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maniacalmagician · 3 years

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EVERHOOD: Pinocchio in Psychedelic Purgatory: the Rock Opera Adventure. OR: I walked backwards into hell, and felt euphoria as I became privvy to the Divine Truths

Hello tumblr people. I’ve been Away. I played a game recently and I wanted to talk about it. damnit i really wanted to put pictures into this mini essay. ive been away from this garbage site for too long, i dont know how to do it lol. ok anyway First, I want to say to the developers and anyone else that this has quickly become one of my all time favorite games. Currently writing I have personally never felt a greater emotional attachment to an experience with a piece of software. Perhaps it is the extreme idiosyncratic nature of it, perhaps it is the deeply intriguing storyline, mostly however it is a combination of those in addition to some of the most outstanding psychedelic visuals I have ever seen, particularly in the finale sequence, and a killer soundtrack that combines many genres but focuses mostly to being as bangers as possible. I will be upfront and say this game comes with a boatload of trigger warnings, and thus the aforementioned idiosyncratic nature of it may not appeal to everyone, however I feel it necessary to indicate potential content warnings here as I would hate for people to be triggered: epilepsy is the big one, I myself have mild stutter based epilepsy and it didn't cause health problems or anything but my case is not universal. Anyway. That is a hard warning on epilepsy. I do it because The Incredibles 2 did not, lmao (that's an example of the kind of visuals that trigger me personally. An aside ) Other things include (spoilers): arachnophobia, misophonia (screeches, unsettling sounds), themes of death, immortality, suicide. Some game mechanics are not immediately intuitive and puzzles require some pretty clever but sometimes obtuse solutions. Direction is not always super clear either. People have complained of performance issues but I am leaving this review after playing the switch port, which played smoothly other than some awkwardly long loading times here and there. What I have played of PC so far runs smooth but as of writing, performance for me was fine (my pc is a lowend budget build). There is a difficulty to it. Even playing on easier modes, it can be quite unforgiving. If you're a fan of hard games (I am but I suck at them) and rhythm games (this is, uh, Not? That? Almost functions as half walking sim, half rhythm Game, dodgy shoot em up kinda feels. Truly unique gameplay I think. Constantly switches things up, too. But yes I also adore rhythm games, and yes i also do suck at those too.), half of it is that. The devs troll you with puzzles. It's truly a wild experience as it advertises, one of a kind. And yet, however.... This game wears, much like its heart,, its references, on its sleeve. If you are not into that kind of thing, you will probably be annoyed by this game. It also loves to delv into meta, as many puzzles and interactions are references to the UI of the game itself. Personally, I'm not wild about meta but I appreciate the ernestness here, so I'm willing to roll with whatever this game throws at me because every turn feels unexpected, fresh, funky, somber, and wildly intelligent, with boldly sincere ludonarrative choices, script and art direction. If you like Geno from super Mario Brothers, which, guess what, narrator here LOVES Geno from Super Mario Brothers, this is functionally the game you've always wanted that Nintendo could never make because Square has held Geno hostage in some kind of underground torture facility since 1995. Turns out they were rather right to do so, because when that puppet is out serving a higher authroity, he can be quite dangerous. Narrarively it borrows much from its sources but I would argue there's proof the writers have spent time thinking about the implications of their source materials worlds, and that reflection casts itself back to create this, experience that is wholly unique even if we know Red is Geno and "Gaster" (who was based on Uboa from Yume Nikki or princess mononokes forest spirits), and some kind of disco Marceline character who changes their identity frequently, skeleton brothers- well undead brothers, really - We have to remember in the creation and consumption of media sometimes, influences and archetypes are ever present and Everhood almost itself is a realm that would indulge in the idea of self referential material. It makes for this very Jungian experience of friendly archetypes we're familiar with, which works well with this setting of an immortal realm. Thats not to say the personalities we do meet aren't expounded upon - they are, heavily, and become uniquely their own. (Spoiler) if my theory is to be believed this world is a purgatory where people have made their own artificial vessels and as time has made them bored (though some seem to be having a good time) while typical strains of the Pinocchio myth are thrown in about questions of identity and death - and probably even more so towards Timothy Learys concept of the Ego Death, or the return to the collective soup of unconcious being. Undertale will probably always be a reccomendation even by its own reference to it so comparisons to it will be littered through here. It feels like the developers were emboldened by Toby Foxs spirit in game development (his creative energy is rather infectious) and shared many similar ideas, but this feels far more aimed towards a maturer audience (references to the things I mentioned in the trigger warning list) and focused on achieving this feeling that its predecesors have as well. Yume nikki. Lisa. Earthbound. Toby's games. super Mario rpg in its humor, Cat Soup in its psychedellic depressive vibes, all this cool indie cult classicy kinda mash up soup. bizarre antics and then these characters who have surprising depth the further you go. It has been 6 years since Undertale came out, and the developers for Everhood have called a lot of the "what ifs" that fans of that game ask, an answer in their own game. (What if No Mercy was forced, for example? What if going against destiny is the wrong thing to do? Why is Death such a Bad Thing? etc!) And the further along you progress, the smarter the story gets, the more complex the narrative threads and characters. This game knows how to write compelling literature and that wasn't an element I expecting but god am I so glad for it. Literally my pea brain saw Red's design flipping around some frets on a streamers videocapture (shoutout to based fellow tampa native Charles White, thank you for being witty and having good taste and your Floridian comisery.) one night and went "oh i like." But the experience I got in exchange was, so, so much more than that (but the tetris effect won't let that image disappear from my eyelids quite yet haha.) I hear there are multiple endings and one requires a 3 hour long trek. I'm not done with the game at the time of reviewing. You bet your sweet ass I am going to find out the Ultimate Truth. I found a way to deal with some of the bullshit in other games, I may not be great at games but I want to see whatever imagery these guys put on screen so it compels me to seek out all the alternative routes. I am going to be following these developers projects very closely. If this is their debut, their next project will be ... ... I would hate to force expectations, like if you just made a magnum opus like this it'd be perfectly alright to retire, but I just once again want to say thank you to the developers for putting your heart on display for the world to see. I see it. I have dealt with struggles similar to the ones in the stories this game articulates about anxiety and depression, existentialism and dread, dissociation and all the heavy themes that were risky to include narratively - I'm certaintly glad you took the risks you did. May update this review as I get further along the story but yeah. Tl;dr: haha pinocchio myth done well make brain go brrr. 9.99999999999998/10. I am taking an infitisimal fraction of a point off because of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spider in the monster maze. that thing was abhorrent, but I won't let it deter anyone else who wants to play.

#everhood #audnalysis

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holytheoristtastemaker · 4 years

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Developer Relations has an image problem. The job itself is an ambiguous catch-all for activities ranging from coding to public speaking, and everything in between. People spend an exorbitant amount of time arguing about defining DevRel: what title should they have, how to measure it, who has the better program and/or team, and on and on and on. Amongst all this discussion, we have individuals who come on to these teams from a variety of backgrounds for a single purpose: to make developers' lives easier. One of the ways to do this is by speaking at conferences. It's not the only way, but it is one. Somehow over the years it appears we have over-indexed on this singular facet and forgotten about the other aspects of Developer Relations. At its core, Developer Relations should be exactly what it sounds like: relating to developers. And how do you do that? You go where developers go. You engage with developers on their level of expertise and with the tools that you both use as developers. Tools found mostly on the... Internet. The truth is, not all developers go to conferences. In fact, many of them don't have the means, or time to attend. Some of them will watch a video after the fact, but most are likely to be found deep in Stack Overflow. When they are not researching how to solve their bug, they are digging through blog posts to an eloquent solution for the problem they are currently facing, or watching a hands-on-tutorial for some new technology or a novel way of doing something. So with this pandemic, I have great news! Developers are still using that trusty tool called the internet. Old School I've long idolized some of the early Developer Relations teams and what they represented. You couldn't tell the difference between a developer and a developer relations person because they were doing very similar things: coding, working on content and occasionally going to conferences. I loved that they were so authentic and able to reach developers where they were, naturally. These teams were doing everything from maintaining docs, sdks, tutorials, running and participating in hackathons, to answering questions on Stack Overflow. They were good at their job because of their authenticity, willingness to help and ability to jump from one project to another. There weren't many companies that had developer relations, but the ones that did had some pretty solid teams. New School We are now in a different era where many, many different companies have developer relations — —for better or for worse. We have also grown the number of conferences and hackathons significantly. From that, we've brought on a whole onslaught of developer relations professionals with a broader skillset that have helped us grow and evolve into pioneering new ideas and different areas of reach. The easiest way for these teams to feel they had value in their reach was to go give a talk, whether that was locally or getting on a plane. And because of reach, the bigger the talk, the better. And to increase reach, the more talks you could give, the better. "Bigger, better, more" became the name of the conference game. The more conferences there were popping up, the more plane tickets, talks and people they had to hire, and well, you get the idea. An illusion was created: to be effective in DevRel, you had to be on a plane. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten our core purpose: meet developers where they are all the time — — online, not just where they go once a year, at a conference. The travel problem There is a ubiquitous cost of conferences that no one talks about — — and it's not just limited to fiscal revenue; it carries personal, social and environmental impact. Don Goodman Wilson referenced this concept about two years ago in his discussion regarding our utilitarian view of flying and our decisions to travel. Review more here. There is a toll to travel, not only to our environment and our company’s bottom line but also to us individually. They are called road warriors for a reason: it is a trek. Quite often this is what we see online, where Developer Relations people talk about #devrellife, in which people are living out of their suitcases, not getting enough sleep, eating poorly and taking selfies on the plane. This all takes a toll — — not only on our bodies but on our personal and social well-being, which is not sustainable. I like to use food as an analogy. Travel is like dessert: It’s fun, it’s exciting and I love to have it in my life. However, I don’t need it in my life and I certainly don’t need it all the time, because that’s not sustainable. We need fruits, vegetables, and proteins, which help balance things out so we can have dessert and then enjoy it more when it does come around! While travel is a great add-on for our impact as Developer Relations, it's not the core activity that brings value to the position. Of course, this looks different for everyone: for me personally, I know I can bring value through coding or writing a blog post at home, going to my local gym and sleeping in my own bed — — these are all of the things that I need for a sustainable lifestyle. Then when I get to the opportunity to go to a conference, I amplify the impact of these activities. Here I am free to enjoy the satisfaction of my dessert, sans cavities. Ultimately, we don’t need to travel to do our jobs well, and quite frankly we never have. Many developer relations programs specifically focus on not getting on a plane. James Governor mentions Stripe’s policy of fly less, write more in one of his talks and how excellent they are at their developer experience because of it. Here are the questions you need to ask yourself: Is the ROI of attending a conference as high as a strong following on your written content? What about bringing a trusted resource on Stack Overflow. More generally how trusted are you as a community member? The ugly truth is: the grind of travel is hard. And it may not have the highest ROI. The Pandemic So here we are in the midst of our COVID-19 crisis and there are a lot of conversations happening around how to “recreate” conferences and the Developer Relations job. We have pushed things to the summer, fall and then straight canceled many others. But the truth of the matter is we don’t know when this will be over. We don’t know the peak and the full effect it will have. Who knows when conferences will come back, and if they will even come back the same way. There is a real chance that this is the last thing to return to normalcy, whatever that may look like. But at the core of everything, canceled conferences do not end Developer Relations —— they create an opportunity for growth. This pandemic is giving everyone the chance to reset back to the basics. It’s not about conferences, and it never has been. The skills that we came into developer relations with in the first place is what I like to call flexing our “Dev Rel muscle”. We can reach developers through our code contributions, our content creation, and our online community. With all of this, we can still do our jobs and do them well. Because developers, just like everyone else, are still online. I would encourage us all to take a good hard look at our activities for the rest of the year and in general, think about the impact we are having as individuals on our developer community and for our company. We have plenty of things in our toolkit to boost our outreach during this pandemic and it's not just online conferences. As Developer Relations, we know how to code, we know how to write, we know how to be on a microphone. There is so much we can do with that trifecta alone from the comforts of our own home that can make such an impact! We don't need a fancy set up that costs hundreds or thousands to create. We just need a problem to solve and a good story to tell around it.

http://damianfallon.blogspot.com/2020/04/back-to-basics-how-to-devrel-without.html

#SEO #Local SEO training

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bttnbsh · 2 years

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Ten A Penny

This week I wanted to talk about ideas, and how I landed on Effing & Blinding, and the wasteland of former projects that started off as good ideas but soon got away from me. After all, ideas are ten a penny: it's the execution that matters. I'll start with the old stuff ...

DEAD PROJECT 1: 'BEDROOM DEV'

There were many projects that came before 'Bedroom Dev', but none that I thought were good, marketable ideas. Also none that I kept the projects for, so this is where we start. I spent a lot of time on r/gamedev looking for advice and following tutorials and getting extremely jealous about the folk who had released games already. But i wasn't very good at anything - terrible at pixel art, needed my hand holding with programming, barely touched music and sound effects, and my game designs were MOSTLY just reskins of other games, though I guess the majority of things are nowadays. But on r/gamedev, I found a great list of games to build in your chosen engine (mine's Godot in case you're wondering). Each subsequent game added something to your knowledge, beginning with Pong and then maybe progressing to Pac-Man, with its moving enemies and collectibles, before you try your hand at Space Invaders, with waves of enemies and different enemy types. I worked my way through a few of them and then got the idea for Bedroom Dev: why not turn my learning process into a game in and of itself?

So the concept was that you're playing as a solo dev, someone doing this in their bedroom like I was at the time, hence the name, who's trying to make it in the world of IndieDev. While your skills and money are low, you can only make basic games with bog-standard graphics, terrible SFX and poor game design - all my fortes at the time. But the twist was you'd actually be able to play the games that you make - think GameDev Tycoon by Greenheart Games, but with more than just unlockables in a menu. As you released more games, you'd make more money, be able to improve your skills and then release better and better games. But that's when the difficulty started - I didn't have the necessary skills to show a game even as simple as Pong progressing from a level 1 art style to a level 5. Not to mention the complexity of keeping all the permutations straight in my head - all skills had five levels and you could choose to make a game at any of the levels for each skill, so for each of the 10 games there were something like 3125 possible combinations (there's a sixth skill that doesn't affect how the game plays if you're analysing the screenshots). It was too much for my tiny brain to compute.

