A Little Help Would be Awesome!

Hi friends!  So if you have a little time to help out a struggling indie game developer - and you have an iOS device - I would really really appreciate it!  My new game Space Bot Alpha is out on the App Store, and *just got a feature at 9th position* in worldwide paid strategy games.

Its make or break time for my bid to be an indie game developer.  My app store feature only lasts a week, and thus *I have only that 7 days* to turn that exposure into actual success for our little heroic Space Bot.

What do you need me to do?

1) Find Space Bot Alpha on the App Store of your iOS device, or failing that on your iTunes by: App Store > Featured > Categories > Games > Strategy > Paid -- or -- by typing in the search box "Space Bot Alpha".  There's also the button on this page.

2) Play the preview video and check the screenshots and see what you think!  I'd love it if you'd play the game if it looks like fun.  I have a couple of promo codes if the $1.99US cost is an issue.  If it doesn't look like your thing, well, thanks for reading so far!

3) Share! If you get through 1) & 2) above then please please share.  The game has a built in sharing feature that takes a screenshot whenever you win a level, and tapping the share button on the score screen allows you to tout your victories on Twitter, Facebook and SinaWeibo.

4) Review!  This is sooo important to me.  Please please review!  If you liked the game, go and add a review by hitting the "Reviews" tab on the Space Bot Alpha page on the App Store.  Genuine reviews from players are huge for helping App Store browsers decide to spend their hard-earned coin. Note that the option to review is only available if you get the game.

5) Write a blog post, online review or even just talk about your experiences playing the game.  I have to be a publicity seeking firefly right now, so any bit of extra buzz is great!


6) Follow / subscribe / like on the Space Bot Alpha Google+ page.  A Facebook page is coming soon.

So, well - thanks for reading!  Got questions?  Check the FAQ or post below.

FAQ

If you were on Android...

I'm a one woman coding team, and while I'm currently working hard on the Android port and have early builds working already, what I have right now available is the iOS version of the game.  If that fails in the App Store its possible the Android build will never eventuate.  Right now I need to hype the iOS side of things to pay for ramen and rent, so I can keep working on the Android build and the next update.

Great about your feature, why do you need us?

Yes, its great that Apple has featured the game!  Being at 9th position for paid strategy games is a huge deal.  It means I have a chance.  But that exposure means nothing if those folks browsing the new strategy games in the next week never wind up getting the game.  This is where *reviews and a good vibe on social media* come in.  Convincing those browsing folks to be Space Bot Alpha players is critical right now!

Couldn't see the Preview Video?

For some reason Apple uses the iPhone 4"/3.5" shots for the iTunes desktop, and since I only recorded game play videos for iPad, iPhone6, and iPhone6+ that may be empty when you view the game listing.  I'm on it - will be fixed for the next update.  In the meantime you can see the video on YouTube (embedded above) or on the Space Bot Alpha website.

Found a bug/crash!

Ah, the joys of being a solo indie developer!  Its really hard to test all corner cases on all devices and I'm already aware of a few crashes and niggles.  If you have time to report them you can do so on the support page: http://www.spacebotalpha.com/support - also I should get reports sent to me from Apple.  I'm already working on the next update to the game which will have some fixes in it for these issues.

Can't Afford It!

I know, by the time $1.99USD gets translated in to local money it can be a bit of sticker shock compared to other online buys.  Especially if you're between jobs or otherwise doing it tough.  So, here's some promo codes:

• M6TPRJPY6969
• 9EH97PENY74T
• KTXKATNE73AM

If you use one please comment below so that other folks don't get the cold shoulder when they try it on the App Store.  Also, if you try a code and it doesn't work - maybe someone forgot to record it below, so if you could comment below on that too it would be super cool!

I don't have Time!

Its a problem!  Me too.  :-)  Don't worry about reviews or the other stuff if you have no time to play, or its not your thing, as what I am really after is genuine player feels for the game.  I would not ask that of you, so if you have no time I totally understand and you're off the hook!  Maybe someone you know does have the time so feel free to share this post!  Pass on the hype!

Thanks for Everything!

I could not have got here without my amazing Producer, business partner, hubby and best friend Raymond Smith.  He has put up with my tantrums, fits of despair and interminable 7 day weeks to get Space Bot Alpha to where it is now.  

