Michael.neel

Some time ago the first episode of Republique dropped on the iOS marketplace, seeking to deliver a "AAA" stealth experience with talent like David Hayter and Jennifer Hale. It's priced at a hefty $4.99 per episode, but for a limited time, you can grab the Season Pass for $0.99. The reason for the price drop is evidently the way the Kickstarter campaign went down.

Backers were promised the full game, but the developers didn't check with Apple beforehand to see if that was possible -- and it isn't, as Apple isn't willing to generate that many codes, nor will they generate codes for Season Pass-like content. So, they chose to drop the Pass manually to $0.99 to honor their agreement. Backers who still aren't willing to pay $0.99 can seek reimbursement. I can verify the pricepoint at the time of this writing, but it could change anytime.

To re-iterate, this is supposed to be for backers only.

'Republique' Season Pass In-app Purchase Discounted Down to .99 [Touch Arcade]

Nintendo CEO Saturo Iwata had more to say following the earlier espoused plans to turn Wii U sales around, which include some mystery, non-wearable fitness advocacy device. Speaking to The Nikkei, as picked up by MCV, Iwata explained, "[W]e've been preoccupied with a fixed idea of what a game should be like. The game industry is at a turning point amid new developments like the rise of smartphones."

Of course, Nintendo has also explained it does not want its games on smart phones, but says, "We'll change the way we sell products, by managing customer information via the Internet. We'll offer discounts to steady, regular customers."

While it's nice to joke about Nintendo thinking that "using the internet" is a dramatic shift, my ears perked up at 'offering discounts to steady customers.' Nintendo is infamously against devaluing its games, leaving its first party software at launch price for years before cuts. It'll be interesting to see what it does with that.

Iwata also said, more generally, "We should abandon old assumptions about our businesses. We are considering M&As as an option. For this reason, we'll step up share buybacks," and explained that the companies previously built up cash reserves have kept them going. "Without savings, we could not have recovered from a single failure in game systems. Even now, we can afford many options because of our robust financial standing."

Nintendo opening up to the idea of mergers and acquisitions to stabilize its business is the most potentially interesting bit in there, though. Maybe they'll be acquired by Sony? (It's a joke, don't kill me).

Nintendo chief: low-price games in emerging markets, M&A an option [Nikkei]

The new and improved 16GB OUYA console is available right now on Amazon and OUYA.tv for $129.99. This is a North American release only.

With this new one they've doubled  up on the memory, boosted the WiFi signal, and dropped in new firmware for improved performance, says OUYA. A redesigned housing gives it a new look, too. An included updated controller has improved Bluetooth, and we're to expect better functionality with it.

So are you getting a new OUYA today?

In May 2012, I decided that it would be in the best interest of my team (and bank account) to launch a Kickstarter campaign. Despite having already released five smaller games, my team Divergent Games was essentially an unknown entity.  Realizing this, I knew that we’d not only have to make our existence known, but to somehow coerce complete strangers to throw money at our little JRPG – a formidable task indeed.

Fast forward thirty days later and our campaign proved a success. Hiro Fodder: A Blue Hope ended up raising a $548 more than its asking goal of $12,500.

Running a Kickstarter campaign was akin to working a full-time job. It’s stressful, it requires long hours and, if not planned out, it can easily result in failure. And while we managed to hit our goal, there are so many things that I learned during and after the campaign that, had I known them beforehand, I could have potentially saved myself a lot of headaches. The purpose of this article is to share what I learned with other no-name or first time developers, so that they too can run a successful Kickstarter campaign.

• Marketing Your Indie Game: The Single Most Important Thing That No One Knows How to Do
• An Indie Game Developer’s Marketing Checklist (Including Portable Formats)
• Kickstarter Post Mortem for Hiro Fodder: A Blue Hope

The Plight of the Unknown Developer

Before I go on a rant about how hard it is to succeed on Kickstarter, let me say this: Kickstarter is awesome. Kickstarter has helped gaming icons like Brian Fargo and Tim Schafer raise hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars for their upcoming projects. Without it, I would have never met some truly fantastic folks. More importantly, it’s one of the main reasons why I’m able to develop the game of my dreams.

But if you’re new to the game development world, running a successful Kickstarter campaign can be a harrowing experience. There’s a reason why the Tim Schafers of the world can raise seven figures more easily than the average no-name can raise five: they’re known and trusted. Remember – no one is going to question whether or not Tim Schafer is going to put money raised through crowdsourcing to good use, but they’ll certainly question you.

