game, and I had plans to update it sooner, but I had a few changes in my life occur. One request I received was to get the game out for iOS, and and I am happy to say that after only a few short years, it is now available.

I hope you enjoy it!

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Toytles: Leaf Raking Player's Guide

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Categories
Marketing/Business

Books I Have Read: A Social Strategy

Mikolaj Jan Piskorski’s “A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media” was published in 2014, which is quite a few lifetimes ago in the tech world, but I checked it out anyway.

A Social Strategy

It’s an academic text, looking at the success and failure of different social media platforms and a few companies attempting to take advantage of them through the lens of sociology.

It can get quite wonky at times, but I like wonky.

It also attempts to give advice to anyone looking to establish a new social network or use existing social networks to either save or make money.

In economics, there is a concept called “market failure” in which economic transactions do not happen or happen inefficiently due to some reason or another.

Piskorski notes that there are also categories of “social failure,” social
interactions that people seek and would better their situations if they happened but cannot accomplish in the off-line world. Social failures are about the interactions that do not occur, which is an interesting way to look at things.

For example, single people might find it difficult to meet others, and so dating platforms such as Ok Cupid and eHarmony provide social solutions. He analyzed how each differed in their approaches and how one succeeded due to providing a superior, more effective solution.

Besides “meet” failures, there are also “friend” failures, in which a person might find it difficult to share information or social support in an existing relationship. There’s a chapter in which Zynga is a case study that focuses on this context.

And much like how in economics there can be transaction costs as the underlying reason for a market failure, there are economic and social costs that prevent or inhibit otherwise good social interactions from happening. He categorizes them as breadth, display, search, and communication.

It’s a fascinating analysis, which is especially relevant if you are trying to create a new social app or platform. Piskorski juxtaposed Facebook and the Japanese social media platform mixi, as well as LinkedIn and Friendster, explaining how each tackled their solutions to the above social failures differently and how those different approaches created different results.

He argues that a social solution needs to address both the economic AND the social causes of interaction costs. Otherwise, it will be ineffective. In fact, he argues that social solutions that provide breadth, display, search, and communication functionalities will do better than others that only provide a few.

But, he also says that there are often trade-offs that need to be made. Some solutions increase the costs of certain functionalities. Facebook will never replace LinkedIn because Facebook would need to offer a way for people to meet strangers. In fact, Facebook once did offer a way to search and find strangers, but it had the side-effect that individuals in relationships used this functionality to cheat on their partners, which reduced the effectiveness of the “friend” solution that Facebook is offering. So Facebook removed the functionality, leaving LinkedIn as the dominant platform to meet people on.

Well, what if you aren’t setting up your own social network but want to take advantage of existing networks for your own business?

Piskorski also talks about the concept of the “social strategy.” In general, organizations use either low cost or high willingness-to-pay strategies. If you can lower the former without lowering the latter, or if you can increase the latter without increasing the former, you have a competitive advantage. Piskorski goes one step further to say that a social strategy involves leveraging people willing to take on business tasks for free in order to indirectly lower costs or increase willingness-to-pay.

A social strategy is different from a digital strategy, which is basically taking the familiar activity of broadcasting content at an audience and applying it online. A social strategy involves identifying and implementing a solution that solves unmet economic and social needs. In short, if you can introduce people to each other AND get them to do things for you for free, you are leveraging social media for your organization’s benefit.

The generalized framework used:

1) A viable social strategy seeks to increase a company’s profitability
2) by improving interactions between people
3) if they undertake a set of corporate functions for free

Piskorski discusses ways an organization can develop a strategy that fits the framework, as well as identifying what problems can occur if the strategy does not focus on how the proposed solution can both provide business value and social utility.

I am not sure exactly how different the social networking world looks in 20202 compared to 2014, and I would love to see if Piskorski has a new, updated analysis.

But “A Social Strategy” provided a set of principles and a framework that I think I can use to figure out how to more effectively market my games. Instead of randomly tweeting and posting on Facebook and wondering why I’m not getting the results I want, I can be a bit more analytical and thoughtful. I can be more purposeful and deliberate. And I can recognize when a strategy isn’t working that doesn’t involve merely noticing a lack of sales.

Categories
Games

Games I Have Played: Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns

In November 2019, I was listening to podcasts in my car, and I was catching up on Three Moves Ahead, a fantastic podcast about strategy games. There was a 2012 episode in which the Kohan series was discussed, and it intrigued me.

Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns

I knew Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns was an older real-time strategy game, released in 2001 and ported to Linux-based systems by Loki, but I had a hard time finding a way to buy it to play on my Ubuntu system in 2019. It was only available on Steam if I didn’t want to try to get an old copy on eBay or something like that.

