Gaming World: It is my first anniversary

 GDC, Photography  No Responses »
Mar 222010
 

GDC 2010Ahh, finally back from the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. About halfway through the conference I stumbled upon the realization that it is my “Gaming Birthday;” right about this time in 2009 I wrote an article about how GDC Inspired me to make my first game.

I’ve done a fairly in-depth post-mortem of 2009, so I won’t go blabbing about the past again. Suffice it to say that it feels like a dozen years have gone by when it has in fact only been one; I feel like an industry veteran; I’ve been invited/spoken at 4 different events; and I’ve even been hosted on The Independant Gaming Radio Show twice (once just last night, about GDC and Steambirds; the other back in January about community management).

The one thing that has really stood out for me in the last year, though, is the new friends I’ve made. Experiencing the legendary Indie Love firsthand. Excuse me for a moment while I go and embarrass myself and several others:

I still remember a year ago, when I was considering whether or not I should attend GDC at all. I remember sitting there at the back of the Independent Gaming Summit talks, wondering who all them friendly-looking folk at the front were. But now, each of those astounding folks are my friends.

I really have to give credit to three people in particular:

  • Colin Northway: Convinced me to go to GDC in the first place, and while at GDC, convinced me to write my own game.
  • Phil Hassey: Inspired me to make my first game while at GDC (after learning he made one of my favorite games, Galcon, in only 48 hours).
  • Greg Wohlwend: Showed me how amazing and easy it is to collaborate on projects; working with him convinced me that this could be a career and not a flirting interest (and for making the best game trailer I’ve ever witnessed).

If it weren’t for those three chums, I’d not have the chance to be sitting at the IndieLove campfire in Derek Yu’s backyard. I wouldn’t have added around 60 new people to facebook in the last few months alone.

Heck, I just spent a week sharing a room with Indie Gaming’s Patron Saint of Passion, Devotion, and Chemicals: Phil Fish.

A final shout out has to go to Matthew Wegner, who usually escapes the focus of my blog thanks to his undefinable grandiosity. Matthew seems to be everything and everywhere: Organizing IGS, operating my favorite blog, running an awesome company, and starting TIGRadio, just to name a small fraction of his resume off the top of my head. Yet at the same time, he isn’t up on stage like some guitar-slinging rock god; he’s more the guy in the booth that lights the entire Indie Stage. I’d venture to say that the fundamental Indie landscape would be different without him.

But enough with all these blowjobs.

I brought my camera with me down to SanFrancisco and got some excellent shots of some architecture. I’m not usually a fan of architecture, but sometimes a particular view or piece of scenery will strike me as particularly enjoyable. You can see my entire (short) GDC photoset here, but I’ll post one of my favorites:

I love that without any context, this photo goes quickly from “neat” to “striking” — in my mind, anyway! :)

SteamBirds is doing excellently, to say the least. I don’t want to post my post-mortem or stats yet, because it’s still collecting me dollaz. I’ll probably post something closer to the end of the month.

Posted by Andy Moore at 6:31 am  

Shots from Across the Street

 Photography  No Responses »
Feb 282010
 

Triage (get it?)There’s an awesome park across the street from my place; nice little hill covered with plants and trees. I often take my camera out there but haven’t uploaded any photos from my excursions yet.

This here is one of my favorite trees on the place. It’s sitting right near the top and stands fairly alone, contrasting against the sky, as you can see. (click for larger image).

I also found a nice winter berry bush, and a collection of flora from the base of the mountain.

Posted by Andy Moore at 5:30 pm  

Blog Relocation: Complete

 Personal, SteamBirds  No Responses »
Feb 082010
 

Finally! Got my blog moved over to my own domain. My old blogger account can now die. Farewell, Aught Nine; it was nice while it lasted, but it could only last a year.

I’ll be working on making this site themed up nicely and have some links to my games. For now, why don’t you check out my SteamBirds trailer?

Posted by Andy Moore at 7:15 pm  

The End of Aught Nine

 Game Design, GDC, Personal  3 Responses »
Dec 302009
 

Well, the year has come to a close. I started this blog knowing it would only last a year — but don’t worry! I’ll be firing up a proper blog on my own website (andymoore.ca) soon. I’ll make another post here to announce it, and I’ll see about exporting these posts there.

Protonaut is an exercise in open development. I make a blog post just about every time I build a [working] update to the game, involve a lot of people in obtaining feedback, and have a lot of fun doing it! I haven’t been updating recently because Protonaut has been on hold (dev ramps up again soon!) and I’ve been working on a new, top-secret project.
It’s just an experiment: Switching from Open development to Secret development will allow me to get some perspective on how the two systems work with each other.

