Feb 26 2011

MOTIVATION

is hard to come by! It’s something I suck at.

I have days when I get stuff done and days when I don’t. I’m new to this self-employed stuff and I haven’t quite got into the rhythm of working yet, I guess. Still, I poked Flash briefly earlier and figured out how to import images and blit them. Basic stuff, but these basic things like sprite rendering and sound – hell, and generally learning my way around HaXe and the Flash API – are what’s necessary for pulling a simple game engine together. I know there are simple engines out there already, flixel and FlashPunk and so on, but I reckon it’s a useful exercise for learning the language. It’s just four or five hours’ work, even if I’ve only done the first 30 minutes so far!

I actually have a book on motivation. Specifically, it’s about how to make yourself do the things you should but don’t really want to. I’ve never got round to reading it. 😛

Feb 24 2011

1. FLASH GAME, 2. ???, 3. PROFIT

I’ve been looking at the Flash ecosystem today! It’s pretty tough, but there are options. From what I can tell, OK games can make a few thousand dollars with some effort, and decent games – in a popular genre, in an established Flash game franchise, making use of multiple revenue streams – can make $50,000 or more for a few months’ work (according to Boxhead developer Sean Cooper in this awesome Gamasutra article on the topic). However, getting there can take several games, and there are hits as well as misses.

Bear with me now – I don’t have experience in this market yet, this is just what I’ve read, and I’m noting it down for myself as much as anything 😀 But… what I’ve read suggests multiple revenue streams are key.

Feb 23 2011

FLASH IS OKAY I GUESS

I started messing around with FlashDevelop and HaXe this morning, seeing what I could do in terms of just spamming pixels for some simple software rendering. It’s super slow, so I imagine in practice Flash graphics really are limited to blitting sprites and vectors and so on – all that higher level stuff – but it’s not terrible.

Adobe claim they’re working on an API for access to fully programmable hardware accelerated 3D. It’s called “Molehill” and they reckon it’ll be out for public beta some time in the next few months. This seems well overdue but should be interesting 🙂

My first Flash app ever below the jump! It’s nothing special – I’ve only been poking this for 4 or 5 hours.

Feb 22 2011

ALTERNATORS

Will you read a post about car mechanicals? DOUBTFUL.

A few weeks ago, the alternator died on a car I was driving while about 70 miles from home, collecting some parts for my car. This was an interesting experience. Initially, the headlights ran bright for a few seconds – the voltage regulator on the alternator had failed, so it was providing excess power. Then the whole unit gave up, triggering a few warning lights and telling me I had probably less than an hour to get wherever I wanted to go before the car died completely.

The thing to do in this situation is to turn off everything electrical that you can – radio, air con – and peg it to a safe harbour nearby. Sadly, night time driving without headlights is frowned upon, so the efficiencies you can make are sometimes limited.

The first thing to fail was the odometer display (mileage counter). Then, the speedometer and tachometer (rev counter). Within a few minutes the indicators stopped working, and almost straight after that the engine gave up. A fading battery is a strange and clumsy death for a car, with near-essential systems failing straight away and irrelevancies like the electric windows quite happy to power up and down long after the car’s rumbled to a sombre halt.

Feb 21 2011

PLOTTING

Nothing to report here. I’ve spent the day planning a new project with Hanzonaut and playing Scott Pilgrim.

Actually, I guess I can report that Scott Pilgrim is pretty sweet in co-op.

Feb 18 2011

WRAPPING UP

It’s been quite a week!

Feb 17 2011

MUSIC

A lot of people liked Beacon’s music. That’s awesome! Some have asked me where they can get the soundtrack. Well, if you’ve installed the game, it’s already in the package you’ve downloaded:

Windows/Linux: Look in Beacon/Music/
Mac: Right click “Beacon.app”, select “Show package contents” and navigate to Contents/Resources/Music/

If you haven’t got Beacon installed right now and just want the music, I’ve uploaded a zip file of the soundtrack.

I’ve also uploaded my first album. It’s from over three years ago now but I’m still proud of many of the tracks in it, even if they could use remastering with the tricks I’ve learned since 🙂 It’s over here and there’s a Flash player for the individual tracks as well as a downloadable zip. Feel free to check it out! I’ll upload some newer tracks in the coming days – some which are more like my work on Beacon, and some which are quite different.

Feb 16 2011

DONATIONS

feel a bit weird to me, since I’m planning to make games commercially. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that they’re funding more freeware and feel betrayed when I charge for my next game! Still, a few people have told me to put up a donate button, so here it is. If you liked Beacon enough to want to give me something for it, it’d certainly go some way to paying rent 🙂

I’ve spent today sleeping in; promoting my game to Mac and Linux sites; changing an alternator; and fixing my website! I’ve set up a projects toolbar on the left now. It’s just got the one project at the moment, but I’ll start uploading some older things shortly – and of course I’ll get to work on some newer.

Feb 15 2011

LINUX BUILD DONE

…I think. Please let me know if it works for you, as I haven’t had anyone test this one!

As ever, it’s up on Beacon’s project page. (I’ll have to set up the sidebar project links tomorrow to keep that visible.)

The Linux build was easy after the Mac build – I lost some time to the case-sensitive filesystem but there wasn’t anything really odd to deal with. The only weird part is that Linux doesn’t seem to look in the local path for dynamically linked libraries, so you need to install the libraries required to your system or run a shell script that tells it to look for them locally, since I put them in the .tar.gz. I think it’ll work…

I also discovered today that my Mac build won’t work on OS X 10.5! It only works on OS X 10.6, and I think I’d need versions of SDL and possibly FMod that were compiled for OS X 10.5 in order to fix that. It’s unfortunate but I’m just not willing to put the time in to try and support the older OS. It’s an odd approach by Apple, making compiled code only work on the latest OS by default… I’m pretty sure my Windows build would run on Windows 98 or something, let alone something a mere two years old.

Anyway, so far Beacon’s been getting some great feedback (“a lovely bit of work” – RockPaperShotgun.com; “My god, this is beautiful” – an RPS commenter :D) and has already been downloaded by over 4500 people. It’s great to see so many people interested in small indie games by total unknowns. I’m feeling much more confident about trying to do this for a living now!

Feb 14 2011

MAC OS X IS WEIRD AND SCARY

but I’m DONE and there’s a Mac version of Beacon now and it’s lovely.

I thought doing a Mac build would be like building stuff for Linux. It’s not! Apparently libraries come in “framework bundles”, and programs go in “application bundles”, so there’s lots of Mac-specific directory stuff to handle. On top of that, the accepted way of doing everything is to build stuff through XCode. I wanted to use gcc directly so I could port to Linux more easily, but I think that actually made everything take longer.

IT’S OKAY. I get it now! And the sheer number of Mac owners and gamers around was quite a surprise. I only realised yesterday that about half the people I know use Macs, and a bunch more showed up on Twitter to hold out for the port and help beta test. You guys are great and very patient. I won’t make you wait next time 🙂

Next up: Linux build.

Next next up: sleeping for a couple days solid.