I don’t normally play Steam games when non-DRM versions of games exist, but as I really wanted to experience Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns myself, I will say that Valve’s Proton, a fork of WINE, made the game work seamlessly on my system. I mean, periodically it will crash inexplicably, losing progress on a mission I finished, but when it doesn’t crash, it runs seamlessly.

Well, mostly. Apparently any screenshots I took are missing, and I managed to get to a mission that I can’t start because the game crashes when I try, but by then I think I got a good sense of the flavor that the single-player campaign provides.

Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns did some interesting things differently from other RTSes of its time. I am not going to pretend to be an expert on strategy games of that era, though. Around that time I had just discovered PC gaming as a colleague introduced me to Total Annihilation, and I eventually found myself playing Starcraft with coworkers at the help desk I worked at. I eventually played one of my favorite games Original War, and I fell in love with Homeworld: Cataclysm. All this is to say that my experience with strategy games in general is fairly limited, and so I am trying to play catch up by playing older games.

In this case, I wanted to see for myself what the Three Moves Ahead panel described as an “evolutionary dead end” for strategy game innovations which somehow also has influence on future games such as Company of Heroes.

First Impressions

  • The voice acting is kind of awful.
  • The enemy AI is not only putting up a fight but kicking my butt.
  • Oh, I don’t create individual units, I create companies? Interesting.
  • The economy is a bit confusing.
  • The dragon looks awesome!
  • Oh, geez, run away from the dragon!
  • Oh, geez, the dragon is giving chase quite beyond where I expected it to run!
  • HOLY COW THE DRAGON’S FIRE-BREATHING ATTACK HAS A HUUUUUGE RANGE!
  • Ok, wait, so I just tech up to grenadiers and mow down my enemies?
  • Why are my unstoppable grenadiers getting decimated so easily by the enemy all of a sudden?

I had a really cool screenshot involving a dragon just incinerating entire companies, but I can’t find it now. You’ll have to take my word for it.

So what makes Kohan special?

Let’s start with companies. You don’t create individual units like you would in Starcraft or Total Annihilation. You create an entire company of units at once by assigning a set of units to the front line and two support units. Each company has a captain, who can be some generic anonymous person or a Kohan, one of the immortal sovereigns who have amnesia in the campaign’s story but still insist on leading people to war.

What might not be obvious is that an individual unit is more like a symbol of recruited soldiers. If you lose units to battle but at least one member of the company survives, you can resupply and eventually get back your full company. The only exception is that the death of a Kohan in battle turns them into a medallion you can activate for 50 gold back in town. What this means is that if the company somehow survived while the Kohan died, it now has a generic captain in charge, and you can resurrect your Kohan to lead a different company.

Which brings us to the concept of Zones. Each zone could have its visibility on the map toggled on or off.

Companies have a Zone of Control, which I always left visible because when ZoCs overlap with enemies, a battle ensues. You don’t micromanage the battle, as the units fight on their own. It’s actually very enjoyable to watch since the 2D artwork and animation is gorgeous. The only things you can do to influence a company in battle are flee to a specified location or flee in whatever direction your company captain randomly decides to go. There were multiple formations you can put your company in, and each influences the ZoC. The terrain also did so, although I never understood why desert terrain would shrink instead of expand your ZoC.

Your settlements aren’t just places where you can invest in upgrades or create your companies. If your company has hurt or killed units, being within the Zone of Supply will heal them.

There is also the Zone of Population, but that mainly shows where you already have influence and where you can’t build settlements. I almost never paid attention to it since I never built settlements.

Extending your Zone of Supply is actually a key strategic point of the game, one that the AI knows how to handle well. If you start to send your armies against your enemies but don’t build settlements and outposts along the way, your companies will have a long retreat each time they need to heal up. Instead, I’ve found success in some tough missions involved leapfrogging ahead with soldiers to fight off enemies while my engineers built an outpost, which extends the range of my domain’s Zone of Supply. As a bonus, those outposts field their own guards, which means I don’t necessarily need to worry about using one of my precious companies to play defense. Then my advancing armies can retreat a bit to heal up and ready for the next wave of attack.

If you leave a company idle, it eventually fortifies its position, which increases its defensive bonus. It can often tilt the tide of battle, especially if the enemy is making its way towards your capital city and you need time to create a new company to fend them off.

Other bonuses come from attacking or defending from certain terrain, so an entrenched company in the forest will have a much easier time defending against an attack than a moving company marching through the open plains.

When a company’s Zone of Control overlaps with an enemy building, a siege occurs. The building’s guards appear automatically, and the battle ensues. When a building is under siege, it can’t upgrade or build companies, and the Zone of Supply for that building is disabled for the length of the battle, which is another reason to have outposts nearby.

