Today I fixed the game a bit more. Still needing to add the spawn in but its turning out to be quite a challenge.
I got addicted to minecraft yesterday and didn’t do any work(Curse you Notch!!!!!!).
I need to get this done my sunday and then submit it to apple.
-bear
Hi everyone! Just finished making a rigid body train in my physics simulator haha. I might make a game like canabalt but with trains and realistic physics.. haha jumping trains ftw ^^ Anyways here’s a pic(:
On the 9th of September, I decided that I was going to complete a game in time for the Windows Phone 7 launch. That was goal number one. I knew I didn’t have long, so I picked the most complete game from my portfolio to start from and began porting it to C#.
I had already started when PoV issued the October Challenge, but his second post said that the game can be something you’re already working on. OK, count me in.
So I added goal two: Sell a copy before the end of the October. This is quite different from my original goal. In fact, the last time I tried to make a commercial game, I “finished” it but never sold a copy…
I don’t have a Windows Phone, and couldn’t get hold of one. Someone at Microsoft offered to let me test on his pre-release device, so I took an afternoon off work to visit the local Microsoft office and see if my game actually worked.
It did! But my control scheme, which seemed so sensible with a mouse, was terrible on a touch screen. Oops.
Next week I went back again with the second draft control scheme. It was slightly better. I never got back to test the third revision… it’s interesting developing for a device that hasn’t been released.
I applied for early marketplace access and submitted as soon as I got it, on October 11th. I spent just over a month on the game, working every weekend and an increasing number of weekday evenings towards the end.
The game has now been approved. It will be in the marketplace on launch day – I have already met my original goal.
But to complete PoV’s challenge, it has to be good enough that someone will buy it. That’s where I would like your help.
You probably don’t have a Windows Phone 7 phone, but I really want your feedback on this game. So I’ve hastily made it run on Windows, and you can get it here:
http://www.newnorthroad.com/space-octopus-mono-windows-1.0.zip
(6 MB, Windows, requires the .NET framework)
Before now, I had no easy way of showing people the game – it’s had almost no user testing. So I don’t know what’s good or bad and what I need to improve.
I had to cut a lot of features to get SOM submitted on time, including some of what I thought would be the key reasons to buy it. I won’t tell you what they were, because I don’t want to color your feedback – but please tell me what you think. Give me some hints, and I’ll try to make an update that will get that first sale.
Hot dang, I am off to the races. That last feature ended up being about 10 more features, some of which were actually difficult. I also discovered that even though I thought I had done enough testing on the 3g, the audio dropouts were beyond stupid. Luckily I had left a bunch of pointless processing in the audio pipeline, so I was able to get a huge performance jump by just deleting about 20 lines of code. I should always do that.
Also it turns out that I hate doing marketing materials more than anything else in the world. I wish that just blogging about it would solve my problems, but then only 10 people in the world would hear about it. I did manage to write up an ok blurb, and do an ok video, but I really need to redo the video, and include some humans in it.
The other thing that I am going to do is just put off approx. a 200 hours of additional features to version 2. I started in on the top layer of them, but I just couldn’t justify missing the date to get them in. They will be good though, this app has so many possibilities that it makes my head spin.
Speaking of the possibilities, I should talk a bit about why I made this. Some people are aware of the 3.3.1 restriction for iphone apps, the so called war on turing completeness. I am well in the camp of this being a really sad restriction, not because I particularly have a great interest in scripting languages (I do), but more because I believe that there are a ton of opportunities to teach programming literacy, and I think the iphone and ipad are one great place. My first introduction to programming was qbasic, but I never created an actual piece of software until I learned max/msp. I also look at things like scratch and see something that would be perfect to port to the iphone.
However, I really want to test the waters of what is allowed in terms of turing completeness. I know that this particular app might be rejected, but I think it would be something I could argue. Yes, this is turing complete, but saying that you are acessing any of apples APIs in any ways would be absurd. It would also be absurd to say that this is a programming language, unless you really want to stretch the definition. The closest thing this could be compared to would be a circuit simulator, but even those generally give you slightly higer level abstractions.