The screenshots actually show my second attempt at this project, and I'm not horrified by most of it, but the scope was far beyond what I could achieve on my own.

DEAD PROJECT 2: 'PLAYGROUND TACTICS'

After my first attempt at Bedroom Dev, I looked for something else. I was back on Reddit searching for inspiration and found two common themes among a lot of the posts - 'work on something you're passionate about' and 'please don't make your passion project as your first game'. What does that second group of probably seasoned professionals know?

I thought I would be the exception to the rule of course, so I started to build my own tactical RPG. I'd always loved the genre, ever since I played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on GBA, I've lapped up almost everything the genre has to offer; XCOM, Chroma Squad, Hard West, Wargroove, Into the Breach, and so on. My game was going to be set in the real world, with kids playing make-believe to create the classes - think FFTA-meets-Costume Quest.

I did SO much for this game. I had the nuts, guts and bolts sorted out, from an overworld map and a handful of mission types, to a fully scripted story with cutscene dialogue and hours spent balancing skill powers and health limits. But an isometric TRPG is NOT a clever first game to pick. It took me weeks to get my head around non-Cartesian coordinates, tilemaps, pathfinding, and Y-sorting characters against the various components in a level.

My main issue was the art. I've never been artistic, and pixel art is about all I can muster on a good day, but isometric pixel art?! Not a chance. And i couldn't decide on a scale, which is why there's one heifer being chopped in half by a fence. See the results for yourself above ...

I did have a friend helping me out at one point (they're the half-decent aliens in the turn order bar, as opposed to the reskins of FFTA characters elsewhere), but with eight different character classes, each with 10 skills, and something like 15 different levels, it was too much to ask someone to do for free in their spare time and I tried to do it all myself. And the sheer weight of the work that lay before me made me think it wasn't such a good idea to go it alone if I wanted anything released before 2025. So I moved on with a heavy heart, hoping I'll get a chance to get back to it one day.

WHAT HAVE I EFFING LEARNT?

So that's two projects down the tube, death by overscoping for the most part, and a lack of skills, particularly in the pixel art department. So why is Effing & Blinding going to be different? What lessons did I learn that will help me out this time around?

Firstly, scope control. I have a limited amount of time to finish this game, and it needs to be shortish. There are eight levels planned, a main character with limited actions, probably two dozen more characters with even fewer actions, 200ish items and objects, a typing minigames and all the extra GUI/menu mumbo jumbo. That sounds like a lot now I've typed it out, but it's less than a quarter of what those other ideas would've required, and it's also not all necessary to hit a milestone. I just need to finish and polish one and then I have a demo! Something out in the wild, even if it isn't a full game.

Pixel art is also still one of my weaker suits, but I've simplified by going top-down rather than iso, and I've been practising whenever I can. I know already that i'm going to have to redraw most of what I'm using at the moment because it's all very rough, but it's a starting point from which to improve!

Finally, the most important thing is time! The other two projects I was making on the evenings and weekends, letting it eat into my free time that should've been better spent elsewhere. This time, I have no job to distract me, and no excuse not to make a big dent in the project, even if I don't finish before I need the pounds pouring in again.

THIS WEEK I'VE MOSTLY BEEN ...

Last but not least, a little update on what I've been up to this week. Last week was all washing machines and making items do things with objects, but this week I did a bit of work on NPCs and the main character. Take a look at this video!

I'm embarrassingly proud of that, though do respect your elders. I hope that gave you a bit of insight into the path that led me here, and where that path will hopefully end. For more sweary antics, come back next week, or even sign up for the mailing list. Thanks for reading! Craig BTTNBSH

#gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegames #godot game engine #videogames

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silenttowergames · 6 years

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Super Platformer RPG Postmortem (LD41)

Play Now | Ludum Dare page | Website | Source Code

Ludum Dare 41: Combine Two Incompatible Genres

On the night of April 20th, 2018, I did some work on my current game Retro Slasher for a few hours, and then went to bed. I was scrolling through Twitter on my phone before I went to sleep, when I saw a tweet about Ludum Dare. It had started about two hours before.

I had heard of Ludum Dare, but never participated. I was interested.

The theme also caught my eye: “combine two incompatible genres”. I had an idea! A platformer / turn-based RPG game had been rolling around in my head for a while, and I thought it fit pretty well. It could combine the best of both worlds, while also having a quirky oil-and-water separation between the two.

So I jumped out of bed and immediately got to work.

I decided to enter the competition rather than the jam. Its requirements are more strict: You get 48 hours rather than 72, you must be a solo dev, you must create all of the content new for the event, and you must release all your source code. I’m a solo developer, and since I’m trying to make it in indie games, I wanted to put myself to this test.

HTML5 + vanilla JavaScript

I decided to program the game in pure HTML5. I usually work with C# + MonoGame, but I don’t have a rapid-development engine available yet. I have experience with pure HTML5, however, and knew it would be much faster to get things going. Also, having your game playable in-browser makes it much more accessible.

For the record, I used howler.js for audio, since it makes everything much simpler. Outside of that, there were no libraries used.

Assets

I probably made the art in about 10 minutes. I am not a pixel artist, so I couldn’t have made anything much more complicated. I recently played the beautifully-simple Downwell, so I was feeling inspired by its 1-bit art style. (Despite the similarities between this game’s page and Downwell’s, I’ve never seen their site until this moment haha).

My game ended up being the 11th most-rated (note: most, not highest) compo entry this time around (peaking at 4th!). I think the pixel art was probably the reason why so many people played it. I got several compliments for it, and it was my second highest-rated category (next to humor).

In the audio department, there was no music. The sound effects all came from the incredibly helpful sfxr program.

Coverage

I watched a few streamers play my game in the days following the compo. There was even a Twitch meme made out of it! Possibly my proudest moment yet as a developer.

My game was also included in videos by Jupiter_Hadley and Ian Hinck of Easy Allies.

Major Criticisms

Between watching the streams and videos, and reading the comments, I discovered that there were a few major issues with the game:

The platforming is too difficult

The RPG elements aren’t very clear

The game is made up of two distinct genre sections, and both of them have glaring flaws!

The platforming not only requires lots of precision in your jumps, but the jump goes too fast to feel comfortable. I tried to prevent it from feeling spacey, but I went too far in the other direction. Then, there are the sections where the player goes off the top of the screen when you make certain jumps, so you can’t tell where you’re going to land sometimes.

To quote user Deprecat’s comment:

Players that enjoy hardcore platforming tend to prefer forgiving controls but brutal level designs.

I had it backwards. The level design was kind of hard, but it was really the harsh game physics that got you killed most of the time.

I experienced a wake-up call while watching streamers play:

What I found was that they didn’t finish the game. It’s a 5-minute game at most, but people kept dying at the same spots over and over because my jumps were just too harsh, so they quit. This is a fatal flaw.

As for the RPG elements, there was no in-game explanation for how things worked. Different options told you how much AP they had, and whether or not they had a cooldown, and that’s it. Most people thought the Psychic move would be some sort of magic attack, or after using it didn’t think it did anything at all. It actually reveals the enemy’s health bar at the cost of a turn, but clearly that wasn’t obvious beforehand, nor was it apparent to some players that the enemy health bar even showed up.

I put these things on the game page’s description, and Psychic showed that it had 0 AP, but this was not enough. If I could do things over, I would probably include a description box that tells you what each move does, and some sort of animation that shows the enemy’s health bar appearing.

Lesser Criticisms

Considering that I made the game in less than 48 hours, I’m proud of it. It’s a short proof-of-concept, so the following issues don’t ruin your 5-minute flash-in-the-pan experience as much as they would an hours-long investment. But if I move on with the project, these issues must be ironed out:

The game doesn’t advertise its controls to you. Heck, the description doesn’t either. I should’ve added some indication of the controls in the GUI. For the record, it’s arrow keys to move/jump and space bar to select attacks. Most people figured this out, so it’s alright, but that was a huge oversight on my part.

The RPG battle system has almost no balance. There were attempts: you level up, enemies get stronger, they roll a die to determine attack strength, your stronger attack has a cooldown, etc. But there’s no real strategy in selecting Jump until next turn when Hit is available. There’s no way to protect yourself from attacks, there’s no telling how powerful your enemy’s next attack is going to be -- it could be anywhere from 1 to 5 AP (or in some cases, even negative, thus giving you HP). And Psychic ended up being basically worthless, since missing even a single turn might cost you the battle.

Scores

After all this, how did I score? Well, I did... okay.

I did the math: my overall score is in about the top 40% (precisely, the top 39.379243453%). It isn’t a glamorous position, but it is better than most people in the compo did. 3.299 is above average, so I count myself lucky.

Surprisingly, Humor is my highest-rated category. There were a couple jokes in the dialogue, but I didn’t expect them to land very well. I guess it went over better than the gameplay did though, haha. (Also, nobody has yet pointed out a Star Fox reference in the dialogue, which makes me kind of disappointed).

I was really expecting the graphics to be my highest-rated category, considering that I got several compliments on that but not one on the humor, outside of one or two streamers mentioning it. No complaints here, though.

Conclusion

I put myself to the test, and I wouldn’t say I failed. I created a game in under 48 hours; a game which got me compliments in a few different areas. Realistically, it’s deeply flawed, but I’m aware and I’ll know not to make the same mistakes next time.

I’m looking forward to the next game jam! I think I’ll be able to make something even better.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Tumblr for more dev blogs, visit the website, or on Twitter for regular updates on what I’m developing. Right now I’m working on Retro Slasher, an 8-bit rogue-lite survival horror. It also has its own Tumblr page and website.

#gamedev #game jam #8bit #ludum dare #ldjam41 #postmortem

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overtopsdev · 4 years

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Hacking Your Mental State

To quote the very first post on this blog; “starting something is easy”. However, we don’t want to just start this thing, we want to finish it too.

Working from home can be challenging at the best of times. Harry has spent most of his career doing it, but Shane has spent most of his actively avoiding it. This year however, none of us get a choice, the world rolled a 1, and we all have to work out how to do what we’ve got to do while in these particular circumstances we are in. It’s very tempting to throw up your hands and go “too hard, I’ll just wait for the world to be back to normal”, but that is no way to live. If you want to get anything done in life, you have to just roll with the punches, look at the situation and go, “ok, what can we do with this? How can we make this work anyway?”

So, Harry and Shane have decided to make this whole game in a few months, on top of their other day jobs, which themselves are already quite demanding. How do we fit it in? Well, most answers to that question come down to making the best use of time that we can. Firstly we have to be constantly making decisions about what’s worth doing and what isn’t. This is discussed in more detail in the post “A Never Ending Balancing Act”. But it goes beyond just making smart decisions about the fidelity of the game. Often it will come down to doing less revisions of an asset, or having less content in the game, because a game that gets released with less content at least gets released.

(Walking? Easy. Walking to Perth? Hmm…. not so much)

But, even all that isn’t really the beginning of the story. Sometimes it can be hard just getting started.

This is where the title of this post comes in. This kind of applies across the board, but especially when working from home; there are ways you can trick yourself into being more productive. It might sound strange, but honestly, our brains are often like unruly pets, they aren’t just going to do what’s in our best interests by default, and you often need to “trick” them into desired behaviour.

A naive, yet common approach to “better productivity” and something I’m pretty sure is universal when we are young, I know I definitely both did it and saw it in all my peers when I was at uni, is to just consume more caffeine and pull all nighters to get things done. This is not really recommended. It might work in the short term for something like a game jam, but long term, it will just wreck you, and actually be COUNTER productive.

(Source: Shane’s actual energy drink can collection)

So, apart from a life long caffeine addiction, taking that approach won’t really get you anywhere, so what will?

The following is a list of tips and tricks we have picked up over the years, from reading books, to experimenting and learning from our own experience:

Just do it for 5 minutes

This is a common one amongst artists, and many of you might have heard this one before. Just getting started can be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome when it comes to productivity. The mountain of work in front of you can seem insurmountable, even if you have managed to conceptually break it down into bite sized tasks, that pile of tasks stretching off to the horizon can still feel like too much, and that can be a major hand brake on progress. So, because our brains are lazy, or more specifically have a lot of inertia (they just keep wanting to do what they are already doing), all you really need to do is convince yourself to just do 5 minute’s worth of work. That doesn’t sound so bad does it? You don’t have to do the whole thing, just 5 minutes, maybe 10. You will then find that after all the effort of getting set up, opening up the project (or in the case of art, getting your pencils/paints/whatever else out), and actually putting pen to paper, the momentum of getting started will carry you through. It will actually be harder to stop than to keep going, and before you know it, you will have done at least an hour or two worth of work.

Walk through a doorway

Ever have that experience of walking into another room and immediately forgetting why? Then when you go back, you remember? You aren’t just going senile, it’s to do with how our brains chunk information, and switch from context to context. Real life physical cues cause our brains to change context, I’m sure there’s probably some perfectly logical evolutionary explanation for it, but it doesn’t really matter why, all you need to know is that it is a thing, and you can use it to your advantage. By putting yourself in a different physical location, you can put yourself in a different mental location too, making it easier to be in “home mode” and “work mode”. Now, this year, we don’t get the “freebie” of going to an office or classroom to do this for us, but we can trick it into happening anyway. If you make sure to set up your space at home in a way that keeps work and leisure separate, even if it means just moving your monitor and chair from one side of your desk to the other, then when you “travel” from home to work, get up, walk to the letterbox, and come back to sit in your new context. Travelling through the doorways while doing so acts as like, mental “page breaks” or chapter markers. Trust me, it works.

Put shoes on

This is related to the above point. It’s about forcing your mental context. Wearing shoes is something most of us strongly associate with being in “work mode”. I would suspect that most people don’t wear shoes around their own home all day every day, and so the act of putting shoes on is subconsciously associated with going out and doing “non home things”, which for most of us, is probably most commonly work/school. Shane’s version/personal preference for this one is putting on a belt rather than shoes. It amounts to the same thing, although may be less effective. There aren’t really empirical studies on the difference that we are aware of .