The economy is interesting. I understand when I’m short on wood or iron that it prevents me from creating a company, but at some point even though the number is negative I apparently produce enough gold to pay for it anyway? I think it makes sense, and fans seem to love it, but it was hard to know what caused deficits in certain resources (was it the fact that I have too may outposts or companies which require maintenance/upkeep costs?). I never felt like I knew exactly what to do to make the economy go a certain direction. I basically invested in making enough gold that it covered everything and hope I did it right.

The individual units and makeup of companies has some intricacy I didn’t see initially. I found cavalry to be frustratingly weak, but they did allow me to explore the map much more quickly. I thought that grenadiers were both very strong and very armored, and creating a company of them was an “I Win” button. Eventually I learned that there is a bit more of an elaborate rock-paper-scissors mechanic, and I found battles were more likely to be won if I had a combination of archers, pikemen, and others fighting together. Unfortunately, much like the economy’s complexity, I didn’t feel like I understood exactly what did well against what.

Diplomacy between factions you meet on any given map looks like it should be more intricate, but other than one map in which I tried to bribe someone into liking me, I didn’t see it used as anything but a status indicator. Yep, that enemy is at war with me. That ally is not. Maybe there was more planned for this feature?

I haven’t played multiplayer, but I imagine it is potentially a different game?

Summary

The battles are enjoyable to watch, especially when magicians attack each other with explosive fireballs and demons expire by going back to wherever they came from. Since you don’t control individual units and the companies fight on their own, you are free to work at a higher level of strategy. I found the focus on Zones and their interactions made the game both manageable and enjoyably complex. I really, really liked the dragons, even though they were an optional part of any map they were on and didn’t play much of a role other than as a provider of a danger zone and a potential reward if you decide to take them on. I wish I understood the economy and the unit interactions better, and unfortunately it is difficult to find any guides or tips online that might shed some light on these key things.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, and I wish it was more stable to play so I could finish the campaign. I also want to play games such as Company of Heroes to see where some of these interesting ideas went, but I think I’ll play the rest of the games in the Kohan Warchest first.

Categories
Geek / Technical Politics/Government

Books I Have Read: Tools and Weapons

A colleague at my day job lent me a copy of the book Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne.

Tools and Weapons book cover

The main premise of the book is that technology is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it has the potential to do so much good for individuals, organizations, and societies. It can ease our lives by automating drudgery, help us make and keep connections with friends and family, and assist us in solving some huge problems in healthcare, conservation, and business.

On the other hand, technology has the potential to do a lot of harm, especially in the area of human rights. It makes it easier for totalitarian governments to identify and spy on political enemies. Our privacy is at risk as organizations find ways to take disparate pieces of data and find correlations that give insights into who we are. Inequality can get exacerbated.

I found myself impressed with Smith and Browne’s ability to tie modern day conundrums back to analogous situations in the past. The late 1800s gave birth to the modern U.S. government when it started to regulate railroads, an interstate technology with a scale and scope that was unheard of in an era when states were almost exclusively the ones doing the regulating. What does our modern Internet require?

In the early 1900s, combustion engine technology put horses out of work in firehouses all over the country. The need for food to feed these horses also dropped, which had knock-on effects for other areas of the economy, from farming to packaging to shipping. What will AI do to today’s workforce, and how much can we reliably predict?

When it comes to making broadband Internet available for rural residents, what can we learn about the initiatives to spread the benefits of electricity throughout small towns and farms?

And as Smith is an executive at Microsoft, I also enjoyed getting quite a bit of insight into the company’s approach to dealing with the world and governments over the last few decades, especially when juxtaposed with newer tech companies such as Facebook.

While I don’t doubt Microsoft led some initiatives to work with governments, I did find myself rolling my eyes at reading how moral the company supposedly was and is. There was a lot of name-dropping, including U.S. presidents and major figures in technology and political science, and I appreciate that there were discussions about how a large and influential tech company such as Microsoft needed to create policies to ensure that they did as little harm as possible to society, but then again, this is the same company that for years liked to spin their monopoly as natural.

But now I also know that this is the same company that provided their technology to organizations such as ICE. I mentioned the name-dropping earlier because I wanted to emphasize how weird this one passage was:

A glimpse of what lies ahead emerged suddenly in the summer of 2018, in relation to one of the hottest political topics of the season. In June, a gentleman in Virginia, a self-described “free software tinkerer”, also clearly had a strong interest in broader political issues. He posted a series of tweets about a contract Microsoft had with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, based on a story posted on the company’s marketing blog in January. It was a post that frankly everyone at the company had forgotten. But it says that Microsoft’s technoloygy for ICE passed a high security threshold and will be deployed by the agency. It says the company is proud to support the agency’s work, and it includes a sentence about the resulting potential for ICE to use facial recognition.