I am starting to get concerned about making this post, but ah well, fast and loose!
Oh, I know that asking people not to share a link on the internet is absurd, but if you could keep this link to yourself, that would be awesome: wiresq video and helpfiles. I am planning on making a better video prior to release, and that is the one that I want to be passed around to everyone. Thanks much to all 10 of you that read my blog!
(cross-posted from Under The Bridge)
So we’ve almost won the October Challenge now:
This was a rather enjoyable little frenzy, actually, much more so than we’d expected given our previous history with commercial games programming. Which is actually a fair bit, starting with porting Dark Seed II to the Mac waaaay back in the day right up to little trifles (and some not so little) you can find on the App Store now. But the common thread throughout all of those is that our creative input was for all practical purposes zero; they’re either porting existing code, or implementing somebody else’s specifications. Doing so rather well, it is generally agreed, mind you; as nicely exemplified in what’s still our favorite review ever:
… Overall, Horse Racing Manager is a great port of a good game. It is bugless, it is an almost perfect replica of the PC version, it just isn’t a game that the average gamer would ever want to play.
Hey, it keeps the mortgage paid. But there is a certain lack of creative fulfillment itch there, which over the years every so often we’d consider scratching. But then we’d remember that producing a successful game generally requires a vast array of talents which we pretty much completely lack, from artistic to marketing; and return to our accustomed mercenary pursuits.
Fast forward to September 27th when we stumbled across the October Challenge; and as it so happened, we’d just been moping about losing on October 10th the kinda cool we thought “BallZOut” name that we’d registered with Apple last spring for a project that ended up not happening, now that you can’t squat on App Store names anymore. Plus, we’d been thinking gee it would be a good idea to get some actual experience managing a Game Center enabled app before somebody required that in a project bid. So hey, let’s see if we can indeed achieve a MVP in twelve days flat — a challenge, indeed!
First thing was the game concept. Narrowed it down pretty quickly to a level-based physics puzzler being the only thing of conceivable practicality given a twelve day time frame; and as our name is “BallZOut”, well let’s make it … knocking. ballz. out. Like marbles, or curling. With some obstacles to make it not completely trivial. Yep, that’ll do.
Engine choice given the concept was immediate; as big fans of cocos2d, we’d bought the LevelSVG code referenced here to support the author back when it first came out, and it demonstrates Box2D physics engine integration and Inkscape document parsing for level design. So hey, there’s most of the heavy lifting done already! And yep, that worked out pretty much as well as could be hoped.
So, on to design. Did we mention above that trolls completely lack artistic talent? Why yes, yes we did. So how, you ask, do we address that problem? Why, by frantically mining every clip art/sound collection in our archives and every free clip art/sound site on teh Intertubez, that’s how we address that problem. Plus picking over the discards from our last project that involved a real artist, in return for throwing in a referral screen. Topped off with laying out all our text type stuff with Comic Life Magiq as a substitute for any actual art skillz. We’d like to think that didn’t work out half bad. For lacking completely in both investment and talent, anyways.
Game Center integration went pretty well, although designing in multiplayer somehow wasn’t practical in the timeframe. We’d like to get around to that sometime. As with a vast array of other features. And more levels. We did rather underestimate how long it would take to design levels even vaguely interesting, the last couple days were mostly spent constantly downgrading our expectations of how many and how interestingly designed it would be acceptable to ship with. 20, by the time we’d achieved a state of complete panic a few hours before Lose Your Name Day™. Definitely, we would like to find the time to up that. Significantly.
But under pressure of immediate deadline, we offered it up to the Apple gods just in time, and in the ten days since we did some looking around for easy ways to throw up a support website; settled on Templatic’s iPhone App theme, which worked out pretty well we think to throw up ballzoutgame.com in an afternoon. The $99 we paid for that being the only cash investment involved here so far, other than $29 for the newly commercial Zwoptex native version, a handy and highly recommended tool for your sprite sheet creation needs. Add in the probably 80-90 or so hours we spent finding artistic assets and doing the coding, and, hmmm, well, we’d still have to sell a pretty unlikely several thousand to make the exercise remotely worth it compared to doing a couple weeks’ worth of contract hours, actually.
