Game Hours: 576 (previous three years) + 53.25 (current year) = 629.25 / 1000 Game Ideas: 775 (previous three years) + 3 (current year) = 778 / 1000
I had another fairly productive week, but I had to take massive action at the end to have something to show for it. If you check the Walls page, you will see the latest version of the game in Flash format, as well as downloads for Windows and GNU/Linux with the updates.
This past week I learned a lot about the perils of outsourcing, but I also learned that even when your project looks hopeless, you can still do things to get the project on track again.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
Game Hours: 576 (previous three years) + 38.25 (current year) = 614.25 / 1000 Game Ideas: 775 (previous three years) + 0 (current year) = 775 / 1000
I think this past week has been my most productive week! Since I’ve released Walls for Windows and GNU/Linux, I’ve been interested in having a web version of the game made available. I’ve been working with someone else on integrating it with a website, and it’s amazing the progress that has been made so far! What’s more, I’ve also been outsourcing significant parts of the work, so even more work is getting accomplished than the hours above would make it seem. There’s only so much time in a day that I can make use of, so leveraging the skills of others can help advance the progress of a project much more than going it alone. After another week, I expect to be finished with this project, and I plan on writing up a post-mortem about the experience.
I will say that out of all the business books I’ve read, I’ve always skipped past topics involving management since I never planned on hiring employees. Now I find that I need to brush up on the skill.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
While many of you read the blog, you may be unaware of my main site at www.GBGames.com. If you go there now, you’ll see a new link to my recently released Walls!
It’s a very simple yet fun game that lets you practice your mouse-fu! To play, move the mouse cursor towards the goal while avoiding the increasing and expanding walls.
The game is available for Windows and GNU/Linux. I don’t have a Mac, but the source is available and highly portable, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble to get it running on OS X if someone would be willing to try.
Game Hours: 576 (previous three years) + 18.25 (current year) = 594.25 / 1000 Game Ideas: 775 (previous three years) + 0 (current year) = 775 / 1000
I spent this past weekend working on my submission for MiniLD #6. The rules were pretty cool: each participant will be making a level for a larger game. There will be an overriding theme for everyone, and each person must claim a unique secondary theme. I wasn’t sure how well the combined game would work, but the primary theme was Monochrome, which I thought was a brilliant way to make all the individual levels seem like part of an integrated whole. For my secondary theme, I picked Guardian.
You can see my submission at the Ludum Dare website.
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
It’s good to see Jason Rohrer’s name among the finalists, and it is appropriate that his entry is nominated for the Innovation Award. Rohrer was the developer of Gravitation, an artistic game.
But there are other innovative games in the running, and it looks like another great year for indies in general. Good luck to all the finalists!
Game Hours: 576 (previous three years) + 6 (current year) = 582 / 1000 Game Ideas: 775 (previous three years) + 0 (current year) = 775 / 1000
The first week of 2009 was a short one, and I’m off to a slow start. I spent the majority of my time working on using NSIS to create a Windows installer for Walls, which is otherwise a finished game. NSIS turns out to be a lot less straightforward than I expected. While I understand scripting an installer, it would be nice to have it automatically create the uninstaller that will completely remove all trace of the game regardless of where the player installs it. The installer would know more about what its doing than I would, but I’m expected to write a full-proof script? People keep suggesting Inno Setup, but since my build environment is my Debian machine, I’d like to keep my build process as simple as running a single command and waiting for the GNU/Linux and Win32 builds to get created automatically. I want no manual steps, and I don’t want to require a Windows machine to be involved in the process.
I know I’m just learning what NSIS is capable of, but I’m still surprised there isn’t an Easy Script option that says, “Anything you install, this uninstaller will remove, no matter where the player installs it.” I’ve made significant progress, and just a bit more time will see a finished installer ready. Still, with all this hassle, I can see why web apps are so appealing. Installing is just uploading to my own server. B-)
[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]
In the last three years, I’ve been participating in The Thousander Club. Scott Hsu-Storaker started in back in 2006 after reading my blog post called Action vs Waiting, Practice vs Talent, which focused in part on the idea that to become an expert on a topic, you need to put in a lot of practice. Expert chess players have put in thousands of hours over many years to hone their skills. They don’t necessarily have natural talent. They couldn’t have been born knowing what to do. They simply focused their time and efforts on getting better. They practice. A lot.