Setting a Realistic Goal

Before launching your campaign, it is imperative that you establish a realistic goal. In order to do so you should ask yourself a few questions first:

• Have you written a game design document? The worst thing any game developer can do is assume that a game will only require X amount of assets, when in fact it needs Y. Game design documents, at least good ones,  counter this issue by breaking games down into their constituent parts. From there, you should be able to assess how many of each asset type will be needed. By determining this information beforehand, you’ll be able to more readily deduce how much money and time you’ll need to development your masterpiece.
• What do you need the money for? If the funds are going to be used to hire additional team members, try to gauge the cost of their services. For instance,  if a composer charges $200 per composition, and you need to commission him for 18 tracks, then your music budget should be around $4,500. Why $4,500 instead of $3,600? Because Kickstarter collects a 5% fee, and Amazon anywhere between 3-5%. In addition, you’ll need to reserve part of your budget for creating backer rewards, and (in the case of physical rewards) shipping charges.
• Is Kickstarter your only means of raising money? Most indie game developers either self-fund part of their project or seek investments from multiple sources. If you’re planning on using Kickstarter exclusively, be warned: the higher your goal, the less chance you’ll have to succeed, especially as an unknown. On the flip side, if you do manage to fund the majority of your project through Kickstarter, you won’t have to worry about taking out loans, maxing out credit cards or giving up insane amounts of equity.
• What are similar games asking for? Identify your genre and scope and begin searching for like-minded campaigns. Examine both successful campaigns and ones still underway. Take a look at their reward structure, and gather data about their most popular reward tiers – usually the “Pre-order” or “Pre-order plus original soundtrack” tier. Based on this information, structure your own rewards accordingly. While it may be tempting to ask for $50 in exchange for a copy of your game, you’ll find that most games from no-name developers usually ask  for $5, $10 or $15. Stay competitive.

If the Game Gets Funded, How Long Will It Take to Develop?

I’d estimate that approximately 100% of Kickstarter campaigns do not meet their expected release date. Backers have become accustomed to these delays, and as long as updates are provided on some sort of consistent basis, they typically don’t mind waiting a few extra months, or even over a year.

With this in mind, determine your game’s earliest possible release date, add maybe 20-25% to it, add another six weeks (since it will take about that long for the money to hit your account) and post that as your estimated release date. For instance, if under ideal circumstances your game will take a year to develop and your Kickstarter launched today, your estimated release date should be somewhere around eighteen months from now.

On the flip side, if your estimate is too conservative, you may turn potential backers off. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to back a game that is going to take five years to develop. Try to find the middle ground between safe and aggressive, knowing full well that most Kickstarter backers are forgiving types.

The Project Page

Your game’s project page is likely the only page potential backers will view before making the decision to contribute to your campaign. It should be informative, well-structured and highly visual.

• The project description: When writing a short blurb that sums up your game, be sure to include the game’s genre and any feature that differentiates your game from the masses. For instance, it’s not enough to say, “Hiro Fodder is a game where the player assumes the role of the traditional villain.” Instead, try something like “Hiro Fodder: A Blue Hope is an uproarious yet heartfelt and story-driven JRPG that follows the journey of one rambunctious slime on his quest to redefine the definition of easy XP.”
• Graphics: One quality graphic is worth more than a dozen mediocre ones. If your funds are limited – and they probably are, otherwise why would you need Kickstarter? – commission an artist for one or two pieces of high quality concept art specifically for your campaign. Better yet, have the artist create a mock-up of your game. That way, potential backers can at least see your vision of the final product. Along the same lines, create graphical sub-headers that capture the feel of your game. These go over better than simple text headers. Echoes of Eternea game designer Ryan Harmon did an excellent job of selling his concept to the masses by littering his project page with impressive visuals and eye-catching sub-headers.
• Budgeting section: At the very least, include a section that spells out, in detail, what the funds will be used for. Better yet, use a graphical display. Backers are more inclined to scan a visual aid than to read a wall of text, especially if they only have a passing interest in your project.
• Platforms: Don’t forget to mention what platforms the game will be released on. If one of your stretch goals is to release the game on additional platforms, mention that.
• Demo: In order to show off your game, you’re going to have to create some sort of demo. Like with graphics, it’s more beneficial to create a very small portion of your game and create it well, than to slop the entire thing together and have it comes across as being made by a bunch of hobbyists. If you’re on a super tight budget, base your demo around one facet of gameplay (like combat, exploration, or puzzles). Avoid programmer art, stock music, and boring aspects of the game, like menus, whenever possible.

The Video

It is imperative to upload a well-conceived video. It doesn’t have to be of the highest production value as long as it accomplishes two purposes.

First, it needs to show off virtually everything your team has accomplished on the game thus far. A cinematic opening, gameplay, concept art – anything that presents your game in a favorable light. Without it, most visitors are simply going to hit the Back button on their browser and proceed to the next campaign. Showing off your game is so important, that when people ask me how they should structure their pitch video, I suggest that they front load the video with images and gameplay from their title, and don’t start talking until at least a minute in. Forget about high production values, comedy sketches and elongated introductions – you have approximately 20 seconds to capture your visitor’s attention. Use them wisely.