The next paragraph goes on to talk about how that supposedly forgotten marketing post took on different meaning in the context of the Trump administration’s decision to separate children from parents at the US border, and it goes on to talk about employee activism, but wait…

A gentleman from Virginia? Why didn’t we name this individual like we did everyone else? Well, there was an endnote:

Taotetek (@taotetek), “It looks like Microsoft is making quite a bit of money from their cozy relationship with ICE and DHS,” Twitter, June 17, 2018, 9:20 a.m. https://twitter.com/taotetek/status/1008383982533259269.

While Smith makes it sound like the relationship between Microsoft and ICE/DHS was this forgotten quirk, here’s a thread in which this “gentleman from Virginia” gives more context to this section of the book, including pointing out that a Microsoft executive got a job at DHS and shortly after a number of contracts between Microsoft and DHS were established.

https://twitter.com/taotetek/status/1173338647673933825

All this is to say that while I found a lot of insight into how major tech companies are starting to recognize that great power requires great responsibility and how they are doing more to work together with governments and society to make it happen, I’m also taking the “we’re trying to do right by everyone because it’s the right thing to do” line with a huge grain of salt. When big companies seek out regulations, it is often to make it easier for them to compete and not out of some moral character.

Still, the book tackled privacy, the ethics of AI, inequality, cybersecurity, and modern society’s dependence on technology to live and work while discussing the repercussions of data moving across borders into data centers and the laws that regulate them.

In the end, even while Smith talks about the needs of a “Digital Geneva Convention” to protect civilians against cyberattacks by nation-states, and privacy regulations to protect people against rogue companies (it sounds like Europe is way ahead of the world in terms of pushing technology companies to respect individuals and their privacy rights), I worry about a world in which most of our technology is seemingly dependent upon Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook doing the right thing by everyone. In each case, they’ve shown that there is a priority for them, and it isn’t my or your interests.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

Screenshots Made Easy with Window Resizing Tool wmctrl

I needed to create screenshots for the iOS port of Toytles: Leaf Raking, my leaf-raking business simulation. My game doesn’t have a built-in screenshot shortcut key, and I needed screenshots that were 2688×1242, 2208×1242, and 2732×2048.

Immediately I knew I didn’t want to resize windows by hand, as it would be annoying and error-prone. Was there a tool that let me do it in a much more controlled manner?

I did a search, and I came across this Ask Ubuntu question about resizing windows to a particular width and height.

That’s when I learned about wmctrl. It is a tool that allows you to interact with the X window manager, which is the main windowing system used by GNU/Linux desktops.

I ran the following command to find the window of the running game:

wmctrl -l

It output a bunch of windows and showed me that I had:

0x0320000f 2 [machine name] Toytles: Leaf Raking

And then I used the ID corresponding to the game to resize that window:

wmctrl -i -r 0x0320000f -e 0,10,10,2688,1242
wmctrl -i -r 0x0320000f -e 0,10,10,2732,2048
wmctrl -i -r 0x0320000f -e 0,10,10,2208,1242

And then I just navigated around my game, found a good spot to take a screenshot, pressed Ctrl+PrtScn to take the screenshot, then resized and repeated for the various iOS sizes.

I then used Gimp to remove the top 30 pixels which was just the title bar of the window. I think I should be able to take screenshots without the window decorations, but I haven’t researched it yet.

I think I’d like to create a script to handle resizing, taking the screenshot, cropping the top 30 pixels, and placing into the appropriate screenshot folder, but I’ll probably create it next time I need to make screenshots, which might be sooner than I think.

Categories
Game Design Geek / Technical

10 Years Later: Look Inside the Source of Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV

Last week, Terry Cavanagh made an announcement with the post VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now!

Collectors of commercial indie game source code have another project to add alongside games such as Aquaria and Gish.

And people are swarming all over it.

A lot has been made of the apparently low quality of the code, with people remarking on the very large case switch statement. To be fair, this is code that was converted from Flash to C++, but it’s apparently quite horrifying and fascinating to read through.

Others are more pragmatic about it:

https://twitter.com/mikeBithell/status/1215939170079821824

In contrast, and as a personal story, I just found some old notebooks of mine from around 2005, and I was very concerned about writing code “the right way.” Now, I wasn’t demanding perfection, but I did have in mind that I didn’t want to just hack together something and hope it worked. I wanted to know it would work. And I apparently wanted to learn UML.

I never shipped that project. But I was also pretty early in my career as a programmer, and I didn’t know much of anything.

Today, I know that I would put something together that works, and then I would iterate and build upon it. I mean, I believe in creating high quality code and using test-driven development to help get me there, but I also don’t spend a lot of time focused on up-front design so much as ensuring my code base is easy to refactor and modify without a lot of pain.

And I know that years of not learning UML hasn’t hurt me.

