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!
No posts for a week or so because I've been having a nice restful holiday to New Zealand. It was a chance to rest my brain, and allow myself to really see stuff again. To see stuff, I draw - photographing stuff is good, but you don't see what is there or get your mind working on it until you draw it.
When you make a game you need a premise. OK - we're shooting a bunch of bad guys - and why are they bad again? They're evil zombies from a scientific experiment gone wrong? OK - that is a premise, and without one even the most obvious game idea won't work.
My game concepts are all driven by fairly rich premises and I need something to work from to build those. Bad guys need a back story, and good guys need one too - if players are to care at all about your game characters they need some dimensions.
Sitting in a cafe is great - I find I can easily make up stories about the folks having a coffee two tables over. But travelling to another country, sitting in airports and travelling on ships and helicopters: hell, it doesn't get any better than that for topping up my creative reserves.
Here's some images from my trip and a few words about each - maybe it will give you some insight into how my imagination sees the world and creates a story out of it.
I flew into Wellington, NZ and started there with a trip to Weta Digitals "Weta Cave" for their "Window into Workshop" tour. This was an absolutely amazing insight into the creative people behind movies like "Lord of the Rings" and "District 9", and I have only my memories of it as we were not allowed to take pictures. As it was a guided tour doing drawings was not possible either, not that Weta would have been all that keen on my "taking notes" of what they were working on.
I went to the Southward car museum and managed to strike up a conversation with the curator there. The Corvette Stingray and Jaguar E-type next to it were pretty nice too.
Clearly you need to lend me this De Lorean so I can save the universe from evil
I went up on the Wellington Cable Car to a great vantage point and checked the harbour views. In this picture I'm in front of an older cable car in their cable car museum.
From Wellington I went across to the South Island on the Interislander: a large roll-on, roll-off ferry. It was a few hours so I got to relax and sketch. My favourite activity is ninja sketching random people and making up stories about them. I hold my sketchpad down out of sight and draw them quickly hoping I won't get sprung.
Guy on the Ferry
Guy on the Ferry: he was sitting a few seats over and had a very game-worthy face. Strong potato of a chin and kind of a solid demeanour. He could be like some kind of SAS guy, trying to get away from the memories of his last tour in Afghanistan. He actually smiled a lot, but when his friends pointed at something out the Ferry window he kind of got the "thousand yard stare".
These guys were clearly spies travelling to complete an assignment. I'm not convinced they really were human. Maybe SAS guy was going to take them out.
As the Ferry neared the South Island there were some lovely views of the peaks of the fjords reaching up out of the water, and a few tiny yachts gliding across the water.
View out Ferry porthole
There was something about the way portholes framed the views that made them more poignant, more dramatic.
Queen Charlotte Sound
I think it is the way whoever is watching the view becomes part of the frame itself, their black silhouette and that of the ships window being a surround for the scene sliding past. Ninjas and assassins are like that - you don't see them because they become part of the darkened frame.
Coming into Picton
The ferry itself was pretty enormous - and as it approached the South Island terminus of Picton the buildings seemed tiny compared to it. One of its sister ships was tied up at the wharf.
We spent a few days in Picton doing the wine district and driving around the Nelson & Marlborough area, then headed down to Franz Josef Glacier.
Our cabins in Franz Josef were right next to a miniature horse place and one of the cute little guys stuck his head all the way through the wire fence to where I was set up on a chair with my sketch pad.
The goal of Franz Josef was to get up on the glacier itself which was acheived by helicopter. I would love to own one of these things. Lots of game memes here. :-)
Landing up on the glacier we met up with our guide who took us through the ice caves and crevasses. Glaciers are very very big. And powerful. This is a shot of me carefully listening to the safety briefing - "Don't fall into the ice caves as we won't be able to get you out".
The ice caves can go all the way down through the glacier to its bed, but they quickly get too small for us crazy humans. Here's me doing my best Bear Grylls/Crocodile Dundee impression as I head down into one of the crevasses.