My very close friends (hi Kahni especially) also have been a huge rock of support - so thank you all.  Also a big shout out to my folks Maxwell and Shirley Smith for being encouraging with this crazy game development effort.

Its tough being an indie developer with no marketing department and no AAA budget.   So thanks again, and wish me luck!

Space Bot Alpha

For the past six months I've been working on a touch device game called Space Bot Alpha.  Here's a video.

Late on Wednesday evening I pushed the final release candidate binary to Apple's App Store review pipeline.  If you want to check out the game I'm expecting it will go live around November 5th.  Doing a review, article or LetsPlay?  Ping me on Twitter and I can get you a access.

Whoa. What a totally weird feeling.

After 2013 and working really hard on Ethex2080 only to realise that I'd need a team of 2-3 people as well as me, and another 12 months to get it done, this year has been all about getting my feet on the ground and shipping a video game.

Now, I proved to myself I could do it, and even if your tastes in games are not aligned to space ships and strategy/puzzlers I hope you'll agree with me that the level of polish and completeness is pretty good for a solo indie developer's first published game.  I'm reaching around and patting myself on my back right now.  But its also weird after pushing so hard for so long to break thru and ship this thing.

Yes, I'm really pretty happy with how Space Bot Alpha has turned out, and although its the end of this stage of the Space Bot Alpha story, as the plucky little guy still has lots of work yet to go with Android releases, level packs and other stuff.  So no relaxing just yet.

But I have to say I'm really excited about what this uncorks for me going forward.  Pushing a build isn't everything: I know that.  If no-one likes the game, and no-one plays it then I am going to have to seriously rethink what I'm doing.  But I did a lot of testing and I've seen people have fun with it.  I've even had some fun with it myself which is pretty amazing considering the times I wanted to just throw my dev tablet across the room in frustration at some stupid bug.  I think this, right now, will be the moment I look back on as when my game development career kicked in to high gear.

In December I'm heading to the UK for a holiday and that'll give me a chance to reset my head.  In 2015 I'm planning to make a new game.  In October 2015 at PAX and GCAP I'm going to turn up there and belong; I'm going to have 2 published games under my belt.

Wanna know more about that new game?  Subscribe here and I'll dump some concepts in coming weeks and months.

In the mean time thanks to everyone that was so supportive and appeared just when I was on the ragged edge to say some nice things and keep me going.  I want to give a particular shout-out to my friends at Disparity Games, Nic and Jason and the rest of the Stark clan; and also +Cameron Owen and +James Bowling of AttractMode Games for making me feel like a real game developer.

And, hey - what are you doing just sitting there!  Go check out Space Bot Alpha!

Room to Room

This new progress update video shows a bit of a milestone with our animated door sliding open and our heroine able to move to a new room.

I did all the room background artwork for the apartment a few weeks ago and I have been coding like a demon since then ironing out all the issues with moving from room to room and persisting the game state across view and room changes.

For those of you who are coders you might be interested in this aspect of CocosBuilder and Cocos itself - since it is scene based, and your scene is effectively your entire user-interface, moving to a new room basically tears down the whole UI, and it has to be rebuilt again from the CCB file for the next room or view.

This makes for some fun and games when an item has been modified in one view and you need it to reflect those modifications in a new view on the "same item".  Like wise with items that have been added to the inventory, and which to not appear in the next view.

Lastly of course the actual opening of doors and the logic with the character having to wait for the door to slide open before walking through had to be done.

This is done with action queueing which also took quite a while to get working properly.  So for example the sequence to go through to the walk-in-wardrobe is

• player taps the door to the wardrobe and says "Go"
• queue a GoTo  action to the wardrobe room
• that requires the door to be opened first so...
• queue a GoTo the door
• queue a Open of the door
• when the door open occurs it plays an animation of it sliding open
• finally execute the action to go to the wardrobe

This is all now working.  Whew!

Head down, tail up - its modelling time

I'm working very hard right now trying to hit my self-imposed deadline of August 12 for having the beta ready.  That means getting all the rooms for the apartment done.

Coding is coming along well and I have killed a bunch of bugs that were stopping things working with the inventory and moving around.

This week I'm modelling the remaining rooms - which is basically the exterior of the apartment, the balcony that is, and the interior of the living room/kitchen/lounge area.  This is the area where the encounter with the "killer" character occurs and puzzles must be solved to successfully set up traps and avoid character death at the end of the first act.