But hey, as we mentioned at the start, it was quite a different experience and surprisingly fun to just full steam ahead weighing nothing but “latest wild idea” vs. “time ticking away” minute to minute. Not news to anybody who does these abbreviated development contests regularly, no doubt; but doing it just for the sake of it, that just doesn’t quite get us revved up. Add the “… and sell one copy”, now the addition of that external validation condition, that suckered us right in. So here we are … waiting to see how that works out!
Hi guys,
Checkout my first Unity project, a casual game called Fruits! I’ve worked intensely on it lately, in order to meet the October challenge. Some early info and screenshots at www.fruitsgame.net
/MortenK
(Cross-posted from: my own blog.)
Time for another installment of the developer diaries. When we last left our heroes, they had a plan: make an RPG, The Fae’s Wyrd, in a month. This is the part where the plan goes off the rails.
I knew making an RPG in a month was crazy. I think most people understand that on an intellectual level. But, it’s different when you’re in the middle of it and you’re up to your neck in it. Looking at that TODO list, which seems to be growing every time to realize another hole in the design, is daunting. I wanted to get the basic infrastructure done last week, then spend this week adding the content. Next week would be polish, candy, and rainbows.
I’m not horribly off-schedule yet, but every day counts when you’re trying to do something in a month. I’ve gotten a lot done, but the code is largely untested since Dave has been slow getting the display and interface code done (more on that in a minute). I’m pretty sure the gameplay code does what I want, but I was hoping to test it as I went along. In retrospect, I probably should have written some simple test harnesses to make sure things work as I expected them to.
The other issue I’m grappling with is how future-proof I want to make my code. For example, in the full design spells can take multiple types of mana from the four basic elements (Fire, Air, Earth, Water). For this initial game, I’ve simplified the spells down to 8 that take only one mana to cast (4 light magic, 4 dark magic). But, in the spell casting mechanics, should I use this assumption that there will only be one point of mana required, or do I assume a spell could have multiple mana points as a cost? In general, I’ve tried to plan ahead with my code, but I suspect that has contributed to me being late.
I’m not a huge Beatles fan, but I do enjoy that quote from John Lennon.
So what about that wacky French Canadian working with me? Foolishly, he decided to make some personal games in addition the crazy task of making an RPG in a month. Obviously he’s insane enough to fit in the company.
The problem is that another of his single-player games has been demanding some of his time even though he had finished it. The good news is that he found a sponsor for a game, and has officially made $100. Hooray! Not a huge amount of money, but it’s an important step. The bad news is that he then spent a lot of time customizing the game for the sponsor. It was only a matter of adding a sponsor logo and a few buttons to go to the sponsor’s site, but it was new territory for Dave and took some time. On top of that, the sponsor provided assets that didn’t work well in our development environment. Instead of splashing out money for the Flash authoring tool (or, worse, pirating it), we’re using the free tool FlashDevelop. It’s a great program and I highly recommend it, but it’s not quite as easy to use when doing things like embedding .SWF files into your project. I’ll let Dave post about the technical details, since I only know them secondhand. Needless to say, this ate up a few nights of his time, so his side of the work has fallen behind as well. On the bright side, he’s expanded his skill set and if we need to do this on future projects he’s going to be better able to handle it.
So, as you might remember, part of the reason we’re doing an RPG in a month is for a game development challenge. The important part of the challenge is to make money (“sell 1 copy”) of the game. Our goal was to use the wonderful FlashGameLicense.com to find a sponsor. We accepted that this might take longer than the end of the month, but it seemed to be the best way.