From my old post:
10,000 hours over the course of 10 years might make you a master, and it sounds daunting. Well, yeah. It is. That’s a lot of dedicated hours. But 1,000 hours is doable within a year if you work full time, and you can be an experienced expert. Already have something taking up your full time? 100 hours can be done on the side, and you can still be somewhat of an expert. 10 hours could be a dedicated weekend or spread over a few of them, and you’ll definitely learn enough to be dangerous. Even dedicating an hour to a task will give you practice with the basics.
Scott is a 3D artist, and so he records how many models he creates. His goal is 1,000 3D models. I liked the idea of the club so much that I participated, and I’ve been keeping track of the number of hours of game development I’ve put in. I’ve also been keeping track of the number of game ideas I come up with.
Over three years, I’ve managed 576 hours of game development and 773 775 game ideas. It’s far short of the 1,000/year goal for each, but it’s progress. My first year I did 262 hours, and the second year I did only 146 hours. Last year I did 166 hours, which is a slight improvement, but I obviously still haven’t done as well as the first year. Using these numbers, I can measure myself against myself. I’d like to see 1,000 hours hit this year, but it is going to take a lot more dedication and focus than I’ve been giving in the past. Through 576 hours of game development over the past few years, I’ve learned a lot, and I look forward to the experience I will gain this coming year.
1,000 hours in a year comes out to about 3 hours per day. That’s doable if you are focused. You could even skip a day or two and double up on the weekends. Will you join the Thousander Club this year?
Young talks about how the game industry evolved without leaving a way for new gamers to easily join in the fun. While there is no inherent problem with having complex games, the learning curve got very steep for new people. If you’ve been playing games forever, you’re used to punitive game mechanics and adapted to difficult control schemes. If you haven’t, then an Xbox 360 controller might as well be the controls of a 747.
Young claims that the latest Prince of Persia (which I haven’t played) is exactly what new gamers need: a game that’s forgiving. Corvus Elrod wrote about the forgiving nature of casual games, and since I believe that any game can be made casual by making it more accessible, it seems we’re all in agreement.
But Young asks a question: does making a game more punitive make victory more fun? That is, if a game is too forgiving, does it detract from the fun? Could Prince of Persia have been more fun if it forced you to replay entire levels whenever you failed, the way most games do? Is there more satisfaction gained from success because you know you avoided punishment?
I’ve been playing Advance Wars: Dual Strike a lot recently. Completing missions has been pretty easy, in the sense that I rarely failed to do so. I was still having fun, but part of me wondered if I was going to get bored before I finished the game. Then I came across a mission that was fought on two fronts, and not only did you have to defeat all of the enemy’s forces, but now you had to do so in 18 game days. I played that mission multiple times, trying different strategies, until I finally won, and barely. There was something much more satisfying about overcoming a tough challenge in this mission than in bumbling through the previous missions.
I suppose part of the satisfaction came from a sense of improvement. In the previous missions, I might have thought I was doing poorly, but then I somehow pulled off a victory. When I lost a mission, however, I had to replay it, and I could see how playing differently changed the outcome. I learned what did and didn’t work, and learning is fun. In this sense, the fact that failure required replaying a mission seems to have enhanced the feeling of fun when I succeeded.
On the other hand, what if Dual Strike forced me to replay the entire game after losing a mission? It would be analogous to games like Super Mario Bros, in which you had a limited number of lives or continues. I know I tolerated such games when I had plenty of time to play (and replay!), but did I have more fun with those games than I did with games that had unlimited continues? It’s definitely not fun to come so close to completing a game only to have the final boss defeat me, losing all progress, and requiring a restart. Still, does knowing that such a punishment awaits me make victory all the more sweet?
Intuitively, I want to argue that it shouldn’t. I can point to plenty of casual games that are enjoyable and fun, games in which the most a failure can do is set you back a few minutes of your time. At the same time, however, there is only so much Tetris and Bejeweled I can stand before I find myself wanting something more involving. Maybe there is something to this idea that punitive game play is more fun?
I have Etrian Odyssey 2, a Nintendo DS game in the same category as Wizardry. It’s hardcore and incredibly hard, and I find it immensely satisfying. No, it is not a game to recommend for beginners and newbies, and it’s not meant to be. If your party is killed while exploring the maze, you revert back to your last save. If you didn’t manually save often enough, you’ll find yourself repeating entire segments of the game. Prince of Persia would simply put you right back where you failed so you could immediately try again, but does it lose anything in the process? Is Prince of Persia simply Grimm Fandango, an enjoyable story interspersed with puzzles that you just want to get through to get to the next part of the story?
