Interzone Craziness

~2 months ago I had to suspend my position at Interzone Games due to unpaid superannuation and shaky payroll. This week it all came crumbling down…

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. :/

Global GameJam Post Mortem

So I worked on a game with: Simon Boxer, Ellen Jurik, Brad Power, Daniel Adams and Robert Barnett (get blogs guys! ><), with help from Jason Hutchens who splintered off early on to make a mini masterpiece: Bogus Quest.

We made “Bored Room” it’s available at http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/bored-room.

How to get slug?

Some things went wrong:

• Tech – We decided before the jam to use flash (without any experience) and quickly found that getting it to do what we wanted (without reliable internet at one stage for docs and tutes) was too much effort. We slipped effortlessly into old habits and used pygame. Note that this decision was made at like 20? 15? hours till deadline :/ Jason did the same but stuck with flash and succeeded with bells on so big props to him.
• Team size – While I think it helped us in the end (we got a lot of work done fast) the team size really caused some slowdown and friction when deciding on an idea. People are different, in a team people need to be unified. Sorry to everyone if I was a main offender in the struggle to get settled on something. I can be a tool like that :/
• Team size 2 – As a large team it felt (at least I felt) like we had more to prove than a smaller team, this further hindered the choosing of an idea.
• Theme - The theme was a bit restrictive and early on we tried too hard to be too clever about it. We should have just used it to get ideas flowing and then been more relaxed about sticking to it.
• Multiplayer – We didn’t want to do a multiplayer game because it’s harder for people to play. I now think we should have said “Who cares? We can play it!” if we really wanted to do a multiplayer game.

Overall I think I took it too seriously and worried too much. Not next time!

I also learned a dirty secret. Non-’programmers’ are making kick-ass games with fantastic tools such as Construct. *Shakes Fist* Put us programmers out of a job will ya?! But seriously I’m all about doing more making games and less making tech so I’ll definitely be checking construct and similar packages out in future. Are there any that can target flash?

I did ended up having good fun in the end and our team did some amazing work in a short time and produced a game that (albeit with some glitches) is fun and funny. Thanks heaps guys and gal in my team! Thanks also to Anthony Sweet who appeared miraculously with burgers and sundaes in our time of need and then vanished into delicious smoke. And thanks especially to Simon Wittber for setting it all up and being the loving father of gamejamming in perth!

Global GameJam 2010

GlobalGameJam 2010 begins in Perth a few hours (it has started elsewhere in the future world that is GMT+>8). I am crazy excited like it’s Christmas Eve 15 years ago. Hmm make that 20 years ago

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!

G.Rid – 1 button game entry.

Well I just wrapped up my entry to Gamma 4 – 1 button game competition by adding the required gamepad support.

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.

Blueberry Garden

Just bought and played Blueberry Garden. ($5 on steam). I’d seen a video of it like a year ago so it was a no brainer for $5.
I’ve still got the goosebumps and sad face from my first play. It will require more playing. This is a very strange game and quite unlike anything else. Well worth the $5. I feel strongly that stuff like this should go supported so we see more of it. Music is really nice. Only criticism would be the controls/physics are SLIGHTLY clunky. But it’s pretty great.
FYI: I have only played through once so still have NFI what is going on. Will play more at some point.

On steam it is described as “a relaxing, yet intense experience for people who like soaring through the sky.”  Sums it up kind of well.

Official Site
On Steam

Scout Chop

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

Short interactive game/poem by Daniel Benmergui

This is the same guy who did I Wish I were the Moon and I Fell in Love with the Majesty of Colours.

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.

Scenes from Movies in Unreal 3.0 and CryEngine 2

Game-artist.net ran a competition for artists to recreate a scene from a film using a game engine. Worth a look.

Serenity's Hanger

via Kotaku

“Love” indie MMO type thing

Here’s an awesome gameplay video of “Love” as narrated by its (sole) developer.
Looks like a really interesting project.

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.

Some info regarding wiiware profit model for developers.

Basically games need to sell an initial cutoff amount before nintendo will start ponying up royalties. The numbers are quite low though and once you break the figure you apparently get back paid for the past sales. /shrug.

Article at Kotaku.