Aug 31 2011

SURFING THE WAVE

Fear Is Vigilance went up a week ago. It’s now been played over 6,000 times, which is more downloads than Beacon got in that time! It’s shown up on RPS, in a PC Gamer roundup, on Reddit (hi Reddit!)…

Well, the real traffic to Flash games comes from people hitting Flash portals. I’m putting together a portal-friendly version of the game to send out shortly. It’ll have prominent links back to my site here, no sitelock, and I’ll probably put together a 10MB version as well for those portals who object to a larger file.

However you look at it, Vigilance is a commercial failure. I’m going to make a few hundred dollars from MochiAds, but that’s terrible money for a few months’ work. Still, it was a lot of fun to do, it was a valuable experiment, and seeing people enjoy it really does make it feel worthwhile. Thanks for playing and commenting – it makes all the difference 🙂

Aug 29 2011

USING MOCHIADS WITH HAXE

If you remember my last HaXe tutorial, on getting a preloader working? Here’s another, on getting preloader ads working. Specifically, on compiling and linking a HaXe project with the Mochi API, which isn’t available for HaXe. This could be extended to getting the Playtomic API working with HaXe, or damn near anything else that just has an AS3 API.
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Aug 28 2011

A SLIGHT AMENDMENT

Spent Friday and Saturday playing Deus Ex: HR. SO GOOD.

Anyway, back to work. I’ve just patched Fear is Vigilance to fix a bug that stopped IE8 users from playing. That’s not cool! My server host sorted out the issues with Apache, too, so the server’s responding and everything even with lots of traffic. BONUS.

As a bit of a celebration for all this, here’s some of the Fear Is Vigilance soundtrack for download 😀

– Vigilance – Charity (Title Theme)
– Vigilance – Get Violent
– Vigilance – Ending (Long Mix)

This is the original version of the ending track, before I cut it down to make the ending a sensible length. It’s extra epic!

Aug 24 2011

FEAR IS VIGILANCE

It’s DONE.

I’m gonna go tell everybody. As for you? Go play it!

Aug 22 2011

AD BREAK

Yup!

I doubt anyone ever is a fan of ads, but it should hopefully bring in some beer money at least. Getting MochiAds to play nice in HaXe is a surprising amount of work – no-one supports HaXe! – but it’s done now. I’ll put up another tutorial post later like I did with the preloader, once I’m sure I’ve worked all the kinks out.

I’m going to make some final tweaks tomorrow, like making the end cutscene skippable. Then I’ll put up a site and start uploading the game to portals on Wednesday. o_o

Aug 20 2011

OMINOUS HUM

Just a little update – I’m poking Reels of Steel again, experimenting with music and the general feel of it. I’m borrowing a trick from Rez and the way the music builds up in the first stage, building from a simple regular kick thud up to something more complex. Flash doesn’t actually allow you to stitch together procedural tracks in an interesting way, like Rez does, but I can combine basic drum beats and bass drones with occasional musical stings. So that’s what I’m doing!

I also now have Suicidal Torpedo Robot Fish.

In Vigilance news: I’m going to be releasing without a sponsor, so hold on while I drop in some ad code and set up a home page for it 😀

And one last thing… if you play Starcraft II, I’m working on a little pet project: a rule set for handicapping which lets stronger players play with weaker players without throwing everything off. I’ll be looking for beta testers soonish, on EU.

Aug 16 2011

FROM DUST

I’ve let blogging slide a bit these past few days. I haven’t been able to focus on work, so I’ve been catching up on games instead!

“From Dust” is a God game of sorts. Unlike many, though, the landscape itself is alive – rivers erode and deposit earth and flop around as they do so, volcanoes erupt and lava drizzles unpredictably down the volcanic rock, tsunamis and rain can surge periodically and gradually wear down the earth.

With all of this going on, you’re mostly concerned with shoring things up for a few minutes at a time with your limited powers so your little people can achieve the next minor objective. Building bridges through water; diverting rivers and lava; putting out rampaging wildfires. It’s often a game about coping with, not conquering, a hostile environment.