Procrastinate your way to Productivity

This is honestly something I thought I came up with on my own, but I have since read about it a bunch of times, and discovered during conversation that a bunch of other people do it too.

It’s often easy to get distracted, or when working on something have the thought of “this sucks, I wish I was doing something else instead”. Like we touched on in the “Mix of Easy and Hard” post, this is something you can use to your advantage rather than trying to stubbornly avoid, by having an alternative, just as important task to go on with that is more appealing in the moment. If you have a Rock-Paper-Scissors style arrangement of multiple tasks that all trump each other when it comes to procrastination fodder, you can “procrastinate your way to productivity”.... this is one I would say to use with caution though, as you HAVE to ensure you always come back to the original thing, you can’t put stuff off forever. You also have to actually see tasks to completion when you switch to them. You can’t just keep doing nothing, otherwise, unsurprisingly, nothing will get done.

(This was clearly the result of someone procrastinating something more important)

Put the right music on

Something most people know, even if only subconsciously, is that we tend to be more productive while working to music (I honestly don’t know how musicians do their job then, that sounds like lonely work to me). An extension of that which most programmers at least seem to have a handle on, is that when doing anything that needs the language centre of your brain, like programming for example, or writing of any kind, it’s best to listen to something without lyrics. Classical, EDM, Vaporwave, whatever, but just not something that’s going to interfere with your ability to think words. This doesn’t seem to be as big a deal with art or level design though. Harry and Shane have both found that we are perfectly fine working on visual stuff while listening to basically anything.

One thing I did discover recently though, and in hindsight it’s not at all surprising, but my usual heavy rotation playlists were just getting too repetitive. I’d been listening to the same few favourite tracks over and over. So I started putting on full albums to work to, stuff I hadn’t listened to since I was a teenager/in my early 20s. Apart from the 1-2 “best” tracks off each album that would stay in heavy rotation. What I found was that this was an instant time warp back to my youth. This itself isn’t the revelation, everyone kind of knows that music facilitates mental time travel (the only sense better for it is smell). What was the revelation though, was how much this brought back the fire of enthusiasm for game dev.

There’s this unfortunate trade off that tends to occur over a lifetime, like a metal oxidising, where, when you are young you have all the enthusiasm and drive, but none of the skill or experience to do anything with it… then, the older you get, as experience goes up, the raw enthusiasm tends to blunt and dwindle. BUT, I found that by listening to my favorite music from my youth that I haven’t really listened to much recently, I was able to put myself back in that headspace. So, now that I do have the decades of experience, I am able to trick myself into that high drive mental frame from back when I couldn’t do much with it besides flounder around energetically, but ultimately ineffectively.

This last point I realise isn’t all that much help to most people reading this blog now, but maybe keep it in mind for the future. It might just help you down the track one day.

If you liked the stuff I was talking about in this post, then you absolutely have to read the book “Predictably Irrational”. It should be mandatory reading for any game developer in my opinion.

https://www.audible.com.au/pd/Predictably-Irrational-Audiobook/B01ITOX98S

Holy crap, that was a long one. Thanks for reading to the end.

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gamerzcourt · 6 years

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Nier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Discuss What Games They Admire MostNier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Discuss What Games They Admire Mostvideo games

New Post has been published on http://www.gamerzcourt.com/nier-psychonauts-and-other-devs-discuss-what-games-they-admire-mostnier-psychonauts-and-other-devs-discuss-what-games-they-admire-mostvideo-games/

Nier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Discuss What Games They Admire MostNier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Discuss What Games They Admire Mostvideo games

These past few years have yielded an amazing roster of games that we personally love. With so many fantastic experiences out there, we began to grow curious over what games developers particularly enjoy. During our time spent at this year’s GDC, we had the opportunity to interview a wide variety of game developers and key figures in the industry, so we decided to ask what current game they find inspiring and admire the most, and why.

As you’ll see from the responses below, the games each developer adores might not come as a surprise to you, especially if you’re familiar with their work or tastes. Others had some surprising picks that you probably wouldn’t expect. What current games do you admire the most? Let us know in the comments below. And be sure to check out feature detailing the 25 best games you might’ve not heard of that we saw at GDC 2018.

Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, Directors of Cuphead

Jared Moldenhauer (left) and Chad Moldenhauer (right)

Jared Moldenhauer: I have a library of 100+ games that I’m working towards currently. But one of the earlier games that I chose and found very rewarding was Hollow Knight. It’s an interesting and challenging Metroidvania. And the visuals and the universe that they created, and the feeling within all the characters; I was happy playing every minute of it.

Chad Moldenhauer: I recently started and really enjoy The Witness. I was looking forward to that for a long time!

Yoshinori Terasawa, Danganronpa Series Producer

Yoshinori Terasawa: I love the Persona series. I adore the sense of personality that those games have. I really like how cool and stylish they are.

Rami Ismail, Producer of Nuclear Throne

Rami Ismail: So many games have really sparked me. Games that really stand out to me are Engare and Farsh, by Mahdi Bahrami, both games based on this Iranian heritage. I was very impressed by This War of Mine, which gives a unique perspective on war. Just seeing that tremendous shift in perspective translated into a game that is so powerful and poignant, that reminds me that there is so much more out there.

Tom Kaczmarczyk, Producer of Superhot

Tom Kaczmarczyk: Our game director [Piotr Iwanicki] who actually came up with the idea, he often cites an indie flash game called, Time4Cat, as one of the inspirations, because it did have the same sort of time automation mechanic. For me, I love Hotline Miami because of its action sequences. A lot of what we pick up come from action movies, and from the way people design cinematic experiences where you fall into a certain archetype of a situation, and you immediately understand what’s going on.

Tim Schafer, Founder of Double Fine (Psychonauts, Brutal Legend)

Tim Schafer

Tim Schafer: Lately, a game that really made a big effect on me–it sounds really cliché–but Breath of the Wild was a huge thing. I just loved it. Everyone loves something different about games, there’s no one game that’s perfect for everybody, but it made me realize that my number one thing is exploration. I’m constantly exploring and surprised and I just love it and I play it all the time. I also love Loot Rascals, which is a great roguelike, and I’ve recently been playing Persona 5, which is just amazing. Amazing style and tone, it’s so polished.

Jason Roberts, Director of Gorogoa

Jason Roberts: In 2017, I was a big fan of Inside and Night in the Woods; those were big games for me. I’m big on tone, mood, atmosphere. These are important to me. And I love those games. And I also, this year, I think Florence and any game from Annapurna are just very carefully, precisely created with tone and atmosphere. That’s what I value.

Dean Ayala, Hearthstone Senior Game Designer + Dave Kozack, Hearthstone Lead Narrative Designer

Dean Ayala: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s a roguelike released back in 1997. A lot of the Hearthstone design team plays it. It’s super old-school.

Dave Kozack: It has been in continuous development; it’s one of those community projects. That’s why the name, Stone Soup. But we played a lot of rogue-likes while we were working on Dungeon Run, and that was one of our favorites. It’s just something we keep coming back to as a team. It’s a lot of fun.

Ian Dallas, Creative Director of What Remains Of Edith Finch

Ian Dallas

Ian Dallas: For me, the last game that affected me emotionally in a strong way was Universal Paperclips. A game about clicking on buttons and manufacturing paperclips that I just found myself lost in for 8 hours. It was really like a troubling emotional experience, and it’s amazing that it comes out of just text on a webpage. It reaffirms the power of video games and the way that they can teach you things about yourself and about the world that you couldn’t really internalize in any other way.

Chelsea Hash, Technical Artist of What Remains Of Edith Finch

Chelsea Hash: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Their commitment to the multimedia format and drawing from different rendering styles to support their vision was something that I was glad to be able to experience, something that was willing to think outside the box.

Damon Baker, Nintendo Publisher and Developer Relations

Damon Baker: I can’t choose one game. It is like choosing my favorite child! There are so many different types of experiences. Most recently I am working my way through Night in the Woods. I haven’t been able to play that previously, and having a lot of flights lately has given me more flexibility to get through a lot of indie content. Of course, I totally enjoyed Celeste. I vowed not to use assist mode on that game at all and beat it; but it took me 1800 deaths or something to get through it, but it was a beautiful game.

Matt Thornson, Director of Celeste

Matt Thornson: I’ve been really enjoying my time with Into the Breach. It’s amazing!

Victor Kislyi, Wargaming CEO (World of Tanks)

Victor Kislyi: Civilization. All of them, because I started playing from Civ I. Now, believe it or not, before playing World of Tanks last night I was playing Civilization and I was playing on the plane on my way here. Civ 6 is amazing, and it was my MBA. I’m a physicist by education but, playing Civilization, all those layers, economy, exploration, politics, military, science, religion–your brain is trained to juggle those multiple layers like almost instantly, or at least very, very correctly. And, that’s a good analogy with business, people, finance, media, failures, exploration, etc., etc. I think Civilization, as a concept, as a game, actually, is more valuable to humanity than Mona Lisa.

Yoko Taro, Director of Nier: Automata

Yoko Taro: I think that Grand Theft Auto IV and Super Mario Bros. are two big games that influenced me when making Nier. But with games from the past–not modern games–I felt more freedom or challenge as a player. Let’s say we have a black background with a white dot on it and let’s call it the space. I feel like that really creates freedom, especially in terms freedom of imagination, and challenging the dev team to create a world without really being able to express that world visually. In that sense, I feel that in the past, game developers were trying to create a new frontier. They were trying to expand the world, expand the universe of gaming industry.

Yoko Taro (left) and Takahira Taura (right)

Now that the game industry has matured pretty much now, a lot of people actually go for a more safe game. They try to make all the consumers happy with that one game. I think that that actually limits to what they can do and I feel that no one is really trying to expand that arena or expand that world anymore. I am a little bit sad about that.

Takahisa Taura, Designer Of Nier: Automata + Metal Gear Rising

Takahisa Taura: When The Witcher 3 came out, we all played it and had fun with it, but we also looked at it to see what would we do if we created a game like this. We were using The Witcher 3 as a learning experience on how to create an RPG. I think that’s where it all started. Well, that’s where we came from, so it wasn’t too difficult of a task to create a JRPG.”

GameSpot News

#Admire #devs #Discuss #Games #MostNier #Mostvideo #Nier #Psychonauts #They

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hadlowaudio · 7 years

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Reality Bytes: VR, AR And The Audio Realm!

The idea for this blog came from watching a Julia Hardy Radio 1 Iplayer video covering Uncharted 4 and how console games are now becoming more cinematic and stylised like a film, and in turn to me closer to reality in a lot of ways.

I saw the potential to discuss how games are becoming more than this, how they are en route to becoming a counterpoint between film and reality. Progression in Mobile technology has allowed games such as Republique and Her Story to deliver a more engaging real world experience.

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Further more, I believe this and 3D sound, coupled with indie games also being made available on console as well as mobile should hopefully see an increase in demand for audio in projects meaning more jobs across the board.

I decided for this blog to seek the wisdom and experience of the industry, in the form of games producers, sound designers and Audio Directors to hear what they had to say about the progression of VR and AR with Audio and Video Games.

Will Morton, Audio Director, Solid Audioworks.

Her Story as an example is a very simple game, nothing technologically pushing boundaries, but the fact that the narrative is so engaging has led to the game being such a success.

15 years ago when I began working as an in house sound designer the team sizes for large-scale AAA game floated around the 40-60 mark, give or take. With each iteration of a game in a series, or with each new generation of consoles (and the jump in audio and visual fidelity that goes with it) team sizes have grown hugely (check the credits list for GTA III from early in the PS2 gen versus the credits list for GTA V at the end of the PS3 gen for evidence of this). Mobile phones finally becoming a legitimate platform for games has also hugely affected this - easy access to enourmous marketplaces, games that can be developed by small teams in bedrooms - it is easier for people to get their foot on the ladder now and more opportunities are out there than ever before.

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How I remember this happening is a jump from 8bit to 16bit systems meaning a jump from a few channels of synthesised sounds to more channels with sample playback and basic DSP in some cases (reverb on the SNES for instance), then a jump to PS1 era console and PC games where CD audio was commonplace. It was very inflexible in terms of design, but offered music as real as budget would allow, hence getting a cinematic sound a long time before visuals could match the music. SFX wise from the PS1 era I think was the time when what constituted ‘game sounds’ started to change from everything being front-end and very ‘gamey’ to things being positioned and world-ized, ultimately behaving more realistically.

I can’t take credit unfortunately for either of these examples, but the vehicle reverse 'beep beep beep’ heard in the original Grand Theft Auto really opened my ears to the possibility of going super-detailed with game sound, as did the subtle falling debris that followed explosions in the original Medal of Honor. Until this point an explosion in a game was simply a boom, Medal of Honor immersed you more by letting you hear the aftermath of the explosion. Then PS2 era offering many channels of sample playback and a lot more memory, plus enough processing power that you could be clever with channel mixing and 'faking’ many more than the 48 channels a PS2 offered as standard.

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DSP at this point wasn’t harnessed by many studios, and even fewer did a great deal with DSP beyond basic filtering or reverb, but in GTA San Andreas and Manhunt we did a lot with DSP - in San Andreas to help root people in the environment and blur the line between game and world, and in Manhunt to help the player understand the position of enemies based on the environment he was in. PS3 era didn’t really bring anything particularly new to the table - there were more channels, better compression, better surround support, more memory, more processing power, better DSP support - everything we had the previous gen but more/bigger/better. At the time though many more studios were making use of it, which is great when you see the industry moving forward. VR audio is the next big change, and everyone is having to start from a clean slate.

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Pretty much all vacancies I have seen on AAA game audio teams have required (or at least specify as a benefit) implementation experience. Maybe not so much in the indie dev market, but for AAA middleware experience is a big advantage. For in house sound designers now, it’s amazing how little sound design you end up doing ;)

Vlady Veselinov, Audio Engineer, Rebound.

I think audio is evolving. Knowing how to edit, record and mix is no longer enough. The modern game audio professional should know how to code. There are more than enough tutorials and courses to justify the demand for mixers.