If failure didn’t result in negative consequences, or if the negative consequences aren’t horrible, then there isn’t much incentive for the player to avoid failure. Why learn how to play better when I can just fumble my way through to victory? I feel that a game without negative consequences for failures on the player’s part is going to be pretty mindless or tedious. I’ve only seen game play videos of Prince of Persia, but it looks to me like the Annoying Jumping Puzzle simply got more elaborate with faster iterations between attempts. Am I wrong?
I think Young is right, though. The video game industry needs forgiving games to introduce itself to new gamers. I wonder if such games will be stepping stones to more complex games, or if they will be seen as valuable and fun on their own. Will there always be a barrier between rich, involving games and casual game players? Do the players need to be slowly introduced to the games, or do the games need to reach out to the players?
If you’ve been following my blog for some time, you know that I always encouraged development for multiple platforms and not just Windows. The common argument against doing so is that you increase your development costs and effort for a very small percentage of increased customers. Where’s the benefit?
Wolfire explains why you should support Mac and GNU/Linux platforms. When you’re an indie developer, especially one starting out, you’re a small fish in a big pond. You don’t have a huge marketing budget. You don’t have a massive sales force to help push you through retail. PC Gamer, IGN, and any of the large game review websites aren’t likely to cover your game. Having Mac and GNU/Linux versions of your game makes these obstacles less important, increases your visibility, and improves sales.
So what happens when your game is available for the supposedly negligible extra few percentage of people who play games? Websites such as The Linux Game Tome, LinuxGames.com, InsideMacGames.com, and even the official Apple Games site will cover your game and your company. Then sites such as SlashDot will cover it. That’s a lot of potential customers from a dedicated niche, people you couldn’t reach by releasing yet another Windows game!
Troy Hepfner, of My Game Company, said that releasing Dirk Dashing for GNU/Linux was a very good idea:
And I am so glad we tried a Linux version of one of our games – this has turned out to be a huge shot in the arm for our business!
33% of initial sales came from GNU/Linux, and while the total percentage of sales from GNU/Linux users has gone down relative to Windows and Mac users since then, it’s not an insignificant amount of income. Hepfner has said that he knows a number of his Windows sales came directly from people who only heard about his game from Linux-based gaming news. Again, supporting these other platforms can help an indie to stand out from a crowded Windows-only marketplace.
Wolfire says that supporting these supposedly negligible platforms can help you take advantage of vocal minorities and surprisingly dedicated fans to spread the word about your game.
To conclude, if you’re not supporting Linux and Mac OS X from a philosophical standpoint or for the fans, at least do it for the money. If you don’t support non-Windows platforms, you’re leaving a lot of cash on the table. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in a position to just say f— it to a large community of people who want to support us.
Bottom line: If you agree with the larger game companies and think that there is no benefit to supporting multiple platforms, you’re wrong. You are not running a large game company that can get millions of dollars in sales in the first month of release while ignoring everyone but the hardcore gamers. Having cross-platform ports available provide you with plenty of marketing opportunities which can increase sales greatly. With hundreds of games being released each year, you need to do something remarkable to make your game stand out. It’s still quite remarkable to support Mac and GNU/Linux users, so take advantage of it.
I was shoveling out my car yesterday, and I was having a tough time. There was a lot of ice since I hadn’t moved my car since the previous snow fall. A stranger stopped his truck, pulled out a metal shovel, and said, “You won’t get through that ice with that shovel. Here, let me break it up for you.” After he finished, he shook my hand, we wished each other a merry Christmas, and he left.
And besides feeling pretty good about the kindness of strangers during the holidays, I’m thinking, “How many games involve generosity as a game play mechanic?” B-)
I’ll be spending time with lots of family. I’ll make sure to bring a video game console for the bored cousins. Ok, and for myself. I’ll also bring the classic Christmas film “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”.
Other classics I’ll bring include “Christmas with Gumby”, “Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas”, and “Sonic Christmas Blast”. If you had every Christmas special from every cartoon, how many would that be? Last year I didn’t get to see “A Christmas Story” on TV somehow, so I hope to do so this year.
