Category: Game Development

Categories
Game Design Game Development Marketing/Business

Which Project Do You Choose Next?

In Another Indie Quandary: Short v. Long, Tim faces the problem a lot of indies face. Do you pick the shorter project in order to make some cash sooner, or do you pick the longer project, the one you really WANT to make, hoping not to go bust in the process?

The short project, if successful, means you are one step closer to being financially independent of employee-dom. Of course, shorter projects are probably short because they aren’t very hard to make, which means anyone could make it and probably has. How successful can the game be? If it becomes successful, how hard would it be for competitors to encroach on your turf?

The longer project would require funding to help keep you alive long enough to finish, which usually means working for The Man for a little while longer. And that’s assuming you finish. Longer projects are notorious for becoming nothing more than tech demos. Tech demos don’t sell, unless you are trying to find a better The Man, but it is probably not why you wanted to make the game in the first place. Still, this project will probably be more enjoyable and, if successful, much more rewarding.

Is it a question of suffering for your art? Being timid vs being bold? What do you do?

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

Thousander Club Update: July 17th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 131.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000

Target: 525

There are 54 days left until the deadline for entering a game in IGF 2007: Countdown to IGF 2007

As far as Oracle’s Eye Prime is concerned, I managed to work on an input system. As of this writing, I was able to get individual entities to detect the state of a keypress and send messages to each other based on them. For now, that means that multiple images on the screen can move about in different ways depending on what keys they are paying attention to. This week I hope to implement detection of key presses and releases. I hope to have something resembling a game as well.

One of my computers has three problems: a rattling CPU fan, a chipset fan that doesn’t spin, and a hard drive that was giving me errors. I bought a new hard drive, but I left off the other fans, partly due to the fact that I need to go to the manufacturer for chipset fans and partly because I just want a new CPU fan but apparently I need a new heatsink as well since they don’t sell them separately. I’ll leave the fans to another day. Last night I started copying files over to the drive, but it is entirely possible that as you read this post that they files are still being copied. A 160GB drive with multiple partitions will need to copy everything over to the new 250GB drive.

And the weird thing? It was my backup drive.

I’m also considering the purchase of a Dell laptop. I wonder if I could order it today and receive it by this weekend, in time for the Chicago Indie Game Developer Club meeting:

Where: The Starbucks at
Streets of Woodfield
601 North Martingale Road
Schaumburg IL, 60173

Date: Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

Time: 5:00 PM until whenever

If you’re in the Chicagoland area, feel free to drop by, give some feedback, and talk shop with other indies.

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business

2006 Casual Games White Paper

As per The Ludologist, the 2006 Casual Games White Paper is out, although as of this writing you won’t find it on the reports page for some reason. You can find a copy of it on the IGDA Wiki as well as in PDF form at the Casual Games SIG.

Apparently the wiki format was used to encourage people to contribute to the knowledge base:

Contribute

We have decided to utilize this Wiki as it provides easy access for the entire community to contribute to and update this iteration of the paper. Please feel free to help out by updating any section in which you feel comfortable contributing to!

It should make for good bedtime reading.

Categories
Game Design Game Development

Converting Table Top Games to Video Games

Table Top versus Video Games: Part 1 – The Dice kicks off a three-part series on converting a table-top game to a video game. To make a successful conversion takes a bit of dedication and hard work. This series provides some idea of what it would take.

The other two parts:
Table Top versus Video Games: Part 2 – Jabber, Jingle, Google and 360
Table Top versus Video Games: Part 3 – Reaching Your Audience

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: July 10th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 126 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000

Target: 504

There are 61 days left until the deadline for entering a game in IGF 2007: Countdown to IGF 2007

I took most of Saturday to work on Oracle’s Eye Prime. I really like having entire days of development since I can get quite a bit accomplished in a short period of time. The project is coming together, although progress is still a bit slower than I would like. A few more Saturday’s like this last one would probably help quite a bit. Currently I can load sprites and entity objects dynamically through a configuration file, and there is a way to allow the entities to respond to input. Eventually game development will involve less coding and more configuration file editing.

Categories
Game Development

Indie Game Dev Podcast: Interview with Positech Games

Action has released another podcast, this time interviewing Cliff Harris of Positech Games, creator of Democracy and the upcoming Kudos.

It’s nice to get a voice to go with the posts on IndieGamer forums, and the interview is pretty eye-opening. If I can boil it down to anything, it is “Finish your game projects and you’ll be ahead of 90% of the people out there.” At the end, cliffski gives quite a bit of advice for indie developers.

Also, for another interview with cliffski, see Interview with Positech Games Producer Cliff Harris: Kudos Game Production

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: July 3rd

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 112.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 410 / 1000

Target: 483

There are 68 days left until the deadline for entering a game in IGF 2007: Countdown to IGF 2007

I went out of town for the July 4th weekend, but I still managed to work a few hours during the week before I left. I feel like I am being more productive in the past few weeks, although I suppose I should check the actual numbers to be sure.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Agile Individuals?

Paper Burns: Game Design With Agile Methodologies gives a nice insight on the benefits of using SCRUM and other Agile methodologies to develop games. You can make games in weeks and months rather than quarters and years. After rereading a bit about the use of SCRUM at High Moon Studios, I was wondering how I could apply it to my own development. After all, I still don’t have Oracle’s Eye finished, and I started that project last August.

But like a lot of things I learn about, it seems to apply best to teams of people rather than individuals. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of techniques or methodologies for individuals to develop software, let alone games.

Are indie developers expected to just wing it with subpar techniques and figure out the best way themselves? Are we supposed to hire partners/coworkers in order to make decent progress? Or are there tried and true methods for single-person development teams? Pair programming is obviously out, but can’t other methodologies be tweaked a bit to provide a benefit for the lone wolf?

If you work alone, what tips do you have to share?

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical

Debugging

Richard “superpig” Fine has written a piece called Introduction to Debugging. While it is clearly biased towards using Visual Studio’s debugger, it does provide a general checklist of things to do when killing those bugs:

  • Issue recognition
  • Intelligence gathering
  • Diagnosis
  • Prescription
  • Response
  • Verification
Categories
Game Development

IGF 2007 Announced

Thanks to vjvj from the indiegamer forums, I learned that the website for IGF 2007 has been updated.

I thought I would be further along with my own development by this time, but I am still going to try to get a game submitted. I have until September 8, 2006 at 11:59pm Pacific Standard Time.

Check out the countdown, and another countdown for Chicago natives. Only 73 days left as of this posting!