Second – and only after you’ve showed off a sufficient amount of gameplay footage – it should formally introduce you and your team. Try to intersperse screenshots or concept images while you’re speaking, otherwise you’ll run the risk of boring visitors to tears. And keep it brief – despite how important you think you are, visitors are interested in backing your game, not you. While having an engaging personality won’t hurt your cause, bombarding users with anecdotes about your personal life certainly will. Check out one of my favorite Kickstarter projects, Boot Hill Heroes, for an example of a pitch video done right.

Build a Community

One of the most common mistakes newbie game developers make is assuming that they can simply adopt the same tactics as big name developers and expect swarms of traffic. Big name developers succeed because people already know who they are. Sadly, you do not have luxury. The good news is that there are plenty of things you can do to attract new visitors to your site.

• Twitter and Facebook: By now most game developers know the importance of having a Facebook and Twitter page. Of the two, Twitter is probably the more useful for getting your name out fast. Use it to engage in conversations with other game developers, and to post updates about your game. Be sure to use hashtags as they can increase your reach exponentially.
• Reddit:  Not surprisingly, Reddit is becoming as important as Twitter in helping no-name developers draw new backers. At the very least, post to the /r/kickstarter subreddit at launch. Be sure to mention the name of your game and a brief description. Titling your post “I just launched a Kickstarter campaign” will hardly differentiate you from the masses of new Kickstarter campaigns that launch each day. You can also post in a gaming subreddit, although I wouldn’t recommend blatantly advertising your game. Instead, try to appeal to the subscribers by mentioning how your game shares similarities to the game they subscribed to.
• Steam Greenlight: An increasingly popular trend is to launch Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight campaigns simultaneously. Whether or not you should do it depends solely on far along you are in the development process. If you’re demo is a fully realized embodiment of your game, then by all means, toss it up on Steam Greenlit. However, if you’re trying to raise funds for better art, music and to create new gameplay features, it might be best to hold off until your game is further along. Increasing your chances of success on Kickstarter is hardly worth throwing your chances of being Greenlit down the drain. If you do decide to place your game on Steam Greenlight, wait until the middle of your campaign. Doing so will provide you with an exposure boost – something you’ll sorely need at around the halfway point in your campaign.
• PR and Marketing Plans: During the first 48 hours or so, Kickstarter will feature your game high up on the “Recently Launched” section. After that, it’s up to you to somehow prevent your momentum from slowing to a complete halt. It is during this middle period, often referred to as the trough, that media coverage becomes paramount to your success. In addition to providing regular updates and contacting members of the press, you should be using this time to offer special rewards or add-ons. For instance, you may consider giving away two copies of your game or including a free soundtrack for the price of a pre-order. For more on general marketing strategies, check out my Indie Game Marketing Checklist.

Forging Alliances With Other Campaigns

There is a misconception among some game developers that anyone launching a campaign similar to yours is the enemy. After all, aren’t they stealing your potential backers?

This couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, the more like-minded the campaign, the more beneficial it is for you to get in contact with its creator. Remember, the average backer doesn’t donate to just one or two projects. If they’re passionate about a particular genre of gaming, they’ll likely spread the wealth to every worthwhile team developing a game within their beloved genre. By engaging in conversation with other creators, you can quickly establish a measure of trust. This trust might lead to them dropping a timely plug in one of their updates, asking their backers to check out your game. In turn, you could do the same.

I can say without a doubt that forging alliances with other campaign creators is one of the best ways to increase your chances of success.

Updates

While your campaign is running, be sure to provide frequent updates. Listed below are a few ways to get the most mileage out of them:

• Do not encumber your backers with updates: One or two updates per week is more than enough. Any more and your backers may become frustrated. As much as I liked the idea behind SpaceVenture, 50 updates in a 30 day period was far too many, and probably had a negative effect on their campaign.
• Save a few pieces of content for your updates: Updates need to be meaningful. Just checking in and letting backers know you’re still alive isn’t enough. Instead, reserve some artwork, music, concept art and gameplay footage specifically for your updates.
• Link to press coverage: Doing so might impress your backers enough to start spreading the word about your game in their own social media circles. It may also encourage other media outlets to cover your campaign.

The Last 48 Hours

It’s crunch time – the clock is ticking, and you have yet to meet your goal. Feelings of despair and desperation are becoming more and more frequent. So what do you do about it?

• If you have enough backers, encourage each of them to raise the amount of their pledge by a nominal amount.
• Get together with your team members and run a live stream. This will allow backers to identify with your plight and might encourage them to donate more, especially if they see you freaking out.
• Gauge whether it’s time to pull the plug. If the odds of your project succeeding look grim, consider pulling the plug early. Even if your project is successfully funded, if you’re relying on a few massive pledges to get you over the hump, it might be best to cancel the project. Why? Because if one of those big pledges doesn’t process, you’ll be out a lot of money and will still be obligated to honor the rewards.