I think a retrospective is in order! When I first started this blog, I made some goals for myself. Here’s how they shook out:

  • I will finish moving out of my house in this next week.
    COMPLETE! I am now living with my girl, Aubrey, and have been quite happy.
  • I will sell or give away most of my material goods by February 1st.
    MOSTLY COMPLETE! I have to say that living out of a backpack is quite liberating. When I only really own a backpack, clothes, and a laptop it simplifies life quite a bit. I have a few other odds and ends that I’m still trying to sell or holding on to — a Wii and a Projector to watch the occasional movie on — but I’m happy to ditch it all at a moment’s notice.
  • I will continue working on my various web contracts to pay for my bills.
    DONE! I’ve gained new exciting contracts over the last year.
  • I will make an effort to cut expenses.
    COMPLETE! Aubrey has taught me the magic of making my own food (gasp, shock). I’ve actually got a handsome sum in the bank right now! I’m quite proud.
  • I will finish all of my half-finished projects by April 1st.
    FAILED! I think this one wasn’t destined to win through. It only makes sense to finish a project if I actually have plans or interest in them… What I ended up doing was take all my half finished projects, archive them, and promised not to look at them ever again until I’m sure I need them.
  • I will continue brainstorming at least one new application or game per week.
    KINDA. I think what I was aiming for with this goal was to make sure that I was constantly thinking and working on innovation and revision, rather than focusing on and over-developing single (flawed?) applications. I think I successfully avoided this, but in a way I didn’t expect: I ended up picking a single mechanic and constantly revising and innovating on it, often changing the premise of my application several times before completion.
  • I will select a Flash Game from my list and create it by November 1st.
    LOL. I definitely succeeded here! When I wrote that goal, I had zero actionscript experience and had only toyed with Flash itself for a few hours. My first game was complete in 30 days (finished May 1st), and I’ve now made a few more.
  • I will select a travel location and get there by September 1st.
    FAIL! Looks like real life got in the way of this one. Despite selling all my posessions and keeping my budget low, I don’t quite have enough money squirreled away to travel somewhere with confidence in my long-term survival. :(
  • I will spend New Years 09->10 in a foreign country.
    FAIL! As a successor to the above goal, it couldn’t succeed.
It turns out I was quite a bit more prolific than I thought I would, with flash applications. Here’s a bit of a timeline:
  1. In January, I started this Blog with high hopes. I had done no industry research and had no idea what was going on, really; I was aiming for the future blind.
  2. GDC March was the big turning point for me. I met up with the talented Greg Wohlwend, who I would later work with on projects, and got a massive dose of what was possible and how the industry worked in general. I was particularly inspired by Phil Hassey, Petri Purho, and other rapid-prototyping game developers.
  3. Space Squid was my first game, finished May 1st, 2009. I gave myself exactly 30 days to learn Actionscript, Flash, setup a dev environment, and build a game. I ended up going through around 20 core-gameplay revisions in that time, and posted most of them to this blog.I still look back at SpaceSquid fondly. There are several really good, fun game mechanic prototypes in it’s development cycle. I’m sure I could turn the basic premise into a set of a dozen fun games.

    Sadly, SpaceSquid wasn’t picked up by any sponsors or portals (for money). The gameplay lends itself to a quick 2-minute playthrough, with little motivation to move on. I’m happy I only spent 30 days on it, and I look at it like an excellent learning experience.

  4. Protonaut is still in development, but is my first mega-project. It has a lot of high hopes and future plans, but is currently in the last phases of development. Greg Wohlwend approached me to do the art on this one, and he’s been an excellent source of collaboration for design philosophy and mechanic tweaking.I’m still convinced Protonaut is going to be a successful title, earning me moneys. I really want the product to be juuust perfect though; it’s only going to have one day in the spotlight when I decide to start marketing it. A test-run mini-launch later in the year showed that people enjoyed the game and the mechanics, but were ultimately disappointed in the level selection. I’m going to have to get in there and whip up some premium content…

  5. GDC Austin was an absolute blast. Though the venue was a bit lacking compared to the San Francisco version earlier in the year, the people were awesome. A cozy, intimate set of indie devs all hanging out and having fun… Such joy. It was there that I met DanC, who I later started working with.
  6. Military Contracts are fun and very high paying (military flash apps? lol). I have to give huge thanks to Greg Wohlwend for passing on this job and handing it to me; it’s funding my next few games. :)
  7. The Wooden Fleet is a game I designed for LudumDare #16, the 48-hour-game-jam. I wanted to try my hand at writing a game in such a small timeframe, from scratch, doing all the assets myself…I ended up being pretty lazy about it. I watched a movie or two, I slept normally, and spent the weekend hanging out with my girl. In the odd hours of spare time I had, I ended up making a working game idea, but it is incredibly lacking in polish. Things like you can’t move diagonally, your support ships spam out due to a bug, and your movement is way too slow.