But, then Dave found a blog post from a Flash developer entitled Flash game sponsorship dead? In the post, a rather experienced developer explains the trials and tribulations faced in trying to find exclusive sponsors for relatively high-end games. Dave had experienced something similar with his first game, a wonderful, Halloween appropriate, zombie-themed game that fits within the world of his brower MMO Golemizer. He has what I think is fairly original gameplay and it’s a lot of fun, even if he uses the same type of sprites as from his game (meaning, not lush original art). But, while his game seemed to get a fair amount of attention and plays from potential sponsors, in the end the best bid was $100 for a non-exclusive sponsor.
Now, maybe there are extenuating circumstances here. Maybe the original poster having trouble finding a sponsor has upset too many potential sponsors. Maybe the game isn’t striking the right chord with potential sponsors. Maybe Dave was having some problems since he was a new and unknown quantity. Or, perhaps the market has changed and big-ticket exclusive sponsorships are a thing of the past. At any rate, it’s another concern to note as we go forward. In the long term, however, I definitely want to get back into MMOs, and I understand the business models for those games a lot more than I understand them for sponsoring single-player Flash games.
Not much to report on the art side of the game. They’ve produced some great work and it’s helping the game come together. The art schedule is proceeding according to the original plan, but there are always little, “Oh, we also need…” situations arising. Although one of the artists is taking some night classes and the other has a part-time job with unpredictable demands, which is keeping both of them busy. But, I think that the art portion of the project is going smoother than the programming.
We still have a week and a half left of this month. I think we’re not going to make the literal requirement for the competition: finish and sell a game by the end of the month. I think it’s possible we’ll finish the game by the end of the month, assuming Dave doesn’t have to make more changes to an existing game and focuses on this project! 😉 This game is interesting enough to me that I think we’ll finish it release it even if we miss the deadline, but it might be something you see in the next few months instead of the next few weeks.
Taking a look at the current situation, I see the biggest specific risks as being: bugs in the existing code, having a surprise art requirement, and just not finishing the code in time for the deadline.
As always, feel free to ask questions or post them on my blog’s comments. I’ll answer if I’m not too busy debugging or harassing Dave to get work done.
Hey Guys,
I just submitted my october ludum dare app to the apple iPhone app store monday morning and it got approved already! I ended up cutting some functionality so I could hope to get the game in the app store by the 31st. The game got accepted way sooner than I thought possible. So I wanted to ask you guys for advice.
Here’s a link, the rest of the post is a little confusing if you haven’t played it. It’s a simple side scrolling distance game a la “ninjump” and “monster dash” that’s astonomy based. http://itunes.apple.com/app/linr/id397913344?mt=8 It’s a free app so don’t worry about price. So if you have an iDevice feel free to check it out and leave any advice you have and I’ll try to get it in by the 31st!
To be honest I think the game is fun at first, some-what pretty with particles, then gets pretty boring. I tried to mix it up by adding achievements and a leaderboard but after a while it tends to get boring. I am currently thinking about adding multiplayer game center functionality but figured I’d ask what you guys thought first.
This is the first game that I’ve finished by myself and it’s entirely thanks to you guys. Read this post on reddit and read the blog posts here and my desire to finish something swelled. So for that I thank you. You guys are awesome.
Things are really cranking along now, which is good, because October’s almost over and my first-release deadline is almost here. I spent a good chunk of yesterday and today finishing up one of my last pre-release milestones, and as a result Distant Star now sports a functional, if somewhat limited, save slot system. You can access it via the in-game menu, which is another of those functional-but-terrifically-ugly systems (“Save!” “Load!” “Quit!”).
There aren't a lot of options just yet, but...
As part of the save/load system I also added a new game setup screen, where you can customize the game before starting. Right now it’s rather limited — there aren’t a lot of interesting customizations yet, ‘mfraid — but the interface is all there; it works and it looks pretty good.
Tomorrow and Friday I’m going to nail down the AI, and if I’m happy with the state of things I’m going to start passing the game out to beta testers over the weekend. Huzzah!
More screenshots after the jump:
The map. Yep, it's a map.