Conclusion

One of the first things I said after our Kickstarter for Hiro Fodder ended was, “Well, suddenly developing a game doesn’t seem so bad.”  In truth, I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been, and because of that I had to resort to desperate tactics in order to succeed. It was a nerve wracking, frantic month where little development was done on the actual game. But it was also an exciting month and a terrific learning experience that I would never take back. And next time, if there is a next time, I’ll be ready. Hopefully, with all the resources currently available on the net, including this article of course, you will be too.

I’ve been meaning to write a post-mortem on the Hiro Fodder: A Blue Hope Kickstarter campaign for some time, but I always felt like I wasn’t ready. The last year has been a whirlwind of highs and lows, development breakthroughs and failures. It’s been marked by periods of renewed hope and financial distress. Throughout it all, my team of extremely talented, grossly underpaid gaming enthusiasts have stayed by my side. It’s wasn’t always pretty, but we persevered.

Finally, after 19 months of working together, we’ve hit a groove. After all this time, the development process is somewhat streamlined. And because of that, I feel ready to recount my experiences with Kickstarter and how it both helped (and forced) me to live out my dream. Along the way, I’ll share what I think we did right, what we could have done better, and ways in which we completed goofed.

• A No-Name Developer’s Guide to Succeeding on Kickstarter

Why Kickstarter?

Hiro Fodder went into production in January 2012. We made a previous attempt to develop the game in 2010, but then opted to create a few smaller games first. That was a good decision. We lacked the experience, funding, team members and business know-how to create a game, and while we certainly weren’t experts by early-2012, we had at least established a solid understanding of the industry. And releasing four smaller games on XBLIG did wonders for our confidence.

It was around this time that I decided Hiro Fodder would not, and could not, be a clone of other RPGs from the SNES era. If I really wanted to create a bad version of Final Fantasy VI, I could buy RPG Maker and create the game myself. So we made the decision to go out, hire an engine programmer, and build Hiro Fodder from the ground up. I would shift over to Game and Level Designer and would write the story with my co-founder. Hiro Fodder would feature hand-drawn art, complex animations, sleek maps, somewhat dynamic NPCs, and semi-sophisticated AI, and would offer players a measure of choice, both in how they explored the world and built their characters. In short, it would use SNES RPGs as a starting point, and then go off in 50 new directions.

My ambition would end up being costly. Within five months, I had ran through the $10,000 I set aside for the game. My first mistake was not fully grasping the game’s scope. In order to make even a small RPG, hundreds or even thousands of art assets have to be created. It took my programmer, who began the project as a seasoned hobbyist, nearly five months to get the fundamentals of our engine working. Luckily, my composer and story-writer were working as volunteers, but because of that they didn’t really take the project as seriously as those who were getting paid. Hard to blame them.

Needing money for at least one more artist and to keep my programmer working, I turned to Kickstarter.

Budgeting Mishaps

After careful evaluation, which in retrospect would prove not careful enough, I reasoned that I would need an additional $30,000 to complete Hiro Fodder. But thirty grand seemed like an awful lot to ask for- after all, Divergent Games wasn’t exactly a tour de force of the gaming industry. Therefore, I elected to take a more conservative route: I would ask for $12,500 and raise the additional $17,500 through my various day jobs as a writer and application developer. If being funded on Kickstarter meant that I wouldn’t have to dump a penny into the game for at least another few months, it would be worth it.

That was a mistake. One piece of advice I can give to developers considering a Kickstarter is: never low-ball your funding goal. It’s better to shoot for the stars and fail then to successfully raise a smaller amount and still not be able to produce a finished product in a reasonable time period. Why? Because once your campaign succeeds there is no turning back. Well, there is, but your reputation within the gaming community will forever be tainted.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have asked for at least $20,000; at least then I’d have a bit more breathing room. As it stood, we raised a little over $13,000. About $1,100 of that went to Kickstarter and Amazon fees, another couple of hundred failed to process, and another $1,000 had to be devoted to shipping out backer rewards. What I didn’t account for was the cost of actually creating backer gifts – another $1,500 or so.  When all was said and done, about $9,000 was left to actually develop the game. By the time it dried up, I had only saved another $7,000 or so, for a total of $16,000, so I was still $14,000 short of my projected goal.

My troubles didn’t end there. Because we had to quickly prepare a demo for the campaign, we were forced to cut some corners. We hard-coded aspects of the game, we implemented more than a few programming hacks, and we used cheap, makeshift art wherever possible. All of this would have to be redone after the campaign ended. Combine this with the fact that I had to focus the majority of May 2012 running the campaign and not working on the game, and we were in a big hole.

It’s a hole that we have just dug ourselves out of. To date, Hiro Fodder is approximately 60% done. The engine is mostly ready, we’ve written a ton of custom Lua functions for scripting, the majority of the art assets are finished, and the main plot and all of the essential dialog is written. But we’ve only built about one-quarter of the bloody game. The good news is that once you have the assets and tools, bringing your idea to life is almost fun, at least in comparison.

