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!

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.

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 30 2011

VVVVVV LEVEL

Yup. I’ve spent the past two days writing what amounts to indie game fanfic.

The single best thing about VVVVVV – the thing that made it work, I think – was that it had instant restarts from checkpoints all over the place. You could tackle incredibly hard challenges and failing wasn’t a problem, since you were straight back in there for another go.

Yeah, I’m doing things a bit differently. 😀

The approach I’m taking is totally different from VVVVVV. The levels are a bit easier, I think; you should be able to clear them on your first go, if you sit and think and work out the timings. Likewise, a lot of them have multiple paths through to reward observation as much as timing.

The other thing I’m doing differently is that collecting trinkets (“power cells”) removes gravity lines in an area. This is how your progression through the central tower works, but it also means that once you’ve collected a power cell, the challenges on the way back to the hub are slightly different. Of course, you can just die and walk back to the hub… but where’s the fun in that? That’s the loser way out. 😀

I’ll finish and release this over the weekend and write up a more detailed breakdown (with spoilers!) on Monday.

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.

Jul 22 2011

EDF

There are two reasons to get Earth Defence Force: Insect Armageddon.

The first is taking on fifty or a hundred things larger than you, each of which will take half a clip or a few clips to dispose of. All of them advancing at such a pace, you’re forced to retreat while firing wildly into the crowd and hope you don’t run out of room to backpedal until they’re worn down enough to make it a remotely fair fight.

The second reason is, after minutes of dodging and frantic salvos of gunfire… winning that fight.

EDF:IA isn’t a particularly sophisticated game. Hundreds of ants – or spiders, or flying robots, or wasps, or whatever – run at you. You try to not die. Occasionally there’s a giant robot with them, or you’re given a mech, but the principle is that you’re given city-levelling weaponry and then set against an enemy force epic enough to laugh at that weaponry.

It has two player split-screen co-op and three player online co-op. It’s also fairly cheap, as games go. It doesn’t seem like it’s got the same grindy, levelling-up endurance as its predecessor EDF 2017. But then I’m not sure I have the patience to collect over 6000 armour drops again before I can survive the last level of Inferno, either, or hunt that last exclusive weapon with a less-than-1% drop rate. So maybe that’s a good thing.

Eurogamer’s review here.