GBGamesIf you are in the Chicagoland area or don’t mind taking a nice field trip, come hang out with the Chicago Indie Game Developer Club on Sunday, December 10th! Discuss game development and marketing, provide feedback to games in development, and otherwise be cool, awesome, and amazing. The first five people to arrive will also get to be fantastic.
Where: The Starbucks at
Streets of Woodfield
601 North Martingale Road
Schaumburg IL, 60173
When: Sunday, December 10th, at 7:00 PM
I know you’ve missed him as much as I have, but Action has finally returned, and he brought along an interview with Thomas Warfield, creator of Pretty Good Solitaire.
He talks about how he accidentally got into making shareware games, that there always seems to be people saying that it is tougher to make money today versus yesterday, no matter when today is, and about trends in the industry. He also mentions that while marketing is great for getting eyeballs, a good game is needed to actually convert players into customers.
Paul Betlem, senior director of engineering for Adobe, explained why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long.
GNU/Linux users didn’t even see Flash v8, which meant that while Windows and Mac OS X users were able to use and view newer content, GNU/Linux users had to deal with a wide range of problems due to an outdated plugin.
The problem was that Adobe wanted to create a consistent experience for all distributions, and the Linux Standards Base has not addressed all of the different libraries used by Flash. Testing multiple configurations was also a challenge. The good news is that Adobe’s suggestions to the LSB aren’t falling on deaf ears, and it should be easier in the future to provide an application that can run on any distro without the user or developer worrying about tiny but important differences.
Also good news is that Adobe plans to ship Flash v10 for Windows, Mac, and Linux-based systems simultaneously, so the delay GNU/Linux users had seen with v9 apparently won’t happen again.
So what does it mean to GNU/Linux gamers? Flash games will no longer be off-limits. And for developers, it means an entirely new audience can be available to play their games.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Happy thanksgiving!
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.
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.
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.