In practice, that’s engaging and very physical. With the range of levels – one has the land itself sinking up and down, another is set within an active volcano, and each gives you different powers to play with – it’s fun and quite atmospheric, though having played it to death now I wish there more to it than just manipulating lava, earth and water.

I’ve also made a start on Bastion. In contrast to From Dust, which is very much built on complex simulation and clever mechanics, Bastion’s a real case of presentation over everything else. What presentation though! The narration’s constantly charming. If the demo pulls you in then rest assured the full game keeps it up as far as I’ve seen, and there’s plenty of optional difficulty on top thanks to the Shrine. I’m maybe two thirds of the way through the game now, but more than anything else it feels solid.

They’re honestly both great games. XBox Live Arcade’s library just got even more formidable 😀

Aug 11 2011

CONVENTIONAL METHODS

Maybe the biggest problem with not doing the art for a project is, I don’t get to make posts with cool screenshots all the time! I have to use placeholder stuff occasionally while I’m working, especially when I’m trying out new ideas. Like this placeholder font here:

There are conversations between the fisherman and tiger in this game, one per level. We started off trying something unusual; when you finished a level, the camera would pan left and up and text bubbles would appear above them with their conversation.

The problem was, this wasn’t really providing a good sense of closure when you finished the level. I had the conversation synced to a bit of ambient music to make it more interesting, but that just meant it was unskippable! That’s no fun when you have to replay a lot.

So I’m trying something more conventional now, with confidence in the knowledge that it’ll sort of work. I’ve shifted the conversations to the start of each day/level, and reckon the end will work better with a dramatic “clear” splash to punctuate success.

It’s a less original structure, but don’t knock it if it works, right? 😀 Now I’m building the game back up in this style, and it should come together more easily.

Aug 08 2011

DON’T WORRY. BE HAPPY

This indie business, it’s… well, it’s business. And that means it can be stressful.

I should be getting some income from two big projects at the moment – the contract work we did recently, and Vigilance. Unfortunately, the agency we did the contract work for hasn’t paid us yet. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a bid I’m happy with for Vigilance yet. So I’m stuck wondering: will I get a decent bid soon? Did I do something wrong? Should I abandon Flash games altogether, ditch the work I’ve done so far on Fight Back and just cut my losses?

Of course, realistically, these things take time to work themselves through, and some projects will do better than others. The contract work should pay off eventually; it’ll just take a little while for the cash to come in. Vigilance could hypothetically get a great sponsorship bid this evening, and even if it never does, it might just be that the project was too niche and Fight Back will earn enough to pay for developing both of them.

I guess you have to be a bit more emotionally resilient to handle running your own business, and accept the possibility (or reality!) of projects bombing in the marketplace or deals going bad. It’s especially stressful when you’re just putting out your first serious projects, trying to find out if you can make this indie thing work for you financially or not.

But, you know what? I know I’m okay at this stuff, and I genuinely do feel confident it’ll work out. If Flash games don’t work out for me, I’ll change strategy and do something else, and that’ll work out instead! For now, worrying doesn’t solve anything. I’m getting my head down and working on the next project. 😀

Aug 05 2011

JUST FISHIN

What’s the latest? Well, Vigilance is sitting on FlashGameLicense for another week. My VVVVVV level, “The Tower of Power”, has made several people frustrated and a few people happy. And I’ve been poking Reels of Steel again!

You’re going to get really bored of screenshots of fish if I post a shot every time I talk about it, so I won’t. 😉

I’m working on pacing and level design at the moment. The original plan was to feature conversations between the fisherman and his tiger after each level. The big problem with that is that it takes control away from the player for twenty seconds, and that feels horrible! It’s a really long time, and that was just for three lines of dialogue after each level.

I’ve cut this feature out entirely for now and I’m focusing on level design – the patterns of fish you’ll encounter as you play. I’ll try to reintegrate dialogue once the game’s feeling fun and reasonably paced without it. That always has to take priority 😀

Now, one last thing. If you decide to waste a few minutes on something funny and strange this weekend, make it offbeat adventure game Murder Dog IV: Trial Of The Murder Dog by thecatamites, who did the equally odd Space Funeral.

Wait. I can put in a screenshot of that instead!