This is one of the first renders and needs lots of fine tuning before I use it in the game.  But this basic scene is going to be used to introduce the killer character who comes climbing up the exterior of the building to attack our heroine.

I used Maxwell Render to do this, from a model that I built up from scratch using Sketchup.  The design for the apartment is from my original drawings.  The concrete texture and (a bit hard to see here) the wooden tile texture for the floor are all Maxwell textures - which are pretty good.  I haven't put an arris on the edge of the concrete balcony or sunshades - that probably needs doing so it matches the concrete elsewhere.

Anyway - good progress.  I have already modelled the whole internal area of the apartment so the rest of the week will mostly be fiddling with lighting, fixing up details and adding polish, while I run renders of all the views.

Early Results with Artboard

I've started using Artboard, a fairly simple vector graphics program for the Mac, to do some of my in-game artwork.  Basically I put my room render in as a background so I can get the scale and perspective right, then draw the artwork for the items and props in the room over the top.

I have been using Anime Studio and Manga Studio for this, at various times.  I use Anime Studio as its the vector graphics based animation package that I use for doing my characters, and I need that same look for the in-game items.  Trouble is since its an animation package its not well suited to just doing static graphics.  I therefore was using Manga Studio which is my comic drawing software - it gives lovely pen strokes and cel shading as per Manga comics, but unfortunately the resulting look is not really a match for the vector art that comes from Anime Studio.

Hence I have picked up Artboard, for $35 from the AppStore.  I would have looked at Illustrator but its very expensive and over-featured for what I want.  I also tried Inkscape and that would have been my preference but the performance going through X-Quartz on the Mac was just awful.  On bigger drawings that pen lag was just killing me.  Artboard is a nice combination of features and for price, and has great performance on my laptop.

Here's some of the things I have done with it so far.

Alarm Clock to wake our hero up out of bed

Handy screwdriver

Room render with Artboard drawings on top

It's not perfect, but there is a lot to like here.

I particularly like the expert styles - I used the ability to create copies of the stroke and outset each one to create the sort of "bevelled-in" look on the dial face for the clock.  This stroke was stacked on top of one of Artboards pre-packaged styles, a glossy black which was just right for the face of the clock.

The point editing mode of Artboard is very good too - you can quickly go from shape manipulation mode over to path mode and back again, just by double tapping on the object.  In Inkscape its not so easy to go between treating an object as a path and as a shape.

I have come across a few bugs, but the authors of Artboard - one of whom is an Australian software engineer - seem to be quite responsive, and they're producing new releases so it looks hopeful that these will get dealt with soon.

If you're looking for a simple but relatively powerful and fun graphics editor for your game work I recommend giving Artboard a try.

Game screen design in Google Docs

Looked at Google Docs lately?

If you're like me you probably think you know pretty much what there is to know about Google Docs: its a web-based thing that tries to be like Microsoft Office, right?

Well its been getting better - a lot better.  There's a really good Draw app now.  Combining Google Docs Draw app with the Google Sites features allows you to create a real-time game screen-flow sharing/co-development tool.  The cost is $0 and there's not much you have to do without compared to some commercial apps.  Here's how I use it.

Quick note: these are mocked up development shots for this post, but based on real work from my private Google Docs/Sites - please don't make any judgements about this based on its current state - "Oh I saw the game from Sez and she's making this thing about a room with nothing in it...".  Examples only guys.  :-)

What I discovered is how awesome Googles suite of apps can be as a platform for doing game design, especially if you're an indie and trying to work with others who are not in the same location as yourself.    If you have mentors or friends you want to get reviews from same applies - its a great tool for sharing development ideas in a quick mock-up form before you spend ages coding them up or paying out for finished artwork.

When you work from your spare room, and need some who's remote, doing art-work or some other part of the game to be able to see your ideas, it can be a pain to try to get the latest version of your stuff and drag it into DropBox, or share it on some kind of paste-bin site.

The Draw application is not good enough in itself to do finished work, but its great for quick mockups of screens so that you can get the general proportions, colours and most importantly the flow or sequencing of screens right.  You can import artwork including sprites and backgrounds (like the room background below) and combine it with graphics created with Draw's basic vector tools.  It has a palette of predefined shapes you can use, and you can fill them with color, or make them transparent - even alpha blended, like the Map HUD above.