Cavanagh went on to say:

A decade on, I still feel the same way. I’m incredibly proud of VVVVVV, and grateful for everything. I want to thank everyone who helped me along the way – Magnus for his incredible soundtrack, Ethan and Simon for all their work to bring the game to more people, Bennett for naming the rooms, Stephen for helping me get that mac build out late in launch day. This game is special to me – thank you to everyone who played it and supported me over the past ten years. It’s meant so much. <3

Congratulations, Terry!

Categories
Marketing/Business Personal Development

My 2019 In-Review and My 2020 Vision

Every year end and start, I spend time reassessing how my life is going. I look at my goals, think about what I envisioned at the beginning of the year and how I would change things with an entire year of experience, and set new goals. It helps me collect a summary of my thoughts and plans, and it makes them public.

I just checked and found that my last published year in review was for 2016. My next post reviewing 2017 was still in a draft state and never published, which is too bad, because 2017 was a year to report on!

A lot happened in the last couple of years to throw me off of my pattern, but let’s do a quick recap of 2017 and 2018, then I’ll focus on 2019.

A QUICK LOOK AT 2017

From my 2016 New Year’s post Looking Back on 2016; Looking Forward to 2017:

2015 was about keeping my goals in front of me and establishing habits.

2016 was about being outcome focused. I logged more game development hours in 2016 than in 2015, but the more important thing was that those hours were aimed at targets.

In 2017, I want to focus on promotion and sales.

I didn’t need an overnight hit to be successful. I needed a foothold.

My goal was to go from $0/month to at least $10/month in sales by December 31st.

I know $10/month doesn’t sound like much, but that was the point. It should be relatively easily achievable, but it still required me to put in the work to setup my business to make sales. The idea was that once I had $10/month in income from sales, I could build on it to $20, then $50, then $100, and so on. I was in it for the long haul, and I was fine with being patient while I learned what I needed to learn and put in the hard work to make it happen.

In 2017, I had my first profitable year in probably forever. Awesome!

But I had $0 in sales. Not so awesome.

My income came from part-time contract work. In 2017 a colleague from a former job introduced me to a family in Chicago who wanted an app created. I explained what I knew about game development and mobile in particular, and then offered my services, being completely upfront about my inexperience with contract work and my day job obligations which would prevent me from working on the contract full-time.

It has taken a long time, much longer than I thought at first, and there have been requirements changes, art direction changes, and porting challenges.

But I remember that first payment coming in and feeling pretty good. Here I was, getting paid to create games. It wasn’t full-time work, but within just a few months, I had earned more in 2017 than I had in 10 years from advertising and game sales combined, which was simultaneously a good and awkward feeling.

On the learning front, I got ambitious.

At the end of 2016, I saw a tweet by IGN’s @_chloi about her plans to read 100 books in 2017.

In the past, I would try to read or listen to one book per week, but I was so enamored with the idea of all of the learning and exposure to new ideas that doubling my efforts would bring. So my 2017 reading goal was to read two books per week.

In 2017, I read:

  • 29 books on success
  • 25 non-fiction books (histories, technologies, true crime stories, biographies)
  • 12 books on game development
  • 7 works of fiction
  • 6 books on software development
  • 5 books on marketing
  • 4 books on business
  • 4 books on leadership
  • 4 books on productivity
  • 1 book on child-rearing
  • 1 book on creativity
  • 1 book on sales
  • 1 book on speaking
  • 1 book on writing

That’s a total of 101 books in a single year, just short of 104 to meet my goal. Even though I failed, it was a year that really expanded my mind. I learned so much about so much, and getting it all in a compressed time period helped it all reinforce each other, especially when it came to the success and game development books.

Also that year I set a goal to attend at least one professional development event a month. According to my records, I attended 8 local IGDA meetings, giving a presentation at one of them. I went to two software development conferences as well.

But in 2017, I also succeeded in stressing myself out. I put too much on my plate. I wanted to do it all: marketing, writing blog posts and newsletters, game development, contract game development, exercising, giving presentations, joining the chorus at my church, and getting more involved in social justice efforts at my church as well. Oh, yeah, and my wife and I were licensed for foster care as well.

2017 was going to be a year of market research, customer development, and sales. It turned out to be full of stress and pain, a lot of it self-inflicted.

I realized at one point that I never gave myself time to just be. If I wasn’t reading, writing, programming, designing, planning, or exercising, I was worried I was squandering my precious resource of time. I had to make every second count, and I didn’t realize that my priorities had gone out of wack, that I was letting down my family for not recognizing that I was taking them for granted.

Once I stopped putting so many expectations on myself and demanding that I put in 29 hour days, my life immediately became less stressful. It only took a few months of talking with a friend for me to be convinced to give myself a break, that I’m only one person and can only do so much.

Thanks, Shane! I miss our regularly scheduled talks.

