Category Archives: gamedev

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 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!

Aug 03 2011

ACTUAL VVVVVV LEVEL

It’s here!

Well, strictly speaking, the link’s over here, in the discussion thread on the VVVVVV forum.

Here’s why I designed it like I did.

First up, the lack of checkpoints was to force me to make an interesting, balanced level without them, which in turn would by necessity be substantially different from VVVVVV itself (and the great majority of other people’s levels). With any luck, this forces you to approach the challenges differently – more cautiously.

I believe poor checkpointing like this is bad design, as you’ll know if you’ve played Beacon. But it was more important to me that this was different from VVVVVV – I figure a version of the level with adequate checkpointing would be less interesting.

There’re a few spoilers for the level in the rest of this post.

Continue reading »

Aug 01 2011

MISDIRECTION

I promised a VVVVVV level, didn’t I? Well, something came up, so that’s not coming out for a few days. For what it’s worth, I’m using the time to balance it a bit better (ie. everyone’s dying way too much and I need to fix that).

My main project besides that, now Vigilance is done, is going to be getting my TIGJam UK 5 collaboration with Adam Vian, “Reels of Steel”, into shape. It’s currently lacking a lot of important stuff; we have an okay fishing mechanic and his awesome art, but the game needs a lot of work in terms of higher structure and level design.

Since we’re focusing on atmosphere, it’s going to be a very slow-paced game with a lot of sound work. Should be fun!

In lieu of actual content – I spent a bunch of this morning playtesting a friend’s game, and I’m off to London Indies in a sec – here’s the extremely nautical title music I knocked up for Reels of Steel at TIGJam:

Reels of Steel – So I Fish

Jul 27 2011

FLASHGAMELICENSE

Well, I’ve emailed sponsors. I’ve put Vigilance up on FlashGameLicense. What’s next? I have no idea! I’m totally willing to believe that now the bids roll in and I make ONE MILLION DOLLARS. We’ll see.

I’ve also fixed a few things about the game. The biggest is the filesize: Vigilance was 20MB initially, since the ten minutes of music was all encoded at 256kbps. I’ve managed to cut that dramatically by switching from my old familiar mp3 encoder, BladeEnc, to LAME.

MP3s encoded to 128kbps with BladeEnc universally sound horrible. LAME? Well, it depends on the track, but I’ve got some at 128kbps and some at 192kbps. That seems to work for me.

All that, and now the game’s down to 12MB. Result!

I also made this icon, because FGL wanted one:

😀

Vigilance is up for bidding for the next two weeks. After that, I’ll have to do a little work to integrate the sponsor’s branding, plus whatever else they want done to it.

In the meantime, I’ll continue work on Reels of Steel. I’ve also been thinking about doing a level for VVVVVV now that there’s a level editor. Now, I know it wouldn’t make me any money, but one of the nice things about being an indie developer is that you can just spend a week modding someone else’s game for the hell of it if you feel like it. I reckon I’ve got to do that some time or it’s just a wasted opportunity. 😀

Jul 25 2011

EVER VIGILANT

I admit it – I basically did nothing last week. But that’s okay! It was a holiday, I guess. Or something.

I’m making up for it now. 😀

Today I’ve been prepping Vigilance ready for sending out emails to sponsors and such. I’ve already put together a list of sponsors who might be interested, tiered by whether they carry or focus on “edgy” or “adult” games (most don’t!). I’ve also fixed the bug I was having in Playtomic analytics, which was entirely not their fault; I’ve ported their API from AS3 to HaXe for my own use, and that’s always going to cause trouble.

I’ve been putting off talking to sponsors for a while, spending my time with the game on minor bugfixes and tweaks instead, so I decided to just go through with it today – but then I hit some trouble with the deployment.  I decided to put a sitelocked, secureSWF’d version of Vigilance online (so it can’t be leaked across the Internet) before sending the link out to potential sponsors.

Now, I’ve used secureSWF before, and it introduced a random crash into the project I was working on. True to form it did it to this one, as well. That took me a few hours to track down, and while testing that I noticed a few other bugs. Now I’ve fixed those, the next step is to fire off those emails!

Right after I fix this bug.