A growing collection of quotes and links about Interzone Games, Big Collision Games, Michael Turner, Marty Brickey and Greg Chadwell.

The summary as I understand it:

This week, Michael Turner from the US office, came to Australia to take the intellectual property for the game. The game would then be finished by another company in the US.

This is while the company has around $1.6 million of Australian debt which includes unpaid Australian business tax, unpaid payroll tax, unpaid employee wages and entitlements and unpaid employee superannuation.

When Mike was met with questions as to how these debts will be resolved, he left the premises. He then came back that night after dark and changed the locks of the building. He barred employees from their workplace (personal belongings still inside).

This was met with peaceful protest and many questions that went unanswered. Then the media were contacted and the police were called by both parties, etc etc.

Most notable was the climax yesterday where employees were ordered off their own workplace by a spokesperson of the Department of Commerce?!

The link above has many links to news reports please check em out if only to bump up exposure
It was quite surreal seeing it laid out on the ABC News last night. :/

Anyway I have some thoughts on how I want to approach it this year.

Make a COMPLETE game. (including engine and tools as appropriate).

I’d love to see and create some games this year that can stand on their own. IE that we could stick on a website (for in browser play or download) and actually say that they are finished products. Games that someone in some universe might spend $5 to purchase or $15 to buy the extended version (more content only).

Games that we can take and extend after the fact.

My own games suffer from this a lot. Ladybug Garden and Troll in particular were both ‘complete’ to the point that I’d implemented most of the features I wanted and managed to tack on 10-15 minutes of gameplay. But I’d rather it was an hour of gameplay, or 20 minutes that left you insanely wanting to know what happens next.

Achieving this level of ‘completeness’ requires a better focus on tools, and a better balance of developing the tech vs developing the game. For example I think having someone in the team actually spending some chunk of time writing story and dialog etc would make for a more interesting end product (If that’s the type of game you’re making). Same goes for tools. If you spend 5 hours hacking in 20 minutes of  ‘campaign’ (with all kinds of hard coding and workarounds) then making the next 40 minutes of the campaign is going to slay you. If you can manage to make a great little suite of tools in 10 hours, and from then on can make an hour of content per hour of dev, that is freaking sweet. Whether there is time for this or not remains to be seen.

If you end up with hacky code that is not extensible (IE our Under One Roof from last years Global GameJam) then the product will end its life there. The prospect of having UOR on iPhone or as a flash game is very compelling to me and it pains me that we haven’t done it yet. But rewriting the game from scratch because it’s utterly unportable is really hard to swallow, especially when there are sooo many other ideas vying for attention and development time.

Basically I think the point I’m trying to make, distilled, is:
Make a product that can have a lifetime, not a something throwaway for the purposes of the challenge.

In order to achieve this I think we should be very wary of feature creep and scope.

The other issue, to confuse matters even more, is that a few of us (notable Kranzky, it was his idea) are planning on learning flash during the gamejam (about time, yes). This means more time scrolling through documentation and less time banging on the keyboard.

It’s going to be a blur.

Well I hope some of that made sense. Have a great Jam everyone!

This means searching for things such as “ruby .one?” or “ruby ||= trick” etc are much less helpful than they’d otherwise be.
(Side note, “.one?” is an array instance method that returns true if the array has exactly one item in it. Ahh ruby, you so crazy.)

Every few months this really pisses me off.

Here is a line from google’s basic search help page:
With some exceptions, punctuation is ignored (that is, you can’t search for @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters).

And if you follow the link the most interesting of the exceptions is:
Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.

Well thankyou google! For some reason this annoys me even more. There is someone who every now and again (every few months? or maybe they’ve only done it once when google first added punctuation rules?) goes in and adds “popular terms”. Well most of my terms aren’t popular! That’s why I’m searching for them!

I just checked Bing and notice the same problem. Anyone know a more thorough search engine for special use cases? (Don’t get me wrong google is great for most of my searches.)

The game is called G.Rid and is just evolved from the idea that with 1 button and timing you can position crosshairs on a 2d playing field. It is a strange input mechanism but becomes strangely intuitive after a while.

Check out its majesty!

The gameplay could use a lot of tweaking and focus testing to get the difficulty and scoring right. I’ve also had some good suggestions from other rockethands that might improve the fun factor, but I think I’m about ready to wrap it up, submit it and move on. I’ve spent probably around 12-18 hours on it on around 4-5 sessions over 2-3 weeks (I should really track my time better).

Anyway I’m just waiting on confirmation that releasing the game to the public ahead of time isn’t against the rules, then I’ll stick it up here for people to get and have a go. I might also upload the source code for your perusal seeing as it’s ‘neatly’ (lol) in one big file (FYI the source is nothing to write home about, it’s interesting what corners you cut in a project like this.) It’s all python and pygame, as usual, bleh. Note to self, use new tech – excuse this time was that I had no internet for a lot of the time and pygame’s what I had handy.

PS: Would anyone here be particularly grateful for an osx or linux friendly version of the game? The built version is currently for windows but I should be able to knock something up for other OSes if people need.

All audio mined out of TF2. Good stuff.
Via Kotaku.

I enjoyed this new one and am sure others will too. Also follow the link after the game to see some interesting monetisation strategies this guys has.

Today I Die.

My first conversation:

Connecting to server…
You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: morning
Stranger: r u a female
You: no
You: r u?
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Though not all conversations are that bad

Serenity's Hanger

via Kotaku

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/gameplay_video.html

PS: You should totally check out the tools video as well. Just watching it now and it’s awesome.

Article at Kotaku.