The mountains of the Southern Alps - which featured prominently in the Weta Digital enabled "Lord of the Rings" - were pretty spectacularly beautiful too, swathed in dense green from sea-level and soaring up to snow capped peaks.
From Franz Josef it was back via the scenic Arthur's Pass national park to Christchurch. This city of 300,000 people has been plagued by earthquakes for the past few years. Locals have responded by deploying shipping containers as makeshift barriers to prevent rocks from nearby mountains plunging through their houses.
Post apocalyptic doesn't get any better than this.
The city itself is amazing too - shop owners have moved their businesses into shipping containers and a new cafe district is thriving in the container mall called "Re:START" in the city center.
Here a once proud landmark of Cave Rock is fenced off due to earthquake damage and this rather inexplicable steam-punk pumping device is playing some role in that.
After a couple of nights in Christchurch at a rather Agatha Christie style guest house called "The Grange" it was time to head back to Australia.
Mentally its taken me a little while to adjust to being my own boss, and running my own schedule. This post is about learning to manage time and motivation when doing game dev.
From recent Indie Game Dev events I've been to in Brisbane and looking online many many Indie Game Dev's work a day job and then come home to do their development work at night and on the weekend. For me over the past 6 months, when I was working on contract during the day and hacking fun game stuff at night that just was not working at all, so I saved up and got myself to the point where now I can work on my games wholly and solely. Its something I always wanted to do and now can afford to do.
But to make that work I found I needed to get into the swing of things, in my own way, and that meant figuring out how to get my work done - getting my energy happening - when Game Dev was no longer just some super fun sideline from my main job. If you have a day job, then folks are not really going to give you a hard time if whatever you're doing as a sideline doesn't work out. But if its your main gig, then the pressure is on and its a different thing.
Yesterday I went down to the Kelvin Grove Urban Village which is our local "town center" about 4 blocks from home, and I sat on a park bench outside the coffee shop drinking a flat white, and drawing this sketch of the KGUV complex - or part of it. Drawing in real life (not inside, from photos) is one of the things I need to do - likewise getting outside, and interacting with people: even if its just "Flat white, no sugar - thanks".
Taking time out to look up, and really see, I guess you could say. Drawing makes you look at and understand objects in the real world, how they are lit, how they are constructed in a way that just strolling through really just can't.
I saw the movie "Indie Game" and how those guys handled the pressure of developing ones own creation. There really wasn't much else in their lives outside of the game, although I think the creator of Super Meat Boy really had a better perspective than most of the developers depicted there. He put energy and time into his relationship with his wife, and also into his home life - as well as focusing all his creative output into the game. Actually watching that movie and how gritty and real it was (or at least it seemed) made me feel inclined to include the personal side of my game development experience here. None of us are machines, and the more creative we are I think the harder it can be to force that creative energy when it doesn't want to happen.
Some of those guys in the Indie Game movie I don't think ever did any grocery shopping, and though we don't get to see inside their refrigerator I'm guessing it was tumbleweeds in there. Except for the cases where they had someone else to pick up on the chores of actual life for them as in the case of one of the guys who was still living at home.
Having my home be a nice cheery place with food in the refrigerator, and the dust bunnies pretty much under control is something that is part of who I am. So skimping on running the house is not a way for me to find more time in my day.
I also know from bitter personal experience that if I don't get a fair amount of physical exercise I don't deal with pressure of any kind. In short if I don't train 2-3 times a week I quickly start going quite a bit mad. I'm very lucky because I personally know quite a few very intelligent software developers and creative people who struggle with psychological issues and who are on medication for it. Me, I have my own challenges - not ones I like to talk about and nothing compared to the challenges faced by my acquaintances that I just mentioned - but I have always been able to deal with that stuff by hitting the gym. That has pretty much always worked for me.