What is great about Google docs is that you can edit the document right in the web-page and who ever you're working with always gets the latest version when they open it.  In fact you can collaborate in almost real-time.

But even better with Google Sites you can then embed your Google Docs - graphs from the spreadsheet app, or in my case drawings from the draw app - right into the webpage, creating a flow of screens for different use-cases.

When you update the Draw doc, folks visiting the screen-flow page with your use-cases on it get the latest version - since its a live link, not an embedded render of the drawing.  This makes the Google Docs & Sites a very powerful way to collaborate.

Sites also has very good sharing features so you can make collaborators have writer levels of access, and provide others with read-only, all while keeping the whole thing private while you're still in development.

One other quick tip - if you want some great general icons that are good for doing development mock-ups and use as placeholders, but do not have the commercial limitations of some icon sets, have a look at the Tango project - I've used some of them in the above shots.  There's around 180 icons with standard sorts of things, like "Save" and "Quit" and so on.

The direct link to download the tar.gz of their icons is here:  http://tango.freedesktop.org/releases/tango-icon-theme-0.8.90.tar.gz - on Mac you  should be able to open that archive up without any problems, but on Windows you might need a special archive tool.

Have fun designing your screens!

Traction

Finally starting to get some traction on the game creator having bullied CoreData, Key-Value coding, ArrayControllers and all the other mystical components of Cocoa into doing what I need.  Thanks to all who gave me encouragement!

Screenshot of game creator - 30% done

The game itself is still only partly set up to become data driven, but that I think will be a lot simpler than actually getting the data in there in the first place.  Because so much of it is about the rich world of objects, properties and descriptions the actual game content has to be data driven - hard coding it would have been a massive undertaking and very difficult to debug.

The buttons on the right are for creating exits from the room, and going ahead to the atoms screen to create the contents for that room.  These buttons, and the Atoms and Aspects screens are still on my todo list.  But I can use the room as a model and I'm sure it will be a lot quicker.

Things to add are a launcher button so I can launch the game from the creator, and have the game use [a copy of] the current view of the data as edited by the creator.

Coming Out

It feels so good to be out of the closet.  Here is my big admission!

I am a wannabe indie game hacker!!!

The crowd shuffles nervously.  Is she for real?  Wow - brave to come out like that, but geez those folks who think they can be indie game coders - soooo llaaaaaammmme.

Well if I ever worried what people thought I would never do anything.  :-)

Here's a screenshot of very early days game screens, just to show that I'm not completely delusional.

What's it all about?  What kind of a game is it?  What's the tech stack, platform, genre?  How did you create that artwork?  Well - keep posted, subscribe to the blog and all will be (incrementally) revealed.

So this blog post marks the beginning of a few things for me:

• I am officially taking my indie game coding efforts seriously
• This right here is going to be my development blog
• updates on progress
• screenshots
• insights on the game design process
• sez-cam: developer eye view of game dev in the raw
• I will also post random tutorials, learnings and snippets
• Commit to posting here at least a couple of times a week

And, when my game gets to the point I can publish, you'll know it right here, first thing.

Why would I do all this?  Haven't I got a game to write?  Well, yeah - but its hard hacking away by yourself in a room.  This blog is my way of letting you all in to shine a little light, keep me sane, and maybe lend some encouragement on the way.

In return I hope there's some useful stuff, some entertainment and a few lessons.

Oh, and quick note to the "borrowers" looking for free game art and resources - my definition of success here is that my game makes money.  I don't want to give away my art for free.  I want to make a living out of making games so I can keep doing it.  So this is not a site full of free stuff: if I post some images here or any other game resources, unless I say otherwise they're not for folks to dump into some knock-off game and call it their own work.  Didn't I use Free technologies, and other free stuff from kind people?  Yes!  Doesn't that mean I should in turn give away what I do?  No!  Hey, I hope that is obvious.  Any questions about this contact me in the comments.

Code is an exception mostly: in general in code I post here will have a notice on it that you can use it for whatever you like.  The full source code for the game is not going to be open-sourced, but I have a plan to make as much of the framework of it as I can open-source eventually.  That is I want to split out the artwork and content from the machinery - but that has to be a secondary goal to making a real working game.

So welcome.  And please keep up the commentary - here or on my Google plus account, check the side bar for details of that.