The total amount of money spent on Hiro Fodder thus far is about $41,000 – roughly $1,000 over my initial budget, and I still owe my team about $5,000 more. But at least we turned the corner.

The Campaign: What Worked

1. Analyzing similar Kickstarter campaigns: JRPGs typically don’t get funded on Kickstarter. Most of them are rather generic, feature stock art, are made in RPG Maker, or a combination of all three. One of the keys to our success was realizing this and making a point on our project page that Hiro Fodder wasn’t like other RPGs. For the most part, it worked.
2. Good pitch video: Our video featured tons of gameplay, story bits and concept art. Only after we showed off the game for a full two minutes did I introduce myself as the Lead Designer. Two other team members volunteered to be in front of the camera, which also helped.
3. Cross-plugging: About a week into our campaign, which was treading water at the time, another campaign creator approached me and asked if I could plug his game in my next update. In turn, he would reciprocate the favor. I noticed that he was also creating a JRPG, and quite a good one at that, so I agreed. Our unlikely alliance paid immediate dividends. Immediately after he plugged us, our campaign received an influx of donations.
4. Frequent, but not too frequent updates: I posted updates exactly twice a week for the first three weeks, and four times during the last week. In each update, I either linked to a new media piece, or posted new artwork. Every update was relevant, and I encourage other developers to only post updates when there is something worthwhile to show or say.
5. Family and friends: I had heard about the trough (the middle portion of a Kickstarter campaign, when donations grind to a near halt), and was prepared for it. Instead of asking my family and friends to donate early in the project, I had them wait until Day 14 or so. At the time, only one or two donations were coming in each day. This strategic planning helped us gain a more favorable spot on the Most Popular list.
6. Non-physical rewards: By offering mostly digital rewards, we saved ourselves a lot of money that was better spent elsewhere. The few physical rewards we did offer were reserved for the higher tiers.

A Simple Comment

I firmly believe that the sole reason we were successful is because of one little comment. Allow me to explain:

I had been following Echoes of Eternea closely. Their campaign was featured by Kickstarter, and because of that was widely successful- perhaps too successful. The creator Ryan was new to game development and, due to his project’s popularity, felt obligated to make lofty promises to his backers.

His original intention was to develop the game in RPG Maker. Realizing that RPG Maker wouldn’t be powerful enough to create his game, Ryan asked the community if they would mind if the game was based on a simple turn-based mechanic instead of the promised ATB system. Suffice to say, they did not care for this idea.

Not even thinking about a partnership at the time, I posted on E.o.E’s thread, offering my help. Ryan and I got to talking and eventually agreed that it would be in his best interest to use our engine. In return, without me even asking, he plugged our game. That night, our activity increased 20-fold. To date, Ryan and I have formed a great friendship and we’re proud to offer our programming skills to his game.

The Campaign and its Aftermath: Mistakes

Besides the budgeting issues, we made other mistakes that hurt our campaign. In no particular order:

1. Poor graphical presentation – For the most part, the artwork we presented in our demo was pretty bad. Our concept art was fine, but the tilesets and sprites were made on the fly by someone who really didn’t have much experience creating that type of art. Hiro ended up looking more like a fat kid who ate too many blueberry muffins than an angry slime hell-bent on revenge.
2. Campaign management – If I had to do it all over again, I would devote one person to answering questions, contacting the media and monitoring donations. Running a campaign, working a day job and developing a game was too much for me to handle.
3. Contacting the press – We waited until about ten days into our campaign to contact the press. Big mistake. Luckily, we still managed to coerce Rock, Paper, Shotgun into writing a feature on Hiro Fodder. A few outlets, like Cinema Blend, wrote articles on Hiro Fodder without us even asking. Still, we should have prepared and sent out some sort of press kit before the campaign launched, or at least near the beginning
4. Stretch goals – These were a relatively new concept at the time. Not knowing what they were until towards the end of the campaign, I ended up adding only one. At $13,500 we would create a cut-scene. We never reached the goal, but ended up doing the cut-scene anyway.
5. Relying too much on plugs – Asking another team for a plug is not a bad thing, if done selectively. But towards the end of our campaign, I started feeling a little desperate and began asking more than a few RPG creators for plugs on Kickstarter, Facebook and Twitter.
6. Release date – Our targeted release date was overly optimistic. The reasoning behind my estimated delivery date of January 2013 was partly that I didn’t want to admit to myself that Hiro Fodder would take at least another 18 months to make, and partly that I thought that a later estimate might drive away some potential backers from throwing money at our project. In reality, I should have opted for a more conservative, yet still optimistic release date of August 2013. Yes, I realize that it’s already August and the game isn’t finished, but at least it’s much closer to being done.
7. Don’t work with friends – I founded Divergent Games with two of my best friends. Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine folks, but asking two guys to work in exchange for royalties they wouldn’t see for years wasn’t the best idea, especially since Hiro Fodder is my brainchild. I don’t think they fully understood the commitment necessary to develop a game. Then again, at the time, neither did I.
8. Forging an alliance with E.o.E – Earlier, I mentioned that a comment I made on E.o.E’s page turned out to be the key to our success. But it also committed me to working on a smaller, albeit similar, game. So while our partnership is still mostly a good thing, customizing an engine for two games, writing scripts, creating maps and working a day job can be a bit overwhelming. In addition, my programmer and I have been forced to work on games and applications for outside clients, just to fund our own. It’s certainly not an ideal situation, and one that has contributed to Hiro Fodder’s delay.