The most interesting thing in games for me is procedural generation. The problem with it is, that it’s hard to generate something believable. The next most interesting thing for me is VR, although I don’t know what could be done in that sphere beyond head tracking (HRTF), occlusion and reverberation calculations.

Paul Leishman, CEO, Pixel Sword.

Audio in game’s is held back by three real world factors - space, price and mobile. Not everyone has the room for 5.1 surround sound or the money to offered high quality audio equipment and in mobile most game music or effects is turned off.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t progression in this area. It just means its slowed down by inbuilt TV speakers, lack lustre sound bars and people listening to Spotify while playing mobile games. Audio just doesn’t have the advance that graphics has had with processing power and quality. However, this could change with headphones and the rumours 3D audio is coming back.

Industry News!

I looked around online to see what the media had to say about the emergence of VR and AR and on how the major technology companies are investing in research for these areas. Here’s what I found out - food for thought for Audio Designers!

BT Sport VR

Samsung VR & AR Projects

The Verge 3D Audio

Virtual Reality Reporter

Get Mac VR

You Tech Augmented Reality Demo

DTS VR QA

Omni For VR

Futuristic Gaming Technology

Apple’s Augmented Reality

Samsung Gear VR: Oculus Arcade

Netflix VR

Final Thoughts.

For Mobile and audio it's looking like Binaural (Check my Nightjar & Papa Sangre posts) and/or 3D head tracking are the likely avenues for expansion. Especially with the emergence of 3D headphones and projects such as the Waves NX Head Tracker and its mobile app. The cost for hardware is still at a premium for this kind of new tech, but due to fast paced nature of technology, things should become more economical in the near future, plus more and more companies are capitalising on doing online season sales incentives.

Demand for audio programming & sound design in VR & AR on all platforms is going to be dependent on three factors for me. Cost, hardware mobility (more so for mobile platforms) and creative use outside traditional game genres such as FPS and RPG.

The mobile market could have the two big hitters doing their own thing with Samsung looking at both technologies, whilst Apple, despite having now introduced VR supported graphics chips into their IMac Pro systems could be putting more time into AR due to their strength in the mobile marketplace. AR is more flexible on first look when using multiple applications on the move, and whilst I see VR as more for entertainment purposes; lets not forget, technology and innovation come hand in hand. We just don’t know what is going to tickle the consumer taste buds. Its up to us all to decide as lovers of technology and software.

Listening to the views of my fellow professionals, it does seem we all agree being able to use at least one engine to programme audio is a desirable skillset for Audio Engineers in modern times. Some of us audio folks I completely understand may not be too keen on coding, but as with everything in technology, it develops and becomes easier to use with enhanced user experience interfaces over time.

FMOD, One of the variety of Audio Engines available for Video Games.

Therefore the focus on managing code could all change as time progresses, allowing audio professionals to think less about the programming language and and more on creating sound for immersive projects in VR and AR.

We’re just touching the iceberg with this post, so its by no means conclusive. I believe it is the beginning of something very exciting for Audio professionals and anyone wanting hone their skills in the discipline. Whether your freelance, in house, or an indie developer, I’d say the journey ahead for Audio with these virtual worlds has huge potential as we develop our understanding with graphics, the technology and consumer demands.

If you have any views on where you feel Audio and VR/AR is heading, please discuss. My next post will to be on one of the projects I have been working recently, more to follow!

#video games #audio #game audio #virtual reality #augmentedreality #technology

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teramelos1 · 7 years

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Nick Reinhart Interview // Marcel’s Music Journal

Big Walnuts Yonder–an incredible supergroup featuring Minutemen’s Mike Watt, Wilco’s Nels Cline, Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, and Tera Melos’ Nick Reinhart–just put out one of the most powerful and marvelously eclectic rock records of the year. Even though the band formed way back in 2008 and didn’t record the album until 2014, it still sounds raw and fresh as hell. The dirty funk of opener “All Against All” accurately portrays the LP’s unique blend of lo-fi math rock and noisy, throwback ‘90s skate punk, while the energetic “Raise the Drawbridges?” gloriously flaunts ear-piercing guitar licks and groove-heavy percussion.

Aside from recording seriously great music with Watt, Cline, and Saunier, Nick Reinhart has proved himself to be one of the most strikingly innovative guitarists in recent memory with his countless other bands and side projects. He is best known as the frontman of Sacramento-based experimental rock trio Tera Melos, who explored complex, mind-bending indie-math zones on their most recent release, 2013′s X’ed Out.

Reinhart has also worked with drummer Zach Hill in Bygones and Death Grips; played live in Rob Crow’s band Goblin Cock; and performed a series of engrossing, entirely improvised live sets with Dot Hacker’s Eric Gardner as Swollen Brain, all of which are discussed in our interview below (the power of collaboration is definitely key here).

You and Eric Gardner from Dot Hacker just played some shows as Swollen Brain. How did this whole project come about?

I met Eric through my friend Jonathan Hischke, who plays bass in Dot Hacker. When I originally moved down to Los Angeles I lived in a duplex next door to Eric. I would house sit his Vietnamese pot bellied pig, Francis, a lot. I was a big fan of his drumming in Dot Hacker and at some point it came up that we should play music together for fun. We had a pretty immediate chemistry in playing free, improvised stuff. We played our first show in September 2015 and we had a nice response, so we figured make it a regular thing. No intense band practices, no songs, no rules. It’s a really fun musical project to be a part of.

How do you feel playing improvised sets?

I really enjoy improvising. While I’ve done solo improvised sets, it’s a lot more fun having someone else to connect with on previously unpaved musical roads. With my band Tera Melos we take practice and preparing for a set/tour pretty seriously. We usually need around 12 full days, give or take, of long band rehearsals before we’re comfortable enough to play a show. We even dump lots of brain power into designing the set and which songs or transitions go where. For me practice is usually fairly stressful, as I wear a few different hats- playing guitar, singing and running some sort of sampler/keyboard rig all while doing the pedal tap dancing thing, and I want it all to sound cohesive and thoughtful. there’s a lot of work that goes into that. So as far as improvising goes- it’s amazing to ditch all the preparation and just play music without preconception. It’s very liberating. With Swollen Brain we do play together in our rehearsal studio, but it’s less “practice” and more just playing little sets. We’ll generally do 20 minute bursts of sound just to keep our improv brains fresh, which after 2 rounds of bursts our brains are actually very not-fresh haha. To get better at improvising it seems you just need to do it often. So in a way it’s sort of practicing, but not really… “Practicing” is also a way of familiarizing ourselves with whatever gear we happen to be using at the time. In my case it’s usually a freshly constructed pedal board. I like to have time to see what works sonically and what doesn’t before we play a show. The other thing I like to consider when playing a free-form set is how to keep things flowing and interesting- for me and the audience. Obviously you can’t force magical moments to appear in that context, but I want to set myself up for those moments to occur. Generally that means having the tools that will allow me to make little musical stories with dynamics and tension. One of my favorite parts of an improvised performance is when someone walks up to you afterwards and asks, “so how much of that was improvised?” and the answer is, “well, all of it.” I’ve been the person asking that question and when you get that answer it’s a magical moment in and of itself.

Do you think Swollen Brain will remain solely a live band? Would you ever be interested in recording studio material?

We actually just started making a record. The process of how to go about capturing our vibe was hard for me to envision. It took me a second to wrap my mind around how we could best accomplish a recording. Because it’s very much a live, organic process of improvising it would make sense to just set up some mics and hit record on a bunch of sound bursts, but we felt that it should be sonically more interesting than just drums and a single guitar track. When we play live I end up looping layers of sounds and then repurposing the loops to relate to what I’m doing with the live guitar sounds. Then once we land on something that works we turn that into a little mini song. So one of the recording methods was playing until we landed on some interesting loops, then capturing the performance of drums + loop action, and then overdub myself improvising over that. We did variations of that method for a couple of days. The next step is sifting through all of that and making sense of it.

You also played in Rob Crow’s band Goblin Cock on a tour of theirs late last year. What was that like?

It was great. I love Rob Crow. He’s one of my favorite musicians. Tera Melos toured with Pinback a couple years ago and it was one the my favorite tours we’ve ever done. He’s super thoughtful and just a really great person all around. I was stoked when he asked if I wanted to do the Goblin Cock tour. It was challenging because i had to learn a style of music that I wasn’t really familiar with- whatever brand of metal Goblin Cock is I guess. He uses alternate tunings and B.C. Rich Warlock guitars exclusively. So I had to relearn chord shapes and which notes went where on a really weird guitar, then apply all that to a kind of music I’d never played. Oh and we wore cloaks and face masks that were very hard to see out of, plus all fog machines and strobe lights raging. So there’s actually just about zero visibility on stage. But yea, it was strange and really fun.

You’ve mentioned before that Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Underworld rank among your top influences when it comes to electronic music. What drew you to the sound of those artists and what impact did it ultimately have on your own playing style?

When I was 16 a friend showed me those artists. At that point I was really into punk rock. The electronic music that I was hearing had this relentless energy and all these really melodic sounds mixed with abrasive sound effects. That was really new and exciting to me. I had a super natural, positive reaction to it. The same friend had a Playstation and a game called MTV Music Generator. You could make your own songs by placing pre-recorded samples onto a timeline. It was a very dumbed down way to make something resembling the electronic music that we were listening to. So I’d mess around with that at his house after school. A couple years later I got a desktop computer and found the program Fruity Loops, which was the next step up in music programming from the video game. A couple years after that I got a program called Reason, which I have worked out of ever since. At that point I hadn’t really gotten into guitar pedals and sonic exploration. I mean, I had some pedals, but I was still playing in a punk-ish band and bedroom moonlighting as some electronic music poser. Eventually Tera Melos was created and the guitar pedals section of my brain expanded. I started to recognize the ability to recreate some of the sounds I had learned to make on the computer. Incorporating that sort of stuff into an outside-the-box rock band became really exciting, and still is for me. I should also mention that my knowledge of electronic music in general never really reached beyond those three artists. I think there was just something really special about them that opened my mind at the right time.

Do you think collaborating with other people allows you to think outside the box and push the limits of your own sound? I can sense an almost cosmic force from these Big Walnuts Yonder recordings.

Yes, 100%. Musical collaborations that take you outside your comfort zone are crucial for growth and creativity. When I began playing music with Zach Hill it was like my musical brain got super charged and started wandering in different directions that I previously hadn’t really explored. Rob Crow and I have been batting ideas back and forth for awhile now as well that will hopefully take shape soon. I’m excited to see where that collaboration will take me in terms of new musical territory. And yes, of course the Big Walnuts Yonder thing had a lot of cosmic force going for it. Those guys are all very big inspirations for me, so making that record was a big part of my creative timeline. I think it’s too soon and close to the album release to be able to recognize the greater impact it had on me, but what comes to mind immediately is exercising the ability to to maintain creativity and keep up with these musical giants, and for them to be stoked on what I was bringing to the table. It would be like an indie game dev that grew up playing Nintendo all of the sudden getting to work on a new game with Shigeru Miyamoto. And not only that, but Miyamoto is excited about your ideas and he’s reacting to them with new ideas. It’s sort of like that. Pretty crazy. The other thing that comes to mind is that I had never written guitar parts to pre-existing bass parts in this capacity. 8 of the 10 Big Walnuts Yonder songs were born in Mike Watt’s brain and started with his bass as “song forms,” as he calls them. In other words, I was having to figure out how to write interesting guitar parts to songs that consisted of only bass. In Tera Melos I can probably count on one hand the amount of times where even just a small portion of a song’s construction started with bass. I can recall being very frustrated trying to come up with guitar parts that way because it’s so foreign to me. Of course out of that frustration comes great things. I was well prepared for this challenge though. It took me a while to understand Watt’s compositions (they’re pretty wild) but once I was comfortable with his approach to song writing I think some really cool, unique stuff came out of it.

What was it like recording the album in just three days?

When we started the process of creating Big Walnuts Yonder Mike had been sending me songs that were just bass compositions. So I would sit with them and contemplate different ways to compliment what Mike had written. Now Nels and Greg on the other hand- they had heard what Mike and I had worked on, but I don’t believe they had fully composed “parts” like me and Mike, that is to say I think they had “ideas” and then brought them to life in the studio. It was so crazy and inspiring to see it happen like that. So when we were all set up and ready to play we would jam a song through a few times, talk about the sections, iron out a thing or two and then hit record. It was 99% live. I was actually a little nervous because I hadn’t recorded live like that for many many years, since being in a crappy sounding punk band as a teenager. I mean, my bands usually record live, but then guitars are scratched and then redone. So this is truly a live record with all of us in the same room reacting to each other. I think that nervous energy really helped me pull it together personally.

I think Zach Hill is an artist who compliments your musical style and approach really well. You played on the last two Death Grips albums, Jenny Death and Bottomless Pit. Was that a particular collaboration that gave you the chance to explore new themes and ideas? What were the recording sessions for those records like?

Zach Hill is a very big inspiration for me. He’s one of my favorite musicians of all time and I think he’s contributed some really important things to music. The way I play and perceive music is directly related to him, so it makes sense that what we compliment each other. Contributing to Death Grips’ body of work was really special for me. I respect that band so much and to be able to help them shape their vision is a really cool thing. I think the reason it works well is because I understand where they’re coming from and where they want to go. I haven’t worked with anyone else in that context, so in that sense there are new ideas that appear that otherwise wouldn’t. A lot of the time our creative ideas are simpatico and feel really natural. It’s like as soon as I’m around those guys my brain’s bluetooth automatically connects to their system.

Aside from the recently announced tour with CHON, Covet and Little Tybee, does Tera Melos have any special plans for this year?

I think Tera Melos will probably start doing fun stuff pretty soon here.

Reinhart has a new band with Mike Watt (Minutemen), Nels Cline (Wilco), and Greg Saunier (Deerhoof) called Big Walnuts Yonder. Their self-titled debut is out now on Sargent House.

Via Marcel’s Music Journal

#Tera Melos #Sargent House #Big Walnuts Yonder

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stompsite · 7 years

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indie bundle cruft death match volume two: the revenge of the revenge

this is how it works: I install a bunch of bundle games on my computer, and then I play them until I decide whether they stay or whether they go. Hopefully you get some entertainment out of the process.