WHAT I WANTED 2018 TO LOOK LIKE

I wanted to finish the contract, which would free up time to focus on my own business again.

I realized that my blog, while enjoyable to write, attracts other game developers primarily, and other game developers are not the primary audience of my games. I mean, yeah, sure they might buy some of my games, but my target customer is not “indie game developer.”

So I planned to change my blog’s target audience.

I wanted to read more books by women and people of color. I wanted to play more games. I wanted to spend more time enjoying life.

While I enjoyed the experience of trying to finish two books a week in 2017, it didn’t give me a lot of time to reflect on what I had read or heard before I was off on to the next book. So I scaled back to one book per week.

WHAT 2018 ENDED UP LIKE

2018 was a bit of a mixed bag.

I did not finish the contract, which meant I did not spend any time on my own business. My profit was still mainly due to income from the contract.

I did have almost a handful of sales of my game Toytles: Leaf Raking, although I am sure it was all people I knew personally.

I showed off my game at a local art and games expo, so it was great and gratifying to get feedback from strangers.

My writing output dropped significantly. I had a total of four blog posts for the year, and they weren’t exactly focused on building an audience for my games.

I surpassed my reading goal with 56 books for the year although I did not read much in the way of game development books. I cut myself some slack here, though.

And I gave a presentation at dsmAgile, earning myself a nice Amazon gift card for it, which I’ll count as getting paid for presenting for the second time in my life. It helped me buy myself a 4K monitor.

In the spirit of realizing that I can’t do everything all the time, I cut back on extra-curricular activities, such as choir or attending IGDA meetings, especially when I became a parent of two kids.

I was trying to have a day job and be a parent while continuing to work on the contract at the same rate as before. The more I put into it, the sooner I could be done, right?

But it left a lot of the burden on my wife to act as a single-parent, which was not fair to her. So I cut back the hours I let myself work on the contract in order to contribute to the labor of our home. She still does the lion’s share of the work, especially when it comes to scheduling appointments and coordinating with school, but I do dishes and laundry a lot more often. Our home is still stressful (we went from 0 to 7-year-old and 9-year-old within months), but it’s a bit less so.

Becoming a parent was a huge change, and I’m still coming to terms with how much of a challenge it is. I was always told I’d be a great father, and now that I’m here, I feel like I suck at it. To be fair, parenting is a skill that I had no practice with. Still, I used to think I was a disciplined, calm, patient, and easy-going person, but it turns out that I’ve just never been tested before.

FINALLY, LET’S LOOK AT 2019

My two main goals for 2019 were to finish the contract and earn $10/month in sales by December 31st.

I accomplished neither of these goals.

My expectation was that I would focus on finishing the contract, which had been “almost done” for over a year, then port Toytles: Leaf Raking to iOS, then work on a very quick project to get it published before the end of the year.

But my primary focus was the contract, which was in a weird state. I was pretty much finished with my part of it by September. There were no more deliverables for the client to test, and so I was helping the client get the app into the Google Play and Apple App stores. It’s been waiting to be published for months. I would periodically get a request for a small change or a question about the project, but otherwise, the rest of the work of publishing the game is on the client’s plate.

I’m not actively working on it, and since there are no more deliverables I am no longer getting paid, but it feels like sitting in front of the finish line instead of crossing it.

Before the contract and kids, I had regular morning habits and routines related to my business. I needed to relearn or reconstruct them all. Despite having the time, I finished the rest of the year doing very little non-contract game development. I opted instead to focus on resting and being more present for my wife and kids.

I only wrote a total of three blog posts. Heck, I barely wrote in my own personal journal.

I only read 32 books for the year. It sounds like I fell very short of my one book a week goal, and if I compare it to previous years in which I tracked the books I have read, it is the fewest I’ve read since 2013.

However, the 100+ books in a year experience from 2017 drove me to choose relatively shorter books and audiobooks. I would often go to the library and pick a 5-CD books over a 20-CD book, even if the latter was something I found very interesting, mainly so I could get more books finished sooner.

This past year, I decided to consciously pick larger books, which took longer to get through. Also, I decided to stop listening to audiobooks in my car in favor of listening to podcasts for a change. Currently, I am catching up on the strategy game podcast Three Moves Ahead, which led me to research some older yet fascinating games.

So between the longer books and lack of audiobooks I can listen to on my day job commute, my “# of books read” metric was lower, but I’m not sweating it. I’m still learning and exposing myself to new ideas, and with podcasts I’m getting a wider variety of ideas than before.

Last year, I showed off Toytles: Leaf Raking as well as the contract game at the local art and games expo again. I felt a bit more prepared, and I enjoyed the experience of getting feedback as well as connecting with others showing off their games and art. I wish I had a newer game of my own to show off, but there’s always next year.

