Categories
Game Development Games Marketing/Business Politics/Government

Illinois Anti-Video Game Law Appeal Rejected, Still Costing Taxpayers

According to Game Politics, Governor Blagojevich’s administration has not paid the ESA’s legal fees in the court fight over “Safe Games Illinois”, the law that the governor managed to pass last year before it was ruled unconstitutional. Since the payment of over half a million dollars has not been made, the ESA is now asking for almost $8,000 in interest.

Also reported at Game Politics, apparently Blagojevich appealed portions of the unconstitutional law, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has affirmed the initial ruling.

You can read the entire ruling at Game Politics.

And you can see why I voted third party in this last election. If not, let me point you to one of my earlier posts where I dissected the arguments used to support the unconstitutional laws. Statistics were used in a blatantly deceptive way, and the video game industry was targetted even though the same “supporting” arguments and evidence would have shown that the movie industry was even more of a danger to the children the law was supposed to be protecting. I personally became convinced that this law was just an example of opportunism and politics, and it showed me that I can’t trust this administration.

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Wiki for Casual Game Marketing and Business

I learned at the Indie Gamer forums that a new section has been added to the Game Programming Wiki: Independent and Casual Games Articles.

Currently there are two articles available: How to Make Your Game Portal Ready and Casual Game Portal. There are also a number of article ideas listed, so feel free to add your own content.

Categories
Game Development General Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: November 27th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 227.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 501 / 1000

Target: 924

I went out of town on Wednesday, and so I have only spent a few minutes here or there writing down some notes for the Space Invaders clone I will be working on. Well, that’s pretty much it.

Oh, and I signed up for the Supreme Commander Beta. B-)

I also found that when I am away from my computer for a few days, I can get almost 1,000 spam emails and hundreds of comment spam. Lovely.

Categories
Game Development Games General

Indie Game Developers Thankful for…

While Thanksgiving is an American holiday, I figure that this post might appeal to a few of you international readers as well. What are you thankful for as an independent game developer?

I can name a few things:

  • Quick and easy access to information on the world wide web covering a range of topics from game design to programming to marketing to personal development.
  • Inexpensive or freely available game development tools, such as compilers, game engines, 2D/3D art creation applications, and even operating systems.
  • Ease of distribution of digital data.
  • Personal contacts made through various forums, including the Indie Gamer forums and ASP newsgroups
  • Love…of roller coasters.
  • The people in #gamedevelopers on irc.starchat.net
  • Compound interest.
  • Qatfish.
  • The knowledge that I am capable of much more and that I haven’t done anything compared to what I have the potential to do.
  • My blog readers, who sometimes act as my conscience and keep me accountable to my goals.

Happy thanksgiving!

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical

Automating Build and Test Systems

Years ago, I read Automating the Build Process at Gamasutra, which documented an automated build process for the game Creatures 3. The advantages for implementing an automated build process include better reliability, reduced time, and reduced risk.

A few weeks ago, a new article has appeared called
Automated Build and Test Systems for Games, which outlines what Nihilistic Software does when developing their own games. Once again, time savings are emphasized.

In both articles, it seemed that some customization was needed, but you should be able to find a way to automate the process for your own games. One tool I found is BuildBot, which mentions among its users id, which uses it for Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

The overall goal is to reduce tree breakage and provide a platform to run tests or code-quality checks that are too annoying or pedantic for any human to waste their time with. Developers get immediate (and potentially public) feedback about their changes, encouraging them to be more careful about testing before checkin.

Any time you can use a computer to automate a repetitive task, you’ll find consistency in quality and speed as well as fewer headaches related to the meta-work of making a game. While I believe that having it automatically build everytime a change is made would be overkill for a one-indie shop, having it delegated to a button-press would definitely help.

Categories
Game Development Games General Marketing/Business

Want to be an Indie Game Developer?

Yesterday at 4PM GMT, a number of people were asked to write on the topic of the independent game industry. If you read many game development blogs, you would have noticed that a number of them had the same title: “So you want to be an Indie Developer?”