Let’s get started.

BRIDGE IT (Plus): This is a game where you make bridges. It follows the same mechanics as the last bridge building game I tested. Like... basically, just a different art style, otherwise apparently the same game. I couldn’t even finish the tutorial because every time I clicked the “simulate” button that you need to click to continue the game, the program switched to my desktop as if I had clicked my clock instead. No thanks. GOODBYE.

BRIDGE PROJECT: Virtually the same game, based on the tutorial, as this and the other bridge game. Same fundamental “make a bridge by snapping things on a grid and then running cars across it” gameplay. Not funny like those gifs I see of other, funnier bridge building games. Weird how this is the only game made by this dev, and the other game was the only game made by that dev. My working theory is that there is a small industry of devs who make a bridge game, die, and then try to remake the bridge game, thinking they’ll get it right this time.

They never do, because it’s a game about building bridges.

I didn’t take a screenshot of this one because it looked just like the other one. PASS.

AGENT AWESOME: This game’s sense of humor is “let’s be as referential as humanly possible.” Like, maybe it gets really good later, but the poor initial showing combined with a weird “sort of real time, sort of turn-based, there’s not a lot to it” gameplay isn’t really interesting to me. It’s got a 70% positive rating on Steam, though. If it’s your thing, it’s your thing. It’s not mine. ADIOS.

A FISTFUL OF GUN: I’m a sucker for Westerns, and I’m intrigued by twin-stick shooters, though I don’t like many of them. Turns out I like A Fistful of Gun. A lot. Super cool aesthetic, neat weapons. Biggest issue I had was that I didn’t really understand the controls; the game kinda explains them, but its super minimal UI doesn’t do a great job making things clear.

My Big Game Design Belief is that a game’s controls should be invisible. The barrier between thought and action should be as minimal as possible. I like this game, but I definitely wish I understood how things worked early on. There are a ton of little tweaks that, I think, would have made this game a lot better.

But you know what? I had so much fun I played it for like 30 minutes, and I’m gonna keep playing more. IT LIVES.

A GAME OF DWARVES: Alphabetically, this game was sorted under G, but it was installed in the folder, and I saw it, staring at me, brightly, against a sea of uninstalled titles. I couldn’t resist installing it. Then I ran the game, and I was told “fatal error! this application must exit immediately.” I couldn’t use a mouse to click “okay.” I had to jam “enter.”

I looked on the Steam community discussions for answers, and found this thread, which indicates that the developers went out of business and would not continue supporting the game.

I did eventually get the game to work. What I played was pretty interesting, as management sims go, but I mean... look at that screenshot. The colors don’t blend well, the repeated tiles are a bit too much, the dwarf faces look... not great. That and the fiddly controls made me question if I really wanted to play it. I almost said yes. We PARTED WAYS.

RELIC HUNTERS ZERO: It’s a fun little twin-stick. Free. Not sure why, they probably could’ve made money on this. There’s nothing making me go “wow, this is special,” but it does seem, from what I played, like an exemplary example of the form. BACKLOG.

TUMBLESTONE: Okay, I’m breaking from the norm. I jumped on my Xbox while I was cleaning the apartment in preparation for a move, and I played a couple games there to see if I’d keep them around, or download something else. Tumblestone is a puzzle game. You have to ‘shoot’ three cubes from the bottom of the puzzle space, but you can only eliminate the cubes if they are of the same color. It was fun, but I didn’t see myself sticking with it. I forgot to take a screenshot. BEGONE.

KILLER INSTINCT KOLLECTION: This Xbox title is a fighting game. I still don’t find myself enjoying fighting games. I MOVED ON.

NO TIME TO EXPLAIN: Another Xbox game, this is a platformer that did not feel particularly great to play, but that’s true of all platformers and me. I’m just not that into the genre. IT’S NOT YOU. IT’S ME.

SUPER MEGA BASEBALL: EXTRA INNINGS is an Xbox game about baseball, but it kept throwing menus like this at me, and I don’t swing that way. Get it? A baseball pun. I didn’t play very long because I just wasn’t having a lot of fun, and I get the impression this is best played with friends. None of my friends like baseball. We’re strictly curler fans where I come from. STEE-RIKE.

Right. Back to the PC.

AI: RAMPAGE might be a good game, but I’m a very picky person when it comes to controls. This is a top-down game where forward movement is wherever your cursor is aiming. Also, the main menu is literally just every option available--settings, levels, you name it. One single massive screen. I tried to take a screenshot, but it came out black. NOT MY THING.

AIRSTRIKE HD appears to be a phone game (imagine how big that pause button in the lower right of the screenshot is on a 27″ monitor) made in unity where you fly back and forth dropping bombs on a civilian populace. You might drop them on more deserving folks than civilians later in the game, but I was so busy not having fun that I didn’t stick around to try out. There aren’t enough steam reviews to give the game a proper score, but most of them are negative. CRASH AND BURN.

ARMORED FIST 3 is presumably a sequel to Armored Fist 2 and its maximum resolution is 640x480. I picked this one up because it was cheaper to buy the Novalogic complete bundle on sale with the money I’d earned from selling trading cards than it was to buy all the Delta Force games that I wanted. The controls are strange; I’m suspicious of games that tell you to use the arrow keys, but when it asked me to switch to F9 to change my camera, then didn’t tell me how to switch back, I knew we wouldn’t be getting along. Why this tank simulator from 1999 doesn’t use more modern controls or resolutions, I’m not sure. The reviews are “mostly positive” right now on Steam, but I don’t think I can enjoy this. TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.

AVENCAST, according to Wikipedia, was made by a developer that “had little or no formal education in game development field.” It took them four years to make, and they initially set out to create a Diablo clone. This game does not really control like Diablo at all. It also spends a great deal of time in menus like the above. Too many words, not enough “go do stuff.”

It’s not a bad game, though. Like, there’s nothing here that makes me go “ugh, wow, this is terrible.” It just doesn’t pique my curiosity. It doesn’t make me want more. The controls aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either. The premise isn’t that interesting--it literally starts out by telling you that this is the story of the greatest mage ever, or something like that, effectively killing the stakes--it just kind of feels old and uninteresting to me.

This is coming from someone who likes the Gothic games. What I’m saying is, your mileage may vary, and I almost kept Avencast around, until I decided that, quite frankly, I probably won’t be spending much time with it. Besides, mages are so much less interesting than rogues.

AX:EL’s menus make no sense. No, really, look at this. What does it mean? What does any of it mean? There is a ship, but what kind of game is it? I have no idea. The tooltips aren’t that helpful. One button says something like “patrol,” and if you hover over it, the tooltip says “patrol mode.”

Anyways, turns out there’s a campaign in here, if you dig long enough. Briefly, I suspected this was some kind of multiplayer only game. It is not. There is a campaign. It involves dogfighting. Turns out this is basically an Ace Combat style game, which is neat, but it is easy, there’s no tutorial, and the assets look like something I could make, and I’m not an artist at all.

AX:EL wasn’t unfun from what I played, but it puts up so many barriers to the gameplay that it can be needlessly frustrating. SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY.

BLOODSPORTS.TV sounded cool until it asked me if I had ever played in the “top down hero game” category or somethin like that. I tentatively clicked yes. IT’S A MOBA.

BLOOP RELOADED is just Bloop with nicer graphics. And writing like the above. You drag lines between things and make liquids go down those lines into the things. The end. Quoth the raven, NEVERMORE.

CALIFORNIUM: Imagine PKD’s walking simulator. Mysterious enough to keep me going. Has people to interact with, to a small degree. Would I like a game that actually has mechanical depth and complexity? Sure. But... I’m gonna finish Californium. THIS IS GOOD STUFF.

CHRONICLES OF MYSTERY: THE SCORPIO RITUAL has nothing to do with the Xbox One X. It is a point and click game. I’ve never seen the appeal of these games. You just click on stuff until people do what you want them to, or you do weird things to solve puzzles. Old Man Murray explained this at length so I don’t have to.

I love when Steam’s game description character limit gets overrun. INTO THE FLAMES.

DEFENDERS OF ARDANIA gave me a black screen and wouldn’t quit when I tried to alt tab or anything. I tried lookin for solutions, but found none. I CAST YOU OUT.

20 games. 3 survived. 17 were condemned to purgatory.

#indiebundlecruftdeathmatch

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symbianosgames · 7 years

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Welcome to the Meganoid(2017) post-mortem. This post-mortem goes into the details on the Meganoid figures and stats. Without context the stats are pretty much silly numbers, so please make sure to read all of this because there is more to the numbers than you might think.

So I'll keep this short, if you want to learn more about who I am, please check out my techblog and website. I've been a full-time (indie) developer since 2004. Mostly known for mobile games, but since 2015 also branching to PC games and even some consoles releases here and there (PS Vita and 3DS). I've never had hit games that made me millions, but I have been doing very decent for many years releasing games that have found a growing fan-base in a niche area. My biggest titles include the Gunslugs and Heroes of Loot series of games and Space Grunts.

The original Meganoid was released in 2010 on Android and iOS and was a very hard platformer with short levels that sometimes had you screaming if you didn't manage to reach the finish. For me it was a turning point in my games as I finally decided to just build games like that since those are the games I love the most. Luckily I found a niche that works for me and an audience that has been growing alongside me and my games. It also managed to reach close to a million downloads since.

Meganoid(2017) is a reboot of the franchise lifts a lot on the designs behind Spelunky, while still maintaining the difficulty of the original Meganoid game. I named it a "love child of Spelunky and Meat-boy in space", which is a very clear description of what the game is. It's not extremely original, but I'll get to that later on!

Oh, the game was also created in "just" two months, but I'll also get back to that if you keep reading..

So before Meganoid I was working on a game called Ashworld, which is a huge project for a one-man development team (which I am) and it's also an open-world game, a genre that I personally have no experience with because I often quit those games within a few hours of play-time. Simply put: Ashworld is a huge challenge for me, and I have been working on it since June 2016.

Seeing as my games are actually my livelihood, money needs to come in on a semi-frequent basis. My business is still running fairly well, I have a huge back-log of games and they are all still bringing in money on a monthly base, but to keep it all running I do have some rules on how long game-projects can take. Ashworld is breaking those rules due to a challenging development phase where I've been learning open-world design and also searching where the actual fun in the game-design is. So the game isn't done, and still needs a few months of work.

Enter the stage: Meganoid.

In January I decided to just do some prototyping with the hopes that I would end up with something playable that could be extended into a game. For this to work, I needed a clear design idea and direction. A game that I could almost create on automatic-mode.

This "automatic-mode" does need some nuance here, I wrote a blog about it a few weeks ago and I think it painted a wrong picture. Some comments and replies I got thrown at me were along the line of "a quick money grab". My bad on writing the article and not being clear about things, so here's to rectifying it:

The game was made in "just 2 months; and 13 years of experience".

The key part being those 13 years experience, factual there are a lot more years of experience, but the 13 years is how long I've been doing this commercially. Meganoid at it's core is a platformer with rogue-like mechanics. I've created close to 60 commercial platform games, and I've been doing rogue-like elements in my last 5-6 games. I know what to expect code-wise, and I know how to program those things without having to think about it.

To put it in some more perspective, my game Heroes of Loot 2 is a huge RPG-adventure/twin-stick shooter, and it was made in little over 4 months. So I normally work really fast and very effective.

Now think what you like about the short-development cycle, I don't plan to change your mind about it, but from a business point of view: this made sense and still delivers a quality game.

To have this game make some profit I needed it to take just a couple of months work so it would be easier to recoup on the costs AND make money on the game.

The development-cycle was pretty short, but since I had some interesting stuff pretty early on I actually showed some screenshots and gifs in the first week of development on twitter,facebook,instagram and a couple of forums. Some of this got picked up pretty early by mobile-game sites, and Toucharcade showed the first couple of video's I released in the weeks after.

I started using reddit a bit more, and finally managed to post something there without it being taken down (actually on second try, the first did get taken down because I didn't disclose that the "pre-order discounts" was on a game I made, which obviously makes a big difference../sarcasm).

The two or so weeks before the launch I already had various mobile sites mailing me for some promocodes, which is the up-side of being "known" in a market. In contrast to that there is the PC scene, where I'm basically unknown and nobody talks about my games.

The launch week I started looking at youtube streamers for the PC version, so I basically searched for big youtubers that covered games like: Spelunky, Meat boy, and a few other more recent pixel-art indie games that fit the same category as Meganoid.

I mailed all of them, close to a 100, which at least one steam-key included (for some group-youtubers I included up to 5 keys) and this all resulted in an awesome 0 streams. I did a follow up email to a large portion of them a week later, and this resulted in 1 Streamer playing it, yay results!

It's still possible some streamers will pick up the game later, having full inboxes, managers that handle emails slowly, or just large backlogs of video's. But I don't hold my breath for any of it. Same goes for PC game-site reviews, so even tho I did everything "right" it basically ended up with fairly little returns on it. The emails were short, to the point, showed a GIF of the game, bullet points, youtube trailer, quick-links and a steam-key included with a link to the website/presskit for more info. All according to the average marketing-advise.

Basically, in my opinion and experience, you need to know people to get things done. But reaching out never hurts and is also the way to get to know more people, so yeah.

Okay, okay! that's what you guys came for, I get it!

Google Play's "Best new seller" list charting

Let me first start with this, Meganoid was so far:

Featured on App-store under "New games we loved" - worldwide

Featured on Google Play "Early Access"

Featured on Google Play "New and Updated"

Top-charted (top 25) in Google Play "Best new sellers" list

Game of the Week - on TouchArcade

"Best games of the week for iOS and Android" - Pocketgamer

Now, back to reality, for those who don't know, making money on games is HARD, on any given day there are 100-500 games released on various platforms. That's EVERY DAY! Standing out from those games is extremely hard, most games you will never see and they get like 5-10 downloads (depending on how many friends the developer has).

With my experience of doing this business for a long time, I set a fairly low but do-able goal for Meganoid: $6500 during the launch-period. I know it's a not a huge game, and it had fairly short marketing-visibility before release due to the fast development cycle.