Charts and Graphs

Listed below are a few visuals depicting the progress and breakdown of our campaign. They’re lifted straight from our Kickstarter page, and should provide some interesting information to those considering a campaign:

Conclusion

You know how when you reach a certain age you say to yourself, “Man I wish I could go back in time. I’d do things so much differently”? Well, that’s exactly how I feel. Sure, I managed to run a successful campaign, but it took a heroic last-minute effort and a lot of luck. And, looking back, we needed to have raised at least $5,000 more for it to have been worth it. As it stands, I’m still paying my team out of my own savings account, and am still at least a few months away from beta.

Still, the game is getting done, and who knows how long it would have taken without Kickstarter’s help. So, in the end, I’m grateful – especially to those who backed our project. But if I had to do it all over again, and I likely will, I’d run a much tighter ship.

Opinion Piece – Why IndieCity Is A Waste Of Time is taken from: GameMaker Blog

If you are a registered iOS or Mac OS X developer, Apple will let you distribute your game on iTunes and through the Mac App Store. Windows 8 also has its own software store now. Even developers of online games can submit to online portals, or let online search engines act as a catalogue (searching for flash-based casino games in Google for example).

For developers targeting Windows XP/Vista/7 users, there is no “default” distribution store for applications. Instead, you’ll have to find a games portal like Bigfish, or partner with a distribution service like Steam.

Most of us won’t be getting a game onto Bigfish or Steam anytime soon, but smaller-scale alternatives do exist. One of them is IndieCity.

IndieCity offers a downloadable client which behaves similarly to the Steam client, allowing customers to download your game, find new updates, and earn achievements along the way (using the IndieCity API). As a developer, you get to create and control the store page of your game, as well as a page representing your brand or company. IndieCity is rich with features providing everything you need to sell your games.

Well, except for customers.

I built a game, City Sandbox, using GameMaker Studio and decided to distribute it through IndieCity, as well as other similar websites. Unfortunately, IndieCity has been a big waste of time for me.

Over a three month period between May and July, my game sold 12 copies through IndieCity. I was later informed that 11 of those 12 “sales” were not actually sales at all; a member of the staff told me these were free downloads made by testers, who were making sure the product worked. This meant only one legitimate sale had occurred.

The sale was in June. The customer could not install the game properly due to a problem with the IndieCity client, and I had to step in to provide an alternative download link. What exactly had those 11 test downloads achieved if the client wasn’t working properly?

My game has been selling well on other, more established stores. The iPad and Mac versions sell daily. The game also sells copies for Windows through GamersGate, and has been making the odd sale on the Windows Store following a low-key release. I have not gone above and beyond to advertise the game, but I haven’t put any less effort into encouraging people to buy through IndieCity compared to the other stores I have been selling on. Perhaps the requirement to use the IndieCity client is a deal-breaker for potential customers. Buyers can get the standalone version of my game from GamersGate with far less hassle.

I don’t blame people for not wanting to buy games through IndieCity. The client isn’t great. There is nothing wrong with the software per se, but the servers are clearly struggling and download speeds are rubbish. My game, which is less than 100 megabytes, took about an hour to download!

IndieCity isn’t terrible. I like the website, the staff are friendly, and it’s great how virtually anyone can sign up and have a chance to sell their game. Unfortunately, IndieCity suffers from a lack of real customers. You might sell something, but don’t expect to earn a living this way. You can download free games on IndieCity too, and they tend to do better, but even then the statistics are discouraging.

When browsing through the highest played games, the lack of comments and votes on products makes the place feel like a ghost town. The ratings on my game page were from testers alone; it makes me wonder if any of the votes on any of the games are from real customers.

I’m not the only one who is having trouble. Making any sales at all through IndieCity seems to be an uphill challenge for other budding game developers as well. Evidence of this can be found in a forum topic posted early this year on the IndieCity forum, where one developer professes to having made no sales over a period of months.

The combination of my experience, and the reports of other game creators (be they hobbyists or not) was enough to make me conclude that using IndieCity is a waste of time.

City Sandbox is no longer selling on IndieCity (using the term “selling” loosely). My experience with IndieCity is straight-forward: great site, great staff, dismal sales. Sadly, only one of those factors truly matters when it comes to distributing a commercial product.

Nintendo will focus on independent developers and highlight the Wii U's self-publishing capabilities at GDC Europe this month, according to a press release from Nintendo Europe today.