Among the writers were Dan Marshall of Gibbage fame, Tom Arundel of Introversion Software, Juuso Hietalahti of GameProducer.net, and Cliff Harris of Positech Games. The complete list of links is below:

I believe everyone will agree that Lemmy and Blinky’s post was the funniest. Paul Timson, aka Sharpfish, has some sage advice for indie developers who might not realize what can happen if you don’t take advantage of “RIGHT NOW”. You can’t just wait for someone else to give you your dreams and accomplished goals.

Categories
Game Development General Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: November 20th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 227.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 500 / 1000

Target: 903

A little less than 100 hours left for the year!

I spent another week researching Autotools, and I managed to get two text-based applications building with it. One was a basic “Hello, World!” application, and another was a text-based board game simulation that I completed months ago. Now, I am trying to get the Kyra Sprite Engine building into a shared library. Previous versions already had a working autotools build system in place, but it has been broken for the last few iterations. Ideally I could get it back to a working state. At the very least, I would like to be able to use Autotools on my project while integrating Kyra into that build procedure.

Of course, November is almost over, and a month ago I said I wanted to be able to complete a Space Invaders clone. Researching and using Autotools is only tangentially related to that goal. Of course, goals can be changed, and I think that sticking with learning a new skill would work better than taking a break to make a game, which in all likelihood would take longer than I think it would.

So my plans change again, only I don’t feel too bad about it. Sure, it means putting off finishing another game, possibly until the beginning of 2007, but it also means that I am not trying to spread my focus across five different disciplines at once. I am still moving forward, and learning a new skill always feels as though you are not being productive at first.

Realistically, with the holidays approaching, I can see my time getting split up between the day job, game development, and family, which means that Space Invaders might really take me a couple of months to make anyway. But hey, once it is made, I should be able to easily build and distribute it.

Oh, and I also spent a number of days coming up with some really simple ideas. I plan to catch up to 1,000 ideas by the end of the Thousander Club for this year. Last week I was at 445 ideas, and now I am up to 500. If I spend a few more weeks coming up with hundreds of ideas, I should be able to make it. It has been a long time since I posted one of them, and I hope to post one for this week.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical General Politics/Government

Games 4 Girls Competition Registration Is Open

In an effort to attract more females to computer science, a male-dominated field, the Games 4 Girls competition asks college women to create computer games designed to be fun for middle or high school age women.

In previous competitions, Game Maker was required, but this year other tools and platforms can be used. The only requirement is that the games can run on Windows XP (the competition is partly sponsored by Microsoft, after all).

This past year’s winners were Cornell University’s Green, Eggs, and Pan, the University of California-Irvine’s Eterative Tale, and North Central College’s DummerUnfall. Honorable mention went to Fluff, created by the team from University of Buffalo.

For this year’s competition, each member of the winning team will be awarded $1,000. Second and third place team members will receive $500. Also, three teams will win $1,000 for their Women’s Club/Organization. If you are a female college student, and you’re interested in the competition, the registration date is December 22nd, 2006. Deadlines and general information about the competition can be found at the Games 4 Girls site.

Categories
Game Development General Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: November 13th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 218.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 445 / 1000

Target: 882

I have printed out the manual for Autoconf, which is the tool used to create configuration scripts for a wide-variety of Unix-like systems. Together with Automake, it will allow me to make packages that users will simply need to configure && make && make install. So far, it doesn’t seem like it is too complicated, but it is difficult to find beginner documents that don’t assume you already know something. Interestingly, the Autotools book claims to be a tutorial, but it seems to give examples without explaining much, expecting you to use the reference manuals for the individual tools.

I intend to write my own set of tutorials since I think these tools would be much more useful to developers if they only knew how to use them.

Categories
Game Development General

IGDA Created a SIG for Tool Development

According to a GameDev.net news report, the IGDA has created its own special interest group on tool development.

Tool Box is the SIG’s blog, and even though there are only a few posts, there is one link to an article at Gamasutra called Swiss Army Chainsaw: A Common Sense Approach to Tool Development that was posted a couple of months ago.

Some other options for the tool building community include the forum and the mailing list.

With content creation being such a big emphasis these days, even the indie game developer could benefit from better tools.