For me a launch-period is the first month or so after releasing it. My goals is usually to make 80%-100% of the development costs back in this first period. I calculate development costs fairly rough by multiplying each development-month with $2000 and then add any outsourced work costs. Since I do code+design+game graphics that often leaves out-source costs to music and high-res marketing art.

The $2000 is very low-end of what my cost-of-living is each month (in the Netherlands, with mortgage, girlfriend and pets). It doesn't take into account taxes and extra cash-flow for "the future". But we're talking about launch-period here, so a game will live on for a few more years and with future sales and discounts you can often double the money a game made on launch.

So for this game I had 2 months of work, that's $4000 and since there was such a short dev-cycle and I used ambient sounds from my sound-libraries, there was no music cost and just a few hundred dollars for the awesome marketing art. So let's round it to $4500.

Now the point is to get extra cashflow to cover the longer development-cycle of Ashworld and we get to a $6500 minimum revenue that I was aiming for with Meganoid. Again this is all launch-period revenue, because obviously it's a low amount especially if Ashworld development still needs 2 or 3 months time. So I'll get to that in a few paragraphs below.

I released Meganoid on March 30 on iOS, Android and PC (steam/humble/itch, windows/osx/linux) and we're now at three weeks into the release and currently the revenue is just a little shy of the target at $6200. Which is not bad at all!

So let's dig into this $6200 launch-period amount. Where did most of it come from, and why! The biggest bulk of this comes from the iOS version, actually close to 50% of it: $3580. On iOS the game was priced $4.99 with a launch-discount the first week making the game $3.99. Meganoid was made Game of the week at Toucharcade which most certainly helped, one of the weeks best games for iOS and Android on Pocketgamer, but sadly it had no "games we play" feature for the first weekend.

For some reason the game only showed up in the "Games we play" on Monday/Tuesday for the USA App-store, at which point it spiked to slightly below the launch spike so effectively doubling the sales in the 3/4 days it had that front page feature. I'm pretty sure it would have done better if it did have that feature in the first-weekend (during the sale) but those things are pretty much out of my control and I'm glad it eventually did get a feature after-all (something I kind had planned for in setting my revenue targets).

Apple loved it - all over the world!

Second biggest seller was Android, now this was done a little different. I tried some beta stages on Android and this put my game into "Early Access" on Google Play a week before the launch at a $2.99 price. This price was mostly because I believe that the brave people who try out a beta shouldn't pay full price. The game got a nice Google feature in their "Early Access" list, which only has about 20 games listed, so that's a pretty good list to be in.

The possible down-side of this is that a lot of people don't seem to be clear of understanding what "Early access" means on Google Play, so there was a lot more buying going on than I had planned for, and that means I was pushing updates daily to work out some "obviously-beta" features. Early-access users can't leave reviews during that phase, so that might have been a positive thing, the down-side of that is that many people forget to leave a review once the game was released.. so not as many reviews as I normally have during the launch-period. Not sure if I would do that again on Android, but it's been an interesting experiment.

Finally we come to the PC revenue, in total that's $900 which is split over Steam, Itch and Humble. This is also my biggest pain-in-the-butt, obviously my games still don't make much waves amongst PC gamers. Especially since about 50% of that money comes through Itch.io where I ran a pre-order with 20% discount in the two weeks leading up to the launch. So these buyers are mostly people from my own social-circles and mailing-lists, people who in many cases also buy the mobile version and in a lot of cases people who tipped up to $10 (even tho the pre-order price was $3.99!) (THANKS!).

The humble-store sales were about 10% of that, so the rest is up to you to calculate :p

Side note: Besides this launch-period revenue, there is also the added advantage of extra money made on back-log sales. New gamers that see Meganoid will check out my other games and in some cases end up buying a few more of my games. On top of that a lot of subscriptions to my social-circles and mailing list have happened during and after the development of Meganoid, which are all potentially future fans of my next games.

Another important thing to read about, how are the ratings? Because let's face it, making a game in two months isn't interesting if it's a crappy game. On iOS the game has a strong 4/5 star rating from gamers, and on Android it's at 4.8/5 star rating. I'd say those are pretty good ratings (most of my games are around the 4.0 - 4.5 ratings)

On Steam there are only about 4 ratings of which only 2 ratings count since they bought the game on Steam and not through my website/Itch.io or Humble. But I think "all of them" are fairly positive!

Game-site wise, well that's a mixed bag of thingies. As mentioned before, the game was made "game of the week" on Toucharcade, and it was part of the "best games for iOS and Android" that week on Pocketgamer. On the other side Toucharcade's review gave it just a 3.5/5 rating, and Pocketgamer managed to give it a 7/10. So that's the same two websites already making for mixed-reviews. Not sure what to think about it, and it's mostly the reason I focus on the average user-rating on app-stores since those people play the game even after a review.

PC game sites pretty much ignored the game completely, except for a few news-posts on one or two sites. But the whole game-review-site business is something for another topic. In short, those sites only talk about your game if people are already talking about your game, or if there's something controversial to be found, because that brings in readers and thus advertising-money.

Now there's always a part in a post mortem where people go say things that went right or wrong and how things could have gone different. BUT! Meganoid was just as much an experiment as it was a way to earn some extra cash.

For one, the price: $4.99. For a PC game that's a fairly cheap price-point, and it was something I wanted to try out. Normally my newly released PC games go between $7-$10 in the launch period because I honestly think that's what my games are worth for the amount of playtime and enjoyment you get. However, a game like Meganoid is perfect to try out new stuff and I've been wondering if maybe my games would sell better at $4.99. Haven't really compared it yet with my previous games, but my gut-feeling says I sell about as much copies at this price as I do at a more normal price of $7.99.

On mobile the $4.99 is actually on the high-end of things! More experimenting, normally I'm at max at $3.99 and often in the launch week it's at $2.99. I do believe this game could have done better at a $3.99 or $2.99. Possibly sold much more copies with the result being more revenue. Some people hinted I should have lowered the price when I got the iOS feature, but my golden rule is to not punish the instant-buying fans, which I would have done had I suddenly lowered the price within a week of it's release.

In general the gamers liked the game, which is the most important thing. One guy complained that he couldn't get past the first level so it was way to hard, another guy complained that the sound-effects sounded generic (he was a sound-designer offering to do sound effects.. that's business!). One mobile-game reviewer had a lot of problems with the touch-controls, which is ironic for a mobile-game reviewer in my opinion.

I've been pushing regular updates to Meganoid since the release, and I still have one bigger update planned. After that it will mostly complete the work on this game minus any required fixes or OS-updates.

I never create games as a service, all my games receive two or three bigger updates and then I move on. That's my business-model and that's how I stay in business.

As for the game itself, it now becomes a "back-log game". This means I'll be able to do sales and discounts with the game in the next few years. It's also possible to perhaps get it ported and released on consoles or other gadgets, and there are alternate sales-routes the game can take on platforms like Android or PC (different markets, bundles, etc).

On top of that the game engine is fairly straight-forward and easy to repurpose. So it could be possible to re-use the game, create a new game-world and content for it and release like a $1.99 game with it (in fact I already have a funny viking-style game running on the same engine, so who knows).

All those back-log options should be able to at-least double the game's revenue within a year, so let's say the game does $10.000 in total by March 2018. Set against the 2 month development cycle (and 13 years experience!) that's not a bad deal.

For now I got some breathing room again for working on Ashworld, so follow me on Twitter or Facebook if you want to stay updated on that one!

(Grab Meganoid here for Windows,MacOS, Linux, iOS or Android)

#IFTTT #Blogger

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superfamigos · 8 years

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Sam’s GDC Recap: Day 1

Hey! I recently got back from going to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco for the first time. I've wanted to attend for several years, so I was really excited to finally make it. The experience ended up being really inspiring and positive in a lot of ways, though also a bit overwhelming. Meeting lots of new people and attending many information-stuffed talks in a relatively short amount of time got kind of exhausting for an introvert like me.

So, I thought I might do a recap of the talks and activities I attended at GDC, as both a resource to friends and readers of Super Famigos who didn't make it to GDC, and to help me unpack and process all the information I got last week. I hope you'll join me!

Seven Years in Alpha: 'Thumper' Postmortem

Speaker: Marc Flury

Overview:

The Thumper engine was coded from scratch, with very little middleware

They spent a lot of time lost in the wilderness, not sure about how to make the game fun

Lots of playtesting helped them find what was good about the game

He explained several technical details of creating the graphical look of Thumper

Also explained the needed changes to make Thumper work in VR

Interesting details:

Drool, the Thumper dev studio, is pretty much a two-man team.

During much of the game's development, Marc worked remotely from Korea, where his wife had found a job

The game's seven-year development was financed (at least on Marc's side) by his day job for the first two years, and by savings and his wife's job for the remaining five years.

Marc isn't much of a fan of object-oriented programming, despite having used OOP extensively in the past.

In contrast to many rhythm games, the music was created to fit the visuals, and not the other way around. Creating a cool soundtrack was not their primary goal with the music, though they're happy that fans have been buying and listening to it on its own.

One cool tool they built was a system for creating URL links to each other that could open up a particular asset or script in the Thumper editor. This ended up being really useful for working remotely, as it made talking about particular bugs and problems much easier.

Thoughts:

A really good talk! A lot of interesting technical discussion on software development and graphics (though I have experience in that field that might make it more accessible to me than others). I was also encouraged to see videos of the game's humble beginnings, and that the idea for the game wasn't fully formed when they started. It makes just starting a project a little less intimidating. And I was surprised they could make it as a team with one team member in the US and the other in Korea.

Links:

http://www.thumbsticks.com/gdc-17-how-thumper-turned-into-something-special/ - A good writeup with more details, plus video of the early prototypes shown in the talk! (Not sure where they found those videos, that probably took some digging.)

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/02/27/gdc-17-creating-thumpers-virtual-unreality/ - Written by Marc Flury himself, this doesn't cover the entire talk but does include some of the slides he showed.

https://thumpergame.com/blog/2013/10/29/engine-tech-easy-collaboration-with-object-urls - As linked in the Thumbsticks article, here's a bit more about the asset URL system they built.

The Sound and Music of 'Hyper Light Drifter'

Speakers: Akash Thakkar, Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace)

Overview:

Rich composed fairly ambient pieces for most of the game, with more sweeping, melodic tracks for bosses and vista points (where the Drifter encounters one of the huge Titans). This was a compromise between Alx, who wanted a more cinematic feel for the music, and Rich, who wanted things to be more subtle.

Akash used extensive layering to build most of the sound effects, and used several interesting recording methods to process his sounds. Akash's digital, bitcrushed sound effects ended up contrasting well with Rich's more naturalistic, analog compositions.

Rich and Akash's Takeaways:

Hire sound and music people early

As a director, don't micromanage your audio team. (Akash thought that sharing opinions to guide the evolution of sounds and music was helpful, but Rich said that a hands-off approach, where the director trusts the composer to make good decisions, can be very fruitful too.)

Allow time for experimentation

Interesting details:

Rich saw Hyper Light Drifter's soundtrack as somewhat of a sequel to his work on Fez. He approached this by trying to do something very different than what he had done on that project. He composed work that was generally less melodic, and more Impressionist and spare. In particular, he stayed away from the bitcrushing effects that were a staple of Fez's music.

Akash used some unusual recording methods to process his sounds, such as a cobbled-together stethoscope microphone and a 1950s wire recorder, an old school technology that records onto a wire filament. This wire is prone to snapping and actually cut Akash in the hand once. The manual for the wire filament says snapping will happen a lot, and suggests that the user just tie the wire back together.

Akash and Rich, despite knowing each other from school, really didn't talk or work together much during the development of Hyper Light Drifter, since both were working remotely. They both acknowledged that they really should have tried to collaborate more, and that it was lucky that everything came together so well, given their limited communication.

Some sound effects in the game had wacky components, such as a recording of Akash's blood through the stethoscope mic (used for ambience), and Akash squealing like a pig (a scream from the final boss). A particularly funny sound source was a sound file of Teddy Dief saying "Shack jack," which Teddy had hidden as a surprise joke to pop up once in a while for devs using the Hyper Light editor. Akash slowed it down and processed the heck out of it to create a scary vocalization that plays somewhere in the final area of the game.

Alx gave Akash direction to make some of the death sounds more sad and visceral. I found it interesting that this was an intentional design choice, since my internal conflict about killing enemies was a big part of my experience with the game. I thought that was just because that I had recently played Undertale though, but maybe it's not just me.

Thoughts:

I thought this was a really good talk too! Rich and Akash are both engaging speakers, and they had a lot of interesting and fun stories to tell. It helps too that I really love Hyper Light Drifter and its audio design. I'd definitely recommend this one if you can find it on the free GDC Vault (or if you have access).

Links:

www.thumbsticks.com/gdc-17-creating-disturbing-soundscapes-of-hyper-light-drifter/ - A nice summary of the talk that Rich retweeted.

LUNCH BREAK!

On Monday, I got lunch with my friend and travelmate Brian, his teammate Colton (of The Stork Burnt Down, developers of Home Improvisation), and some other cool indie dev folks, including Marc Flury of Drool and some people from 17-BIT. We ate at a Mediterranean place just across the street from Moscone West. Unfortunately, the group got split because there weren't enough tables, but I had a nice talk with Marc while in line.

Animation Bootcamp: Cuphead Process and Philosophy

Speaker: Jake Clark

Overview:

Described design process for a neutral animation for a mermaid boss, an attack from a headstone boss, and a death animation for a cigar boss

Talked about why they like the 1930s animation style in their game, namely:

It keeps paper animation alive

It's fun

It fits the established look of 2D games

It gives freedom for the gameplay to go wherever you can imagine, even really weird stuff

Interesting details:

He likes to first do some sketches for a design without looking up any reference, just to get a baseline for his assumptions of what a character might look like. He then looks up a ton of references, both from 1930s cartoons and retro video games.

It looked like there's already a giant mermaid boss in a shmup called Fantastic Journey, which I need to check out.