Nintendo will have staff on-hand in Cologne, Germany to teach developers about self-publishing on the Nintendo eShop. Attendees can learn about developing for the Wii U with HTML and JavaScript through the Nintendo Web Framework from 1-2 p.m. local time Aug 19. They can also learn about developing with Unity and the publishing process from 1-2 p.m. local time Aug. 20. Nintendo and Unity Technologies announced a partnership that allows Wii U developers to use the mutli-platform development software last September. The Nintendo-sponsored sessions were r...

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First, the unique downloads:Inferno+ takes the early lead, and maintains it until it drops off of the Escape Artists feature list.  Early on, both games had essentially the same amount of visibility, and Inferno+ was clearly the leader.

Around 7/25, OUYA put Ballistic SE on their Featured Games list (2nd to last on the list).  So it shot up for a while.  Today it moved up a few slots on that list, and Inferno+ is now on BAWB’s list.  Those numbers for 8/1 represent a small portion of today, so I expect both games will have far more downloads today than yesterday.  As with all digital storefronts, exposure = downloads.  We can also see with Inferno+’s last week what the minimum exposure (searching and genre lists) will get you, download-wise on OUYA.

Now the sales numbers:

Here, we see that Inferno+ generally beats Ballistic SE in sales, except when Ballistic has far more exposure.  The totals for ~2 weeks of data:

Inferno+

Downloads: 1,592

Sales: 157

Conversion: 9.86%

Thumbs Up: 128

Ballistic SE

Downloads: 1,721

Sales: 104

Conversion: 6.04%

Thumbs Up: 114

[NOTE: Don't compare previous OUYA download stats to these downloads, because these are lower due to them being unique downloads.  They just started making these kind of stats available recently.]

Given the games are $2.99, those conversion rates are actually pretty decent.  As I expected, Inferno+ is doing better than Ballistic SE, just like it does on other platforms (exposure being equal, which is isn’t always).  I’ll probably still port Fireball SE, just because it’ll be fun, and you never know when someone will feature a game (it’s done way better than I imagined on Google Play because it got featured).  Super Crossfire will be coming too, though not until a little later.

Compared to early XBLIG totals or other platforms, these numbers are really not that good.  Luckily I only spent a few days on each port.  It would be nice to have more downloads, of course, and exposure is the key to that.  I’ve started a bit of advertising on OUYAForum.com to see if that will help, and hopefully they will get some continued (and maybe better) exposure on the OUYA lists.  I should probably also do OUYA-specific trailers, but I’m not sure the time investment is worth it.

Updates Coming, Multiplayer Uncertain

I’ll be doing some minor updates to both games soon-ish.  Just to fix some minor problems and add a Buy screen at the end of the demo.  Multiplayer for Inferno+ will be coming eventually, assuming the games eventually reach 1,000 sales (or starts to get close).

XNA, XBLIG, and Me (aka The Story of GameMarx)

by Michael C. Neel of GameMarx.com

In November 2008, the same month Xbox Live Community Games launched, I organized a geek dinner.  I wanted to make sure there was some real geekery involved, so two days before the dinner I downloaded Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio.  Until that weekend I had never developed a game.

This is not to say I never thought about it.  I have been reading about game development since the early 90′s.  My favorite topic is implementation of artificial intelligence.  By 2008 I had read at least 10 books on game programming and installed the DirectX SDK on three separate occasions.  Generally the process was install DirectX, follow some basic tutorials, see the effort required to make an actual game, loose interest.

XNA was different.  In two days I went from knowing nothing to having a fully working Atari 2600 Combat clone.  I went to the geek dinner with more than just some example code, I had a working game.  I never got to share much code though.  Some people brought kids and the kids wanted to play the game non-stop.  They fully enjoyed this crude little game and got too loud shouting exclamations of fun for the other patrons.  A game that I made!  Granted I stole 100% of the gameplay but seeing the kids faces I was  hooked.  This is the drug that makes indie game developers, aka people willing to starve making something that will make them no money.

Around this time I remember looking at the games in Xbox Live Community Games (now Xbox Live Indie Games).  There was some weird junk like In The Pit (a game with no graphics) and sin(Surfing) (more tech demo than game).  There was also fun games like Weapon of Choice (Contra inspired shooter) and Blow (artistic physics puzzle game by yes, that David Flook).  It was a bizarre freak show of gaming that welcomed everyone to join it.  That has always been best thing about XBLIG, anyone can share their game.  To paraphrase the mis-attributed Voltaire quote, “I think your game is shit, but I’ll defend to the death your right to publish it.”

It would be a year before I could focus on game development again.  I had just launched CodeStock, and had CodeStock 2009 to plan.  I wasn’t completely passive however, in the between time I talked Dylan Wolf into forming FuncWorks with me.  Dylan is by far one of the best programmers I’ve known (also, not found of me linking that post).  We work well together, never clashing on egos.  Probably because he accommodates my ego and I don’t notice.  Shorty there after, acknowledging we need a graphic artist, we add my then girlfriend now wife Cicelie.