GOING INTO 2020

I’ve been assessing the last few years and comparing them to what I wanted them to be.

My main efforts and income came from the contract. I just received my final payment for helping to get the game through the app store publishing process. The contract is over after 2 years and 10 months. It is no longer a source of income, but it also means that I can put my focus back on my own business.

And I’m going to pick up where I left off in 2017:

In 2017, I want to focus on promotion and sales.

Ostensibly my goal for the last few years was to get from $0/month to $10/month in sales. Again, the goal was meant to be achievable and to be a stepping stone to increasing sales over time.

But I think what might help is if I gave myself a much more inspiring goal, something that is doable but also would require me to stretch to make it happen.

So my 2020 goal is to get $10,000 in sales by December 31st.

It’s not quit-your-job money, but it’s not so small as to let me think I can procrastinate and make it happen in the last weeks of the year, either. It’s also not about the money, but money is an easy metric to track.

Ok, so that’s a goal. How do I go about accomplishing it?

I’m still working on my plan to do so, but I can already think of a few things that will feature as key to that plan.

I need to start creating again. Between the lack of game releases and blog posts, I feel quite irrelevant in the game industry. It’s been years since my last new game. I haven’t been participating in game jams either.

I need to find my audience. Blogging for the benefit of other game developers is great for building relationships, and I want to continue to do so. But I also need to work on finding and reaching people who are interested in entertainment that encourages curiosity and supports creativity.

2017 is when I challenge myself to be incredibly proactive about putting myself and my work out there.

Uh, ditto for 2020. I will be working on getting back into the swing of things and doing my part to contribute to the indiepocalypse (are we still calling it that?).

It will be challenging, and a big part of that challenge will be in trying to be present for my family. With a day job, wanting to sleep a full night, and spending real quality time with my family, I only have so many hours available to make things happen for my business. Luckily, I can dictate what the pace and cadence for my business will be instead of trying to hold myself to other people’s expectations for how I should run it.

Perhaps it is unrealistic, and something will have to give. A giant chunk of my waking hours are taken up with “Not Game Dev,” with the day job taking up the lion’s share. Maybe I will find I am moving so slowly in my business that I’m actually falling behind, that it takes me months to do what others do in a few days of concentrated effort.

I worry there is a minimum amount of time and effort required that I’m not going to be able to give with my chosen priorities. It would be one thing if I was Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a mountain and having to do it again and again. It’s another if I am barely budging the boulder while it grows moss.

I’m saying no to a lot of things in my life to try to make sure I do have time for the things that are most important to me. I have been greedy in the past and have wanted to do and learn and be everything, but I know now that I have limits.

But in the spirit of my past goals, I’ll make slow and steady progress, and then I’ll build on those successes.

And perhaps those successes will give me the capacity to start saying yes more often.

Let’s start.

Categories
General Personal Development

Dealing with No Longer Being Player 1 in My Own Home

My wife and I gave our son a Nintendo Switch for Christmas.

In the week leading up to the day, it dawned on me: this will be the first video game console in my home that wasn’t mine.

I mean, I think the Atari 2600 was the family’s console. But otherwise, my parents gave me an NES. I saved up and bought myself a Game Boy, opting to get the system without a game so I didn’t have to save so much allowance to get it. Santa got me an SNES. I bought myself an N64, then a Gamecube. A friend gave me a Famicom with a few games when he came back from Japan. A girlfriend gave me a Nintendo DS. I got a great deal on a used Wii as it came with a bunch of games, then my wife got me a Wii U. I believe I had a Tiger electronic handheld of Pitfighter of all games, as well.

In case you’re wondering, I never had a non-Nintendo console other than Sega Genesis someone gave me when they couldn’t get rid of it at a garage sale. I never played it. I used to be a partisan of the console wars, but I haven’t cared about it since high school. But I also didn’t care enough to get an Xbox or Playstation in the years since. I much prefer PC games these days anyway, and specifically look for games that run on my Linux-based system.

Anyway, the point is that every console in my life has been mine to play whenever I wanted to.

And now the Switch…isn’t? How does this new world order function?

When I was younger, no one in my family cared about video games. My mother would play Tetris on her Game Boy, sure, and I would play games with my sister, but I was always Player 1. She gets to claim credit for finishing Super C before I did, but I claim that I carried her to the end and she stole one of my lives and happened to land the finishing blow that I had worked hard to get to. Otherwise, if a game was being played in my home, odds were very good that it was me doing the playing.

The games were mine. I subscribed to magazines about games. I bought RPGs, platformers, strategy games, and more. I was given games as gifts for years of birthdays and holidays.

And I’m not sure how things have changed exactly, but I know it would be presumptuous of me to assume I could just use my son’s Switch without asking. I mean, we gave it to him, so I should not act like it belongs to me or the family.