    I really enjoyed working on it though and perhaps sometime in the future I’ll revisit the project and make it playable.

  8. SteamBirds is my current Pride and Joy, and this should be the first time I’ve mentioned it to the public. :) This is my super top secret development, being made in association with Daniel Cook (DanC of LostGarden).SteamBirds is really close to my heart because the game type, mechanics, theme, genre, content, and story are all things that I truly love. This is a game being written by me, for me — obviously with modifications to make it more marketable. :)

    It’s currently scheduled to launch in January sometime. The first iteration is very near completion… I’m excited :)

There are several little things I left out from the list, and a lot of new projects and collaboration requests going down in the next few months. I daresay this is becoming a full-time gig!

All I need now is some bankrolling success!

In other news: My personal website, offering up my IT services, has resulted in zero business. I want to turn it into a proper site that showcases my work and houses a more permanent blog than this one-off AughtNine gig. I’ll post some details once I get something lined up.

I just hate designing web pages, is all. :( Maybe I can pay someone to do it for me…

Posted by Andy Moore at 12:32 pm  

PAX: Meh

 Travel  1 Response »
Sep 082009
 

I attended PAX (The Penny Arcade Gaming Exhibition, aka PAGE; or at least it should be) this last weekend for the first time. People seemed to get so excited about it that I had quite high hopes.

And I was pretty let down.
I caught the Nerd-Cold that was being passed around PAX so I’m a little fuzzy-headed and not feeling my best, so I’ll keep this contained to a few brief bullet points:
Post edit: Rambling fail. This isn’t short at all.
  • You can meet and talk to the developers of the games!
    Not really, no. Sure if you are lucky, or you rush in right at the buzzer, or if you catch one at a quiet moment. But mostly, the exhibition hall is so packed full of people – and the developers are so busy with their tasks – they don’t have time to talk. The few developers I did manage to snag for more than a few minutes only had time to tell me that they had a lot of fun making the game (shock!) and that they had an interesting experience and would do it again (double shock!); all the while handing out pamphlets or t-shirts to passers-by of our conversation.

    The typical meet-the-developer experience is to stand in line for 45 minutes and get spoken at with a megaphone. The words are usually empty; the standard press-fare you get around games. Everyone sounds like a talking press-release. Then you get a t-shirt for your patience.

    I attended GDC, where I could (and did!) talk to some developers for over 30 minutes. Some even went with me out to lunch for for a beer. There was never a line.

  • You can play all the latest games!
    Most of the titles at PAX have already been released. A few are on the cusp of being released. But then again, I don’t really put any value in playing new games first. I don’t really care about that benefit. I would love to (and do) participate in pre-release testing and sharing opinions to help shape the game – but when the game is pretty much gold and just waiting for the discs to be printed… all I’m doing is getting a sneak peak.Playing games “first” simply means that the game hasn’t run through all the review sites yet, and there’s a much higher chance that it’s a piece of crap. Kinda like how the new movie GI Joe wasn’t screened to reviewers when it launched – going there on Day 1 means that yes, you are first… But odds of having a horrible experience? Pretty high, and you have no chance of being warned beforehand.

    I really don’t know where this whole “I got it first” mentality comes in. I’m not the kind of guy (14-year-old?) who runs to his friends and says “HAHA I PLAYED xyz BEFORE YOU!” and my friends get genuinely jealous. I’m a patient fellow; I wait until TV series are cancelled before watching them, for example.

    Contrast this with GDC, where you get to play early builds of games that companies haven’t even decided on release yet; prototypes; exploratory gameplay visions… It’s quite exciting.

  • You get to see all the FUTURE… TODAY!
    Again, I’m going to have to say GDC wins this one. A perfect example was the 3-D gaming concept.At PAX was the marketable (aka Cheap) version of the 3D gaming experience. Showcased by nVidia, they alternate frames on the display for your left/right eye, and using specially sync’d glasses they turn off your opposite eye from receiving said information. Being displayed on a nice 28FPS LCD display, that equated to 14FPS, with a very heavy (and very annoying) flickering effect. The technology is cheap though – a big enough video card with a special jack for the glasses, and you’re set. I watched Resident Evil being played in 3D, which I admit looked cool – but ended up making me feel a little naseous and the twinges of a headache. Plus you are tethered to your gaming box to keep the glasses in sync, or you have to keep swapping in batteries for the wireless replacement. Either way is annoying.