Animations for Cuphead are drawn by hand in traditional style, then inked on paper (but not on cels, which is apparently where they draw the line in their crazy devotion to tradition haha)

He talked about design considerations in each animation. For example, the mermaid's hip sway in her neutral animation happens because the mermaid is constantly moving backwards in the sea, which she would do by swaying her mermaid tail.

The mermaid's hair is a dead octopus, with the eyes X-ed out naturally :)

As mentioned above, Jake said that the 1930s style lets them do really imaginative stuff with gameplay. With this comment, he was referencing the fact that nearly anything could happen in a 1930s animation: animals get turned inside out, characters take their own heads off, etc. It's just the nature of all the experimentation that was happening in that period. This means that they could do weird transformations and things in the game that might not make sense when using a more realistic style.

Thoughts:

I came away from this talk slightly disappointed, though I think that's on me more than on the quality of the talk. I was kind of hoping to hear how they achieve the 1930s look in a video game from a technical perspective, but the talk was more from a character design perspective. (I probably should have expected as much, since this was part of the animation bootcamp.) Anyway, personal misconceptions aside, this was a fun talk. It was neat to see how the designs evolved, and what references and inspirations were used. Jake is a really talented artist, and I enjoyed both his Cuphead designs and the supplemental sketches for the slides. I'm really excited for Cuphead when it finally comes out! (No new updates on a release date at the talk.)

Links:

http://www.4gamer.net/games/306/G030679/20170228144/ - The only summary I could find online was in Japanese, but it's still worth checking out if you can't read it. They have good pictures of the slides, which is great both as another summary and to see the visuals I mention above. They even have a nice video clip showing the mermaid in motion.

'Owlboy': The Evolving Art of a 10 Year Project

Speakers: Simon Stafsnes Andersen and Jo-Remi Madsen

Overview:

Discussed and showed examples of the changes the art went through from when the project started, nearly 10 years ago, until its release late last year

Gave some reasons why the game's development dragged on like it did, such as needing to keep up with modern games and having more and more ideas

Talked about how they were able to finally wrap things up, by eventually cutting content to better serve the story, and forgoing improvement in favor of getting the game out

Interesting details:

Development on Owlboy began shortly before the announcement of the first iPhone.

Owlboy was developed using XNA, and actually outlived that platform.

The rising popularity of widescreen was just one of the changes they had to design around during the course of development.

Part of their design goals was to promote pixel art as a legitimate stylistic choice rather than just inferior to 3D, an idea not widely held at the time. The indie revolution and the modern revival of pixel art then took place during the long development, adding pressure for them to improve the look of the game to compete.

They gave a really cool demo where they switched on, one by one, several of the graphical enhancements made to the opening area between their 2011 demo and the final release of the game, including parallax scrolling clouds, grass and other bits blowing in the wind, and special animations when the player character, Otus, changes direction.

For much of the game's development, the team lived together in a side condo attached to Jo-Remi's parents' home, and lived a very spare livestyle. Part of the game's development was funded with a grant from the Norwegian government, but this didn't cover all of their costs. (I didn't catch where the rest of their funding came from.)

Depression and the long development took a toll on the team, and their feeling of failure ended up being reflected in certain parts of the story.

During the final stretch, big chunks of content were cut to better serve the story and get the game out the door. For example, an completely finished dungeon was cut, which was a loss of 1.5 years of work, according to the team.

At some point, the team realized that the theme of friendship ended up being the common thread that pulled the story together.

I was curious about what other changes happened during the development of the game, so I went to the wrap-up room after the talk and asked what operating systems and programs they started on, and whether they took any updates. The team started work on Windows Vista, and didn't upgrade operating systems or software versions until late in development. Jo-Remi mentioned that he finally upgraded to Windows 10 when Visual Studio became free, because the team wasn't able to afford a Visual Studio license. Simon said he was currently on Windows 8.1, and had used a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3 to create all of the art from the beginning. A well-known memory leak with that Photoshop version became a familiar problem during the 10 years of development, as well as a bug that would delete files if left open when the computer went into standby mode.

Thoughts:

I knew that Owlboy had been in development for a long time, but this talk really brought home just how long it had been. It's crazy to think about all the changes in technology (iPhone release, death of XNA and Xbox 360) and industry (the revival of pixel art, the indie revolution) that happened before the game finally released. It was really satisfying to see how relieved Jo-Remi and Simon seemed to have the game out, though you could tell there were things they still wished they could add to the game. And I really enjoyed their demo of how the look of the game improved over time.

Links:

https://www.famitsu.com/news/201702/28127977.html - As with the Cuphead talk, the only writeup I could find was in Japanese, over in Famitsu. Unfortunately, the pictures aren't as good, but they did snag the picture I posted above, which shows the team's moment of catharsis when the game finally went live. Beautiful :’)

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute

Speaker: Jenny Jiao Hsia

Main Points + Details:

Jenny Jiao Hsia gave several reasons why we shouldn't underestimate the power of cuteness in games:

Cuteness grabs our attention

Used faces in Stellar Smooch to refine design and draw the player's focus

Cited the idea of "amplification through simplification" from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (great book btw, highly recommended)

Cuteness disarms our expectations

She mentioned how the kawaii writing style in Japan was originally used as a way to make messages unreadable to others, in addition to being cute

Cuteness can be used to mask darkness or insecurities

She did this in Beglitched, where cuteness masked the insecurities and quirks of rival hackers

Other examples: Sanrio's Aggretsuko, Flowey from Undertale, Tom Nook from Animal Crossing

Cuteness gives room for experimentation

By using cuteness as a design aesthetic, Beglitched looks wildly different from most other cyberpunk games

Other games with cute and unique looks include Hohokum and Monument Valley

Cuteness connects us

Cute characters are something lots of people enjoy, and they're often relatable (like Sanrio's Gudetama or Aggretsuko)

Other creators use cuteness as a way to deliver deeply personal and sensitive topics

She's doing this with a new project called Consume Me, which combines cuteness and humor with a dark, personal story of her struggle with food and self-image

Other examples of this include Nina Freeman and Lea Schönfelder

During Q&A, she suggested that one way to develop a cute aesthetic is by creating a Tumblr or desktop folder filled with things you like. She suggested that beginners start with small projects, try easy-to-use tools like Twine, and not be afraid to be weird.

Thoughts:

This was a thoughtful and enjoyable talk. Jenny's reasons to consider using cuteness in games were well-considered, the examples were interesting and relevant, and her drawings to illustrate each of her four points were very cute *_* As someone who derives a great deal of enjoyment from cute things (after too many years worrying if it was cool for guys to like cute things -_- ), I appreciated this reasoned but fun look at how cuteness can be used to great effect.

Links:

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/gdc-showed-me-that-2017-is-the-year-of-cuteness - Cool looking article about cuteness at GDC that includes a few words on this talk, plus other other cute stuff from around the convention.

https://twitter.com/q_dork/status/839352013603373057 - Another set of notes that look much cuter than what I wrote in my Field Notes, trust me.

The Rendering of 'Below': Low Complexity, High Density Detail

Speaker: Colin Weick

Overview:

A rather technical look at challenges with lighting and rendering in a mostly dark game

Details:

With a really dark game, correctly calibrated monitors are the ideal, but they had to assume that the end user will have a badly calibrated screen.

They put a lot of effort into developing a gamma correct pipeline (which I didn't write down or grab a picture of in time). They created their base color textures in sRGB color space, but most of the pipeline was in linear color space.

They created an in-game color grading editor to speed up that process.

Lights created very visible banding as they get dimmer further away from the light source. Being more careful with color spaces helped with this, and also adding some Wang hash noise as a screen filter.

The fact that the player character can create and carry around light was an interesting technical challenge for the team.

As general advice, Colin suggested that devs take the easy route when coding, even if performance isn't the best. Sometimes weird things that would be too hard to fix are what give your game its charm.

Thoughts:

I'm really into non-photorealistic rendering, so I was hoping for discussion on some of the stylistic choices of Below. Instead, this talk really got into the technical nitty-gritty, which isn't quite as exciting, but was still informative. (I’ve struggled with similar color space issues in the past.) I wish I had been faster on the draw to write down some of the technical details in the talk or on the slides, but alas.

Links: Wasn't able to find any links or writeups on this one, unfortunately.

Missed talks

There were a bunch of cool talks I wasn't able to make it to. Here are a few of them, plus links to writeups so you and I can check them out later!

Everything I Said Was Wrong: Why Indie Is Different Now (Lisa Brown, Dan Cook, Liz England, Rami Ismail)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-02-27-everything-i-said-was-wrong

I was really curious to hear what Rami Ismail (one of my favorite designers) and the other speakers thought had changed to make them want to give this talk, but was in the Hyper Light Drifter talk. Fortunately for me, this summary made it online.

I was surprised to see Rami say all advice is bad, since he's done quite a lot of public speaking and advice giving. Still, I can really identify with that statement. Over the years, I've had quite a few crises of confidence over what career to pursue, whether to go back to grad school, and many other concerns. I often found myself looking for advice, probably as a way to get external validation and to help me feel I wasn't making the wrong choice. It took me quite a while to realize that other people can't really know what's best for me (mostly because they can't see the future), and that it's ultimately up to me to make the decisions I can feel the best about. Anyway.

Still Grooving: Game Dev Life Set to Live Music (Teddy Dief and Daniel Rosenfeld (C418))

I really wanted to make this talk, but made the tough decision to go to The Aesthetics of Cute (which I'm glad I did, because it's great). I hope it makes it to the free GDC Vault at some point.

To that point, I found out from friends that this talk was actually a sequel to a Teddy Dief x Disasterpeace musical talk that's already on the free GDC Vault, so you can bet I'll be checking that out.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022095/Keep-Grooving-Life-Musings-Live

Managing Conflict on Small Teams (Rebekah Saltsman)

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/292558/A_devs_guide_to_ensuring_studio_conflict_is_healthy_and_productive.php

I've had the pleasure to meet and talk with Rebekah Saltsman a few times now, and I'm very excited for Finji's projects Night in the Woods and Overland, so I hope to check out this writeup of her talk.

Post-con activity

As I mentioned in the intro, GDC was exciting yet exhausting for me, from the very first day. Though I had a great time, information overload and meeting new people were draining, and it didn't help that my knee was hurting after traipsing around San Fran and Berkeley in bad shoes the previous two days.

So I wasn't quite up to go out and party with friends that night. Instead, I just grabbed dinner with them at the delicious House of Nanking (conveniently located right next to our hotel) and chilled in my hotel room for the rest of the night. I got to decompress and also finish putting up a quick-and-dirty Squarespace landing page for my website, which I wasn't able to get ready before GDC. (You might still be able to see it at samhat.net if you read this soon enough after I post this. Just don't judge - I just didn't have enough time for business cards and school and GDC prep AND a website.)

#gdc 2017 #gdc17 #gdc #Thumper #Hyper Light Drifter #Cuphead #Owlboy #Beglitched #Below #writing #Video Game Writing #disasterpeace #q_dork #Akash Thakkar #D-Pad Studio

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reviewfix · 8 years

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Review Fix chats with OBEY developer Jorge “Dez” Hernandez, who discusses the origin of the game, the long and difficult development process and how he feels about the final product.

For More on OBEY, Click Here.

Review Fix: How was this game born?

Jorge “Dez” Hernandez: What you see now as OBEY started in 2002 as a very different idea. I had just graduated college, and since none of us recent graduates had jobs, we decided to think up some game ideas we could execute. The idea of the game (I think it was just called “death tower” or something at the time) did have a giant tower and players trying to take over the tower in a king-of-the-hill type of mechanic, but the human aspect that makes OBEY what it is hadn’t been thought up yet. I remember one of the main ideas of it was that every key on the keyboard would trigger a different weapon on the tower. The idea was simply to build the most asymmetrical king-of-the-hill game possible.

However the project never got started at all with those friends, and in later years failed multiple times in other attempts I made with different teams and partners.

Review Fix: What games inspired this one?

Hernandez: I get asked this sometimes, but OBEY doesn’t have many parallels in video games. It wasn’t inspired by other games, but by political ideas, human dynamics/psychology, and power theory and memetics. This really came into play around 2014 when the basic mechanics were being implemented. Because one of the main project goals was to make the most asymmetrical game possible, it led me to ask: what is the most asymmetrical relationship between human beings? My answer is the master/slave dynamic (followed possibly by the parent/child dynamic).

As soon as I made this connection I realized the power of what this game could be and what the central idea was going to be: I would be making a human exploitation simulator. The game I always wanted to play and make had come into focus. If you want to ask simply about comparisons, it does have a lot in common with many board games (something I didn’t know until I was well into development), since at the time that I started I really hadn’t explored board game dynamics much (shamefully!).

What is interesting, though, is that I seemed to have re-invented many board game mechanics that I hadn’t known existed. I was happy to learn many of these mechanics had already been proven even before I had the possibility of testing them myself. Because I had never played a game like OBEY before, I didn’t know if they would be viable at all.

As far as video game comparisons go, the closest example I can come up with is: OBEY is a non-broken and balanced incarnation of the Counter Strike Jailbreak mod. There are other examples that can be found in obscure mods or parts of other games, though (like Day-Z, and Town of Salem ).

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Review Fix: Let’s talk about the art. What inspired that?

Hernandez: My first thoughts on what OBEY should look like was to make a “gritty post apocalyptic environment.” The robot would be this dinosaur looking thing, inspired by mecha-godzilla and the players would be these tiny humans running around hiding in the rubble. However a large part of my career has been creating environment art, and no one knows how over-done and cliche it is to make yet another “gritty post apocalyptic” game than environment artists. Further, this would be difficult to execute as a lone developer, because gritty things take a lot of tweaking UV work and poly work to get right. I knew I could do better. I brought the issue up to an old friend and colleague named Matt Harwood (who authored nearly all the sfx for OBEY). Matt immediately trashed my post-apocalpytic considerations and said… no, this game is about contrast! The robot should be this horrible intimidating machine, and the world should be a beautiful forest, untouched and unspoiled.

The robot should clash completely with the environment.

The players should be forest animals.