The day after Christmas, he asked me to play Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle with him, a game I was delighted to discover was a Mario-themed turn-based tactics game. I said I would love to play a game with him.

And then he handed me the second controller. Huh.

When my friends and I would play games at each others’ houses, the unwritten rule was that Player 1 was the person who’s house you were at. A college friend said he had a different upbringing, that wrestling matches would start to fight for control of Player 1, but where I came from, it was peaceful and understood. Player 1 was the home team, and Player 2 was the visiting team.

Realizing that I am now Player 2 in my own home is weird.

But I think this weirdness is something I’m still getting used to as the father of adopted children. We went from 0 to 8yo and 10yo very quickly here over a year ago, and part of what I am getting used to is the idea that my children are going to be given a lot of my time, effort, attention, and resources, that my time isn’t just mine anymore, and that one of my goals is to help my children become more capable of reaching their goals.

In another example, my son came home from the library with a collection of Archie comics, so I pulled out a tote I’ve been carrying around with me since the 90s with all of the Archie digests and comics I used to get. I told him to be careful with it all, but frankly it is more about him learning to take care of his and other people’s things than it is about me caring about my old comics. I don’t care about the comics anymore. I haven’t read them in forever. They might as well be read by him, and to be a lesson in how to take care of things that can be ruined if you’re careless is a bonus.

I’m finding myself sharing stories about toys I played with when I was a child. I have given him some of my collectible cards I have held onto for decades. Some of my old books are now on his shelf in his bedroom. We’ve played games on older consoles before, often with me watching him play through a game I have fond memories of.

But these were always things that were mine to pass down to him, sometimes like relics of my past, and sometimes as junk I have no use for. I was in charge and making the decision to let him have access to things I thought were important to me, and so I hope he likewise finds value in them. I once let him play a Mega Man game to see how he would handle something that was Nintendo Hard(tm) and not as forgiving as Minecraft. I have also withheld things I didn’t think he was ready for, such as some movies I enjoyed as a child (it turns out that PG meant different things in the 80s than it does now) or anything I was worried he’d get jelly or something else on (kids are gross).

But the Switch was never mine. It was his first. It is at his discretion whether or not I play games on it.

He has become Player 1. And I realize now more than ever that, as a parent, I am a non-player character in someone else’s adventure.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical General Personal Development

Derek Yu’s Updated Pixel Art Tutorial

In ancient times, around 2005, Derek Yu of Spelunky fame created a 10-step pixel art tutorial. It took you through the process of creating a cartoonish lucha lawyer, including brief discussions on lines, shading, dithering, and more.

Derek Yu's pixel art luchador
As seen in archive.org’s history of Derek’s old site.
Also, Derek, please don’t sue me.

Yu recently tweeted that he’s rebooted the tutorial, which can now be found at https://derekyu.com/makegames/pixelart.html and takes you through drawing an orc.

Derek Yu's orc from start to finish
Who would win, this orc or the law?

It’s a more detailed tutorial, and it shows what Yu has learned about teaching pixel art with almost 15 years more experience since the original was created.

There’s also a tutorial about common pixel art mistakes to go with it, so you can see what you’re doing wrong as you try to follow along.

Thanks for contributing to the world of game making, Derek Yu!

Categories
Games General

Come See Toytles: Leaf Raking and Continent Race at 60 FPS Fest

GBGames will have a table at 60 FPS, “a festival for videogames, boardgames, and illustration” taking place tonight from 5:00pm – 9:00pm at Mainframe Studios, located at 900 Keosauqua Way, Des Moines, IA.

There are three floors to explore with over 70 studios full of talented artists and arts non-profits, a nacho bar, a photo giveaway, arcade games, board games, virtual reality, and more.

I will be showing off two games.

Toytles: Leaf Raking

One is my own leaf-raking business simulation game Toytles: Leaf Raking, which puts you in the role of a budding entrepreneur looking to earn enough money to buy yourself the Ultimate Item(tm)! It’s a game designed to teach responsibility and strategic thinking, currently available for Android and soon for iPhones and iPads.

The other is a game I’ve been working on for two and a half years for Byron’s Games called Continent Race: World Puzzle. It’s a geography game in which you locate and place countries on a world map, earning stars along the way. It will be available for Android, iPhones, and iPads soon.

The story of Byron’s Games is incredible and inspirational, and I’m fortunate and honored to be part of their efforts to help other kids. An extended hospital stay and a passion for geography gave Byron the inspiration to help other kids learn and have fun — at the same time! Bryon’s Games also has a Continent Race board game which I’ll also have at the table. You can get the Continent Race board game and know that a portion of Byron’s Games profits benefit select children’s charities.

So if you’re in Des Moines, come see me at the Fest! I’d love to talk with you!