Tags: screenshot
I didn’t want to tackle a brand-new game this month, so I decided to make a sequel for my Mini-LD game, Summit. I’ve been working on it pretty consistently this month, but hadn’t gotten around to posting anything about it.
Summit accomplished its goal: to make the player experience the fear of falling. But that was a stressful and often frustrating experience, so the game didn’t have much widespread appeal. With the sequel, I’m using the same engine to create an entirely different game. It’s something of a mix between Shadow of the Colossus and the Robot Wants series, having an emphasis on exploring, with a series of unique powerups allowing for further progression.
The game features a variety of regions, each with a unique atmosphere, level design and characters to interact with.
It is in its final stages of development now, and I’m working to finish up the artwork and details by the end of the month!
Just posted another update on Kobo II over at the Olofson Arcade:
Looks like I’m pulling in the old ZeeSpace after all. That is, structured/procedural/parametric graphics! You know, this sort of stuff:
I planned on just doing some placeholder graphics in GIMP for starters, but that’s just a big waste of time if it’s going to look anything but mediocre. With ZeeSpace terrain and models instead, I basically get instant nice looking graphics that is easy to scale and modify, and that can also be refined and polished to production quality later on. Also, as it’s structured graphics, there’s no need to worry about display resolutions; it’ll render razor sharp in any resolution – even on a 2560×1600 screen.[…]
(cross-posted from Under The Bridge)
So let’s check the iTunes Connect reports and see what happened the first full day BallZOut was available, with our total “marketing” having been cross-posting to Ludum Dare, a tools post in the cocos2d forums, and a Touch Arcade post …
… well look at that, 48 sales for $32.51 income! Woo-hoo! October Challenge WIN! *does the happy troll dance* We’d thank you all by name, but you know who you are. Okay, we’ll thank Pat by name, for providing the most amusing testimonial so far:
It is without doubt, the best app I have bought for iPhone!
(since it’s the only app I have paid for
Thank you, Pat. Your entry into the App Store economy is duly noted.
Speaking of the App Store economy, examining just where these results place us in it is rather eye-opening. “Shocking” might not be overstating it, in fact. Taking a screenshot here of AppAnnie‘s rankings page as we write this:
Woah, dude. Thirty bucks and change of total sales actually gets your game on the charts? And into the top 1000 overall in Argentina? Clearly Argentinians (Argentines? Argentineans? Argentinos?) are discerning folk indeed — we’ll tip a bottle of Fuzion to them at our celebratory dinner — but that certainly seems to indicate an surprisingly low amount of overall sales, doesn’t it? Even if we just look at the U.S. where most sales come from, BallZOut was 265 in Puzzle games and 437 in Action games yesterday. And those are the two most heavily populated categories of games, by far. Can’t seem to quickly google up a running count of subcategory splits, but sufficiently enlightening metrics we can quickly get from 148apps.biz for the ‘Games’ overall category:
Yes, it seems like we can conclude pretty safely that the massively overwhelming majority of iDevice games are just not making any money, if you can be comfortably into the top 500 in your subcategories in the U.S. by pulling in just about enough to go out for lunch with. And unless you have a really killer and massively financed marketing plan, you would be extremely ill-advised indeed to consider writing an iPhone game to be anything other than an amusing hobby. Which, indeed, we did find frenziedly pounding out 1.0 to be; so we have every intention of continuing work on this project as our little playground to experiment with multiplayer Game Center support, features we haven’t tried out yet of the cocos2d engine, and so forth … but we’re certainly not going to shortchange paying projects to do so!
It has been a few days since I’ve last updated anyone on my project, and sadly to say not much has progressed. As of yesterday I still did not have a car moving, or any gameplay. I’ve been tied up with non-gamedev related work and tasks. However there have been acouple of waster opportunities, placing me farther and farther behind schedule. I can’t see it possible to have my project at Alpha complete by October 31st, however I will give it my best efforts to get it as close to that state as possible.