When I was travelling for work, I'd land in whatever country it was break out my shoes or whatever and hit the hotel gym, find a track around a river somewhere, or even do laps in the hotel pool. This was the only thing that helped me not to go stark raving mad with jet lag, and the weirdness of having 300+ people in a conference venue in Munich waiting to hear what I had to say about software engineering. No pressure, right?
So - gym/exercise, keeping house & home together - that's two big things.
But numero uno is making time for my partner Raymond - who I've already mentioned in this blog as being a total saint when it comes to my work. One thing that is tough, is for some reason I am super-productive and motivated to work when Raymond is around the house. And I find during the day when he is out at work, that is when I find my focus drifting. Sigh. I feel like when we're home together is when I should down tools and spend time with him, but right now its not completely working out that way.
You can see why hacking in my "spare time" wasn't working. When I had a full-time job, "spare time" really did not exist. I could make time for my game dev only by neglecting other really important parts of my life.
Edmund, the creator of Super Meat Boy and other games, and also probably the most together of all the developers depicted on the Indie Game movie I think was as successful in life as in game development because he made his time with his partner work as a thing, alongside and in train with working on his game. I guess this kind of thing is very individual. And maybe the maker of the movie cut him a break here, as he was kind of depicted as a god of the Indie Game devs with all the answers. I dunno.
I've always done my best work nights and evenings. The darker and the more rain and cold there is, the better I work. Unfortunately its the evenings when Mr Smith is home and I am trying to make time to slot him into my busy schedule somewhere. Same again on the weekends - I again seem to be very productive during the weekends when he's around.
One good sign is that last weekend worked well where we made time to do some active stuff together: headed out on our bikes for a few hours up to Mt Mee and back on Saturday, and went for a walk around Southbank's new cafe district on Sunday. Actually making some active things to do together I think is better than just "time", which can wind up meaning just blobbing. And between those activities I also got quite a few hours of hacking done on the weekend, in between times.
Productivity: here are some sinks - TV and the Internet. I've kind of cut back on doing stuff on the internet, like Google plus was becoming a habit. There are people wrong on the Internet!!
But I'm going to have to cut back on TV. We don't get broadcast TV but we have a bunch of SciFi and other shows cued up on iTunes and on DVD's - its all too easy to watch a show over dinner, and then press the button to watch the next one instead of heading downstairs to get a few more hours work done.
Still its starting to shake down into some sort of plan - I kind of goof off a little bit in the mornings, go walk and draw, get a coffee or go to the gym: then its in the evenings I get most of my work done. I still have a long way to go before I get a really good productive routine going, but we'll see.
I'd be interested to know: what do you skimp on to fit game coding in? How do you schedule your time?
I tried to spend some quality time with my long-suffering hubby Raymond, and caught up with my in-laws for a big turkey lunch.
My last day at my current paying gig is not for a couple of weeks yet, but I said "Happy holidays" to my colleagues on Friday last week, and since then I have had a full week on my own recognisance.
In that time I've made a fair bit of progress on getting to grips with Cocoa, and with actually getting useful functionality into the GameCreator tool.
It has 4 screens: Rooms, Atoms, Aspects and Identifiers. I've done 3 now, with the Atoms screen now pretty much working. There's a couple of bugs with the Undo but I can add new Atoms to a room, delete them and so on.
I figured having done the Rooms one the Atoms would be easy: not so much. When I select a room I want the Atoms screen to show only the Atoms for that room, and that turned out to be a real pain.
Cocoa bindings would not play ball at all and I had to refactor quite a bit to get what I needed working. The problem was that each screen is a seperate xib file, and its loaded by its own controller - I switch between controllers using a top-level screen. Trying to communicate from one screen controller to the next turned out to be nasty.
I go back to work on Wednesday next week and have sort of two half-weeks before I'm full time on my own stuff. Maybe I should take some of that time between now and when I go back to actually rest.
***Terminating due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason:'*** -[GameDeveloper rest]: target does not implement selector'
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