    And I’m one of those guys that rolls my eyes at reviewers saying racing games makes them queasy. I’m pretty robust in that department.

    GDC’s version was Sony’s booth. They had a new TV, where they essentially doubled the pixels. Yep, you have to essentially buy two TVs to get this to work. Half the pixels on screen show left-eye information, and the other half show right-eye information. You get the full 28-FPS experience from your television set, which means no flicker, no headaches, and more information. Since the left/right channels are permanently polarized, you can use any standard cross-polarized pair of glasses – no batteries, no tether. Technically speaking you can also get 2xHD resolution in 2D as well. Obviously expensive though – new TVs for everyone!

  • PAX Panels are awesome!
    No they aren’t. I was riveted to my seat for 3 days straight at GDC; I walked out of every single talk I attempted to attend at PAX. It’s obvious in retrospect; the attendees are not game developers, they are game players. They don’t want the straight-up insightful answer; they want to hear the generic bulk answer.I’m also pretty upset that most of the talks I attended ended up being microphone-driven. That is to say, the panelists introduced themselves and immediately opened the mic to questions, and just answered them for an hour. This annoys me for two reasons. First, it implies that they really don’t have anything to say or share on their own; the talk has no actual foundation. Secondly, the questions are soooo inaaaaaane.

    Someone went up to the mic and asked the PAX10 panel if Microsoft’s XNA framework supported multiplayer. (!!!!)

    Another dude asked the PAX10 panel, “Now that you’ve released successful games on your own, have you been able to get good jobs at the bigger gaming studios?”… This one just blew my socks off. I suppose the average gamer dude doesn’t realize that indie games are an escape from the corporate world, not an icebreaker into it. I guess I can’t fault them for that, but all in all it was just a waste of my time.

I guess what I’m saying is, most of the things people attend PAX for can be seen a hundredfold better at GDC – minus the lines, the headaches, and the hassles. Of course, GDC tickets cost 10 to 20 times more.
I had a pretty good experience in another genre at PAX though. It wasn’t all bad news.
I ended up spending most of my time at PAX playing boardgames. A crapload of them. And I had a ton of fun doing it – it was really interesting and exciting, playing a bunch of things I had never heard of before. I picked out one or two that I’d even like to purchase, and I had some long talks (and played games with) the staff of the creating companies.
Then the realization hit me: This must be what people are getting out of the video-game side of things. I’m fairly entrenched in gaming media – I subscribe to every gaming site I know of in my RSS reader; I read most interviews and watch a lot of gameplay videos. Everything at PAX I knew before I attended. However, I subscribe to zero board game blogs. I don’t even know of any that exist (I’m sure there are though), and as such I was taken completely off guard by the scope and selection of awesome board games at PAX.
I therefore conclude one of two things:
a) PAX is for gamers that do not have the internet (and are not aware of upcoming or released titles),
b) PAX is for gamers wanting to expand their horizons beyond their favorite medium, or
c) Both A and B.
I fall into category C, I suppose. Video games were a complete bomb for me; but Board Games was an awesome experience.
I don’t have any plans to attend a future PAX (I don’t see there being another 40 new board games for me to play if I do go), but if I did attend I’d probably spend all my time exploring RPGs or figurine-games like Warhammer and the like (since I didn’t get a chance to myself).
Seattle itself was kinda fun though. I was so exhausted and spent most of my time at PAX itself that I didn’t give a good go of the city, but the few places I went to were great. Tried some decent beers and had a really good curry or two.
Posted by Andy Moore at 9:36 am  

The Platformer

 Box2D, Photography, Protonaut  No Responses »
May 192009
 

OK, here’s something I really hate. Coding how a player moves.

It turns out there’s a lot of intricate guesswork going on behind the scenes of most platformers. For instance, did you know that many platformers change the amount of friction exerted on the player body depending on the current action?
Or that bodies accelerate nonlinearly?
There’s a million factors involved and they’re all fairly easy to code – but there’s no easy math behind it; no science. I’m just going to have to continuously pull numbers out of a hat until I find something that feels right. It’s quite frustrating – why can’t it be as easy as just running and jumping?
My latest upload (public build #2) disabled movement while you’re in the air. This is how I want the game to be, and this is exactly how to make it un-fun, which I guess means my opinion isn’t worth anything in this case.
I haven’t pulled any of the levers or pushed any buttons yet when it comes to acceleration or friction. The game obviously has a sluggish feel to it here but it take shape over time; patience!
The buid does, however, feature some of Greg’s artwork actually applied to the assets in-game. I have to say it turned my game from looking hideous to awesome in a single build. I wouldn’t take it as anything near final though – just yesterday we took the game in an entirely new direction (artistically) and the next build I post here will likely be altogether different.
(I think I’ll post with more images from now on, because – let’s face it – a blog post without pictures is like a whore without makeup)
Posted by Andy Moore at 8:31 am  

Progress?