Immediately I knew he was onto something and that is how the bunnies came to be as well. Baby bunnies were the most innocent and harmless creatures I could think of that could also make sense in a forest environment. They would also make acceptable metaphors for human beings (I did consider making the player avatars human babies but decided it would be too weird/off-putting in a commercial sense).

Finally, once I knew the motif that I wanted to try, I got to work designing a look for the forest that had to meet some important specs:

1) It had to be able to work with a lot of repetition since I knew I wanted to have player made maps, I decided the environment would be tile based.

2) The environment design had to have a level of detail and ‘look’ that could be produced and managed by a single developer (me). This was achieved by allowing for large flat colored areas, that would be broken up by lighting and decorations, as opposed to broken up in geometry and UV work.

3) It had to be low poly and efficient enough to draw a large area at once even if it was all on screen at the same time: player made maps would require it since anyone could design any crazy map and since the maps could in principle be viewed at any angle by a spectator, which I knew OBEY would have. I achieved this by designing everything to use 1 single texture and material.

And it is so: everything in OBEY (with the exception of GUI, the robo, and dropship) utilizes a a single material that references a single 2048×2048 texture.

Review Fix: What has development been like?

Hernandez: To be honest, development has been extremely difficult and taxing. When I started, I think for me a big part of my motivation for doing the project was to answer the question of whether I am even capable of completing such a thing. I discovered the answer, but also I discovered that for a single dev to build a project with the complexity and scope of OBEY is not a human thing to do. Besides the effects on my personal life (and there is no way around this no matter the scope of your game, it will have SOME effect), I also faced a lot of failures that I simply muscled through. The Kickstarter I ran for OBEY failed, I also failed to get funding to complete production (even from indie centric publishers), and financially OBEY has so far not been able to fund its own dev.

So OBEY right now is still very much a passion project.

Nowadays, I work on it at night, since early in 2016, financially, I was forced to get a full-time job. I really wanted to finish it before doing that, but my choices became either compromise the project and put a lid on it and ship it, or continue working on it to make OBEY what I think it should be while working on it on the side with no expectation of financial success. I chose the latter.

Review Fix: With all the competition in the indies now, how difficult was it for you guys to try and make something that stood out?

Hernandez: I knew no one was ever going to make any game like this unless I made it. So for me, it wasn’t an issue to try to make it stand out. It was unique from the start.

Review Fix: Bottom line, why must someone play this game?

Hernandez: There is no other video game remotely like it. If you want to play a game built by a developer who said “if I never make another game, this is the one I want to make”, play and try to master OBEY. It is unique.

Review Fix: How do you want this game to be remembered?

Hernandez: From day one, I wanted to avoid gimmicks and just build a solid title that would stand the test of time. I wanted to build something with the depth of chess, with a metaphor as powerful as a Chomsky article.

I hope it is remembered as one of the first games to make the gameplay itself have meaning. There are only a handful of other games I have ever seen do this. Games by Jason Rohrer (ie Castle Doctrine, Passage) and Brenda Romero (The Mechanic is the Message) are the only ones I know of.

In OBEY, the players themselves mirror all kinds of power structures in life in trying to win (corporate, religious, governmental, parental etc). Making it DRM-free is also part of trying to make OBEY stand the test of time. My hope is that it will always be playable.

Review Fix: What are your goals for this game?

Hernandez: I want to build a deep game of the likes that no one has ever played. If you want to play anything like it, there will be only one game to run: OBEY. I also want the game to have meaning beyond its facade and motif. Even though it isn’t finished, so far I do believe OBEY is already these things.

Review Fix: What’s next?

Hernandez: Well, if OBEY does well on release I have several ideas that I would love to hit next. However, if it doesn’t, it will probably be the last title I develop. And I have made peace with that possibility.

Review Fix: Anything else you want to say?

Hernandez: I believe OBEY is the most ambitious project to ever be published by a single developer. As far as I know, there is no title made by a single dev that has all of the following features (or equivalent features):

– real-time action game – server/client multiplayer – fairly large non-isometric 3D environments – player generated maps & customizability – in-game VOIP – non-cloned gameplay (which causes a lot of testing and prototyping) – professional grade art and sound

The games published by a single dev I know of have three or four of the above at most, hence I think it may be the most ambitious game ever made by a single dev.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Review Fix Exclusive: Inside ‘OBEY’ Review Fix chats with OBEY developer Jorge “Dez” Hernandez, who discusses the origin of the game, the long and difficult development process and how he feels about the final product.

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smartshopperteam · 8 years

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5 Women on the Thrills and Challenges of Working in Tech

SAVE ON WEDDING & PROM DRESSES at http://ift.tt/23SccX9 Where Smart Shoppers Shop!

The tech boom has simultaneously simplified and complicated our lives in massive ways—our smartphones insta-deliver news, entertainment, communication, food, and even dates, but basic systems like the presidential election are now vulnerable to digital hacks. Another gripe people have with a tech-fueled world is that it’s not creating the number of jobs you might expect, given how it rules our lives.

No matter how you feel about the tech revolution, there’s no avoiding the challenges and opportunities it presents on a daily basis. I talked to five women about the careers they’ve created in the tech space. Jobs at Tinder, Candy Crush, and other digital mainstays might not be easy to come by, but the people who do them drive our everyday experiences. And to hear them tell it, tech is becoming increasingly friendly to ambitious women who are determined to break in. Below, find out more about how they did it—and how you can, too.

It sucks that women in the gaming world get targeted by trolls on a larger scale than men.

The Game Designer

Yonna Ingolf, 26, Narrative Designer at King for Candy Crush Franchise, Stockholm, SE

“I’ve always played and loved games, but didn’t think about it as something I could work with until I was around 20. I found a school focusing on game design and everything fell into place. My days can look very different, since I work with a couple of different games and a lot of different teams. In a week I can work on stories for new episodes, themes for different live events in the games, and new gameplay features. My office has a very relaxed vibe. There are definitely stressful periods, like any job, but there is a lot of playing around and fun events surrounding the industry. My biggest challenge has been, and still is, to not become my job. Working in a creative environment you constantly put yourself out there, and feel a personal attachment to the work you deliver. I’ve learned is that if I have an off day, that’s OK—and normal.

While I’m outnumbered by men in my industry, I’ve never felt underestimated by the people I work with. Where I have felt underestimated is rather in some toxic communities surrounding gaming. It sucks that some ‘dudebros’ doubt that I work in the industry, that I like games, or say I should be a ‘booth babe’ instead of a designer. It sucks that women in the gaming world get targeted by trolls and hate on the internet on a much larger scale than men who say or do the same things. It can be hard, but there’s no better way of fighting that toxicity than from inside the industry. If you’re interested in going into gaming, make sure the school you go to has an internship period—that way you’ll experience the industry and get to know people. See if there are any game dev meetups in your area and get to know people in the industry. Learn a little about everything! Make some art, try out 3D modeling, write some code or script, create some sound effects. If you don’t have the opportunity or tools to do it, then you can at least read about it.”

It’s not as simple as ‘build a website and they will come.’

The Virtual Assistant

Michelle Mangen, Virtual Bookkeeper at The Virtual Assistant, LLC, FL

“I first learned of virtual assistants as a result of reading a romance novel. It was a few years later before I explored it in more detail. I started as a general administrative virtual assistant and have, over time, evolved and now I only offer bookkeeping services to small businesses. Most of what I do in a day is bookkeeping related-paying team members, reconciling bank statements, preparing financials, etc. I work at home, so most days I’m in comfy clothes. The biggest challenge was getting my first client—it’s not as simple as ‘build a website and they will come.’ I often considered throwing in the towel and finding a corporate America position. My best advice, if you want to be a VA, is to get tech savvy and don’t ever quit learning! Be brave and reach out to established virtual assistants and see if they’d be willing to hire you as an intern.”

MORE: 10 Things Never to Do in a Job Interview

Pambakian with at Tinder HQ with Communications Manager Evan Bonnstetter / @rosettep

We all need to do our part to mentor and encourage other women.

The Tinder Exec

Rosette Pambakian, 33, VP of Communications and Branding at Tinder, Los Angeles, CA

“Growing up, I always aspired to make a difference somehow. It may be cliché, but I believe creating connections across the world is making that difference. Experiencing friendship and love is so powerful, and I’m proud to work at a place where I get to help people do that. Every single day at Tinder is different. Our company and product is constantly evolving, which is what makes my job so exciting. One day I’ll be in Europe meeting with reporters, the next day I’ll be discussing branding strategy with other Tinder executives, and the next day I’ll be in the office planning product releases for the upcoming year. The tech industry can be difficult, though. People work long hours and pour their hearts into products that may not work out in the long run. Instead of letting that intimidate us, we use it to push ourselves to be our best. I often spend more time in the office than I do at my own house, so the people I work with really feel like family.

I think the tech industry is a great place for women to succeed and stand out, and the Tinder workplace is such a creative, fun environment that fosters creativity and collaboration. It’s empowering to work in a male-dominated industry and come to the table with results and ideas that are just as impactful, if not more so, than what the men are doing. The industry is evolving, and more and more women are thriving in tech, but we all need to do our part to mentor and encourage other women. If you’re looking to go into tech, my best tip is that if there’s no risk, there’s no reward. I said yes to a few huge moves in my career that propelled me to where I am today. I knew there were risks when I joined Tinder, but I also knew that there was a possibility for a great reward.”

When you can work from anywhere, you end up working everywhere.

The Digital Entrepreneur

Michelle Dale, 35, CEO of Virtual Miss Friday & 1nSourcing, usually in Greece

“I quit my job and left the UK when I was 23 on a one-way ticket to Egypt, which was when I realized I wanted to live abroad full-time and be able to travel the world whenever I wanted. I started looking for how I could work online and I came across virtual assistance, which became my source of income and passion, and led me to create a virtual assistant assistant training program. An average workday for me involves working through items that my team needs assistance with; planning and implementing projects for clients; devising new ideas for online launches and products; blogging and vlogging. For me, it’s all about the lifestyle: working online, living the dream, breaking away from the 9-to-5, being your own boss, earning more money, doing what you actually enjoy. It’s about working around your lifestyle, rather than the opposite. In any service-based industry, particularly when you have your own business, the challenge is to make plenty of time for yourself. When you can work from anywhere, you end up working everywhere, so it’s not unusual for me to check emails in the middle of the night, work on weekends, and hours just roll into other hours. You have to find the right balance.

Virtual assistance is one of the fastest-growing online industries, mainly because the demand is growing so much. I don’t think anyone, man or woman, can make you feel outnumbered or underestimated unless you allow it. It’s about focusing on yourself, developing your skills, delivering value, and having the confidence to go out there and do your best because you know you’re worth it. My best advice is to find a role model, someone who you can look at and say, I like what they’ve done, I like their lifestyle, and I want to learn from them. So many people offer online courses, training, and mentorship—myself included!—so take advantage of resources, hold your head high, and go for it. Never wait for everything to be perfect—there will never be a perfect time, place, circumstance, financial situation, family situation. There’s now, so work with it!”

As a woman, you’re naturally outnumbered.

The Engineer

Anna N. Schlegel, 48, Senior Director, Globalization and Information at NetApp and author of Truly Global, Silicon Valley, CA

“I never set out to be in Engineering! I fell into it through different high-tech job assignments in Silicon Valley, and taking risks within these companies. I started working with Cisco in the 90s, and from there I went on to working at Xerox, VMware, and NetApp. I have been a general manager and CEO for two globalization companies. An average day at my current job entails a lot of global calls with Europe and Asia to align, evangelize, and monitor our program goals; talking to our suppliers and agencies; and reporting back to executives on progress, or escalations and wins. NetApp has repeatedly been ranked as a great place to work which is hugely important to be able to work within a respectful environment. There’s a lot of room to innovate.

High-tech engineering environments have low numbers of gender diversity. As a woman, you’re naturally outnumbered. The key is to work in groups where all participants value your opinion and prepare yourself to be part of environments where you will be the minority. Unconscious Bias trainings can help. Find out who’s leading gender diversity in your company and try to volunteer to help change with our companies. For women looking to become engineers, my advice is to learn how to present in public; communicate succinctly in writing, calls, and presentations; join forums of your craft to hear how others resolve similar issues; and find mentors and talk to them regularly.”

MORE: How 6 Women Became CEOs Before 30

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from 5 Women on the Thrills and Challenges of Working in Tech

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gamerzcourt · 6 years

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Nier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Reveal What Games They Admire MostNier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Reveal What Games They Admire Mostvideo games

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Nier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Reveal What Games They Admire MostNier, Psychonauts, And Other Devs Reveal What Games They Admire Mostvideo games

Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, Directors of Cuphead

Jared Moldenhauer (left) and Chad Moldenhauer (right)

Chad Moldenhauer: I recently started and really enjoy The Witness. I was looking forward to that for a long time!

Yoshinori Terasawa, Danganronpa Series Producer

Yoshinori Terasawa: I love the Persona series. I adore the sense of personality that those games have. I really like how cool and stylish they are.

Rami Ismail, Producer of Nuclear Throne

Tom Kaczmarczyk, Producer of Superhot

Tim Schafer, Founder of Double Fine (Psychonauts, Brutal Legend)

Tim Schafer

Jason Roberts, Director of Gorogoa

Dean Ayala, Hearthstone Senior Game Designer + Dave Kozack, Hearthstone Lead Narrative Designer

Dean Ayala: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s a roguelike released back in 1997. A lot of the Hearthstone design team plays it. It’s super old-school.

Ian Dallas, Creative Director of What Remains Of Edith Finch

Ian Dallas

Chelsea Hash, Technical Artist of What Remains Of Edith Finch

Damon Baker, Nintendo Publisher and Developer Relations

Matt Thornson, Director of Celeste

Matt Thornson: I’ve been really enjoying my time with Into the Breach. It’s amazing!

Victor Kislyi, Wargaming CEO (World of Tanks)

Yoko Taro, Director of Nier: Automata

Yoko Taro (left) and Takahira Taura (right)

Takahisa Taura, Designer Of Nier: Automata + Metal Gear Rising

GameSpot News

#Admire #devs #Games #MostNier #Mostvideo #Nier #Psychonauts #Reveal #They

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