In other news, I have updated my splash screen, although I will need to update it once again for the final release as my logo will be changing again. I received my wacom tablet last weekend, and it distracted me for several hours. I am not an artist, but that certainly helps with my ability to get something concept wise. Speaking of which, I started working on some concept screens. This is the Race Setup Screen, although more information may be required later.
Concept of the Race Setup Screen.
Beyond fiddling with many parts besides gameplay, I have finally, just tonight, got the car moving! The physics are by no means near complete, but a moving car is a huge step here. Many pieces were required to get this far, and many more pieces are still required before I can actually say I have gameplay. Unfortunately I work on non gamedev related things again this weekend, but I hope some miracles allow me to get laptime calculations and the ability to create replays.
As soon as I have a somewhat ready user-interface, and the gameplay near complete I will try creating some videos with gameplay footage that will likely blow your minds! But until then, you will just have to wait.
I’m not going to submit my app tomorrow, I’m going to work on it for the rest of the week. I’m on Half Term now so I can work on it for as long as I need. This will give the chance to add moving backgrounds and other things! I think I might only have one type of enemy in the first version though, but I’l more enemies after release. I’ve started a live stream so anyone can see how its going( http://www.ustream.tv/channel/attempting-to-make-a-indie-games ) and ask questions. You won’t see it running though because I’m testing it on my iPad.
-bear
EDIT:
http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/1994/ludumdare3.png
I spent a couple of hours on that. Ignore the water mark.
I was planning to make my first Android game for the October challenge, but I need more time for that.
So instead I’m now porting another old game to Flash: Zwarte Piet. So far, I’ve got the first level coming along nicely. It shouldn’t be too hard to finish this game, submit it to Mochiads and still make at least $1.00 before the end of October!
4 more levels completed for the Fruits! casual game. Now only 4 remaining. Getting closer to release
Screenshots at: http://www.fruitsgame.net/4-more-levels-finished/
f(vcPsk6wXay
I ♥ my testers
Tonight, we celebrate — I’ve finished enough of Distant Star that I’m releasing a copy to my beta testers tonight. I spent most of the weekend putting the finishing touches on a *ton* of polish — the game now has attractive victory/defeat screens and a framework for tracking and reporting gameplay stats, plus a really useful report that you can access after each combat showing you how well your ships fared in battle.
“Beta test?” you ask.
But of course — my posts to a couple forums generated a little buzz, where a dozen or so happy iPad gamers took me up on my offer. They beta test the game and let me know what’s good/bad/broken before I release it to Apple; I send them free copies of the final version once it’s ready. A pretty sweet deal all around.
So, Ludum Dares (“Darers?”) — any iPad gamers among you care to lend me a hand with this thing? Information (plus more screenshots and updates) after the jump.
Another thing I’m super pleased with in Distant Star is the audio. I’ve put together a solid Creative Commons-licensed soundtrack; the title track is “Two Swords” by _ghost. There’s some truly amazing stuff over on ccMixter just begging to be dropped into games. Free culture FTW.
I think I won this one, wouldn't you say?
If you want to help me out with the beta, here’s the plan:
Let me know if you’re interested.
Tags: screenshot
Friend of mine mentioned Ludum Dare’s October contest and I blogged about it. I found the idea of completing *and selling* challenging and most interesting. I stepped in the bandwagon on 22nd day, so it’s bit over one week time for me to do the game.
I chose to put together a tactical game. It is turn-based, features hopefully interesting decisions. And there’s some zombie dwarves. Add some pixel art by me and I believe I have a great mix together.
I have managed to complete several key features (couple of dwarves, simple cutscene/dialogue system, enemy apperance, taking actions and such). There’s still much to do (handling game loop, entering new locations, spawning enemies, dwarf art and such) but I’m confident that this will be just fine.
Since the challenge is also about *selling a copy*, I decided that I would put the game on sale right away. I wrote a pre-order blog post and see if people are willing to support this. I put the price tag $1 to the game knewing that paypal will take most of it, and the tax man rest, but at least it’s what this contest was about.
Will report more later.