 Game Design, Personal  3 Responses »
May 102009
 

I’ve made some definite progress since May 1st!

  • I watched the entirety of Jeeves & Wooster for the first time. What a great show.
  • (Now working on the entirety of Black Adder for the first time)
  • Playing some OldSchool Civilization 4 with Aubrey during the evenings. Excellent fun.
Now that I’m coding pretty much full time, I’m finding I have a strange desire for routine. I’m not the type of guy that likes routine – far from it. I like variety and doing things at a whim. I don’t like doing things for rote. But it feels like there’s no structure in my life and I’m just kind of freewheeling – and it frequently ends with me just staring at blogs for hours each day.
To make matters worse, my physical condition has deteriorated rapidly in the last few months. Sitting in the same chair all day every day (Except to go to the pub) is really turning my body into a stiff-jointed blubberball. Not to say that I’m getting fat or anything – I’m still the pinacle of human development and women and men alike oggle me – I’m just losing any muscle I had and I’m farther from touching my toes than I have been in years. I haven’t even gone to Aikido in ages (I sleep through the morning session and Aubrey works during the evening one).
So in an effort to be kinder to my body, and to put some structure in my life, I’m taking up a Morning Constitutional. I’ve always loved the term and I have a small (200ft?) mountain right across the street from me. Might as well go exploring, find all the nooks and crannies, and maybe do some ultra-lightweight bouldering. In any case, it’s nice to get some fresh air.
I never thought that “walking” was a form of excercise. The body is tuned to walk well and it won’t normally expend a lot of energy just moving about in this fashion. I walked to school around 1-2km every day each way as a kid, and I never thought anything of it. I hiked, I climbed, I biked, I kayaked… But last week I walked downtown and I was winded. Brought a small tear to my eye. I must fix this problem.
I’m also going to look into trying to drink 3 litres of water per day. When you mostly sit still and never leave the house I seem to have been getting by on about half a litre, and I don’t particularly feel thirsty. Yesterday I choked down my first 3L alotment and it was actually a little difficult for me. Practice makes perfect!
But enough of me whining about my personal life!
But I’ve also made some progress on my framework. Again, nothing to really look at. I’ve included a few Box2D overrides (Boundary and Contact Listeners, for example) and added a “Keep camera focused on the player” mode. There’s a scaling bug if you zoom in too far on the player but otherwise it works well (toggleable in case you want to visually explore of course).
I’ve also completely severed all ties from the display model (camera, handling, etc.) to the game world. For some stupid reason I did all the Box2D instantiation and world setup in the same class. That’s quite fixed now, and it will open the door to a new cool feature I’ll be blogging about in the coming week.
I spent the entire morning today focused on solving an XML importing bug, but it turns out it was just Flash caching a copy of Level3.xml it was supposed to import from my webserver. I’m very happy on one hand, as it proves once and for all that Flash will cache files such as my larger music files and sound effects. It makes me a little sad because I wasted so many hours on a simple “clear your cache” bug. I might want to look into a “clear cache” button or something somewhere. Not even sure if that’s possible.
Posted by Andy Moore at 12:12 pm  

Apple Products Rule

 Personal  No Responses »
Mar 102009
 

Here I was thinking to myself, “Man, I’d really like a laptop where – if I am listening to iTunes via USB headphones, and I unplug the headphones, iTunes would just close and bring my system to it’s knees because it’s still running in the background somewhere.”

And I got exactly that!
Thanks, STEVE
Posted by Andy Moore at 6:42 pm  

Doin’ it Well

 Personal  No Responses »
Mar 082009
 

4 days of working and 52 hours currently logged. That’s pretty hot considering one of those days I spent getting a bit too drunk and one of the other days I was incredibly hung over.

It’s a good thing I actually love programming.

Yesterday I had a bit of a magical moment. I took half the features I “needed” to implement and moved them all over to a “will do in a future version” list. The project got quite a bit less daunting and I’m closer to finishing than I thought.
Posted by Andy Moore at 11:29 am  

Contracted to the Impossible

 Personal  No Responses »
Mar 062009
 

A big project I proposed to one of my clients was just approved for funding. The only catch is, it was approved quite late and the deadline remains the same.

Can I write reams of code in just 10 days?
Will I make it? Will I burn out? Will I shower?
Tune in next week!
Posted by Andy Moore at 3:24 pm  
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