As CodeStock 2009 wrapped, we focused on game development (after a brief attempt at a t-shirt site for Cicelie).  With the experience of hosting the Chainsaw Buffett podcast I launched the Feel the Func podcast.  This turned out to be the smartest thing I did, though it was just a side project at the time.  I also did a really dumb thing, common among new game developers.  I made a teaser video for a game that four years later still is nowhere near done.

It doesn’t look like much, but as a developer I had created a model, animated that model (which is why the walk cycle sucks), rendered it in game, moved it with a controller, and blended the animation with user input (turning the torso).  I wish I had a video of Cicelie’s model moving (the mech screenshot at the end) because she did a much better job than I.

In the next few months we began to realize the size of scope required for ROCS.  My oldest daughter wanted a game she had been playing at school for her birthday called Rumis.  I suggested we pause on ROCS and create a game based on Rumis called IncaBlocks.  I also decided I was not under enough stress and signed a publishing contract for my first (and only) eBook the XNA 3D Primer.  Both were completed in the next three months.

I learned a lot in those three months.  First, I have no desire to be an author even though I enjoy writing.  Second, I suck at game design.

IncaBlocks flopped, and flopped hard.  Not even a dead cat bounce.  The best thing I can say about IncaBlocks is it wasn’t ROCS.  If I had taken my dream game and killed it with the mistakes I made on IncaBlocks I don’t think I could have recovered.  I had little emotional investment in IncaBlocks and it was easy to do a cold, clinical autopsy.  Final verdict?  The game is not fun and there is no awareness of XBLIG even within the Xbox community.

I wasn’t sure what to do about the first problem, but I had an idea on the second and GameMarx was born.  The idea was to create an XBLIG review site that treated indies as AAA games were treated.  This mean not just reviews and news, but also podcasts and videos plus a database of games.  Websites and podcasts I knew, but I had a lot to learn about video production.  One of these days I’ll dig out the very first episode of “The Show” that was scrapped and reshot, but man is it rough.

Reviews were serious business at GameMarx.  We create a set of standards and guidelines and followed it religiously.  The biggest rules we didn’t write down: the price of a game is never a factor, avoid the “angry reviewer” style, and a review is the personal view of the author, nothing more.  These rules required a lot of time and effort from a reviewer, but we still ended up writing a combined 99 reviews in the year we spent on written reviews.

There were only a handful of video reviews done.  I wish we had done more of these, but they took a lot of time to edit (I still need to finish editing Dylan’s video review of Aesop’s Garden).  Instead we created a segment on The Show to talk about new releases and recent reviews while playing the games.  This concept lead to GameMarx Trials where we played a game’s trial mode site unseen.  Far from a review (each episode starts off with “this is not a review” title card) these were much easier to produce quickly and get out while the games were still on the new release list.

As GameMarx grew it became clear that XBLIG websites had the same problem as the games – no awareness.  We were far from the only site covering XBLIG, and I decided to build a website of websites that would link us all together (webrings for those old like me).  I contacted all the sites I knew of, got permission, and also contacted Nick Gravelyn and Andy Dunn (aka the ZMan) about taking over the domain XboxIndies.  The site keeps a database of XBLIG, sales and chart performance, and also aggregates news and reviews from the participating sites.  We even made a small API for mobile app developers (check out XBLIG Companion).

In the news category we pretty much had our hands full covering Microsoft’s neglect of the service.  In 2010 Indie Games were moved into specialty shops behind avatar clothing.  I wrote numerous articles about the limitations of XBLIG imposed by Microsoft on pricing and features.  Frozen sales data.  Game rating manipulations.  Dashboard freezes.

None of these articles got much mainstream attention.  So in 2011 when the XBLIG section was again buried, I took my growing video editing skills and created a video using Major Nelson’s own words against him.  This is GameMarx most popular non-boob video to date:

Didn’t make the cut, but there was a bit for the video where I tried to voice search for “Cthulhu Saves the World” and “Zeboyd Games” with no success.  (If you want to know the most viewed video including boobs you’ll have to find it yourself.)

At the end of 2011 we decided to step away from covering the games.  The site was growing, but it was clear to us the effort required was going to mean that’s all we did.  In 2011 we played every game released on XBLIG so before hanging it up we did the GameMarx 2011 XBLIG Game Awards.

What made it easy to leave was XboxIndies had a steady flow of content from other sites, and Indie Gamer Chick was here to stay.  While Cathy has a different style, and is dead wrong about review scores (no I’m not), she is getting attention for XBLIG developers and games.  I’m also 37 and she’s still in high school I think with the I-don’t-have-three-daughters kind of free time I don’t.  This means not only can she review many more games, but also has time to put together a project like the Indie Royale Indie Gamer Chick Bundle.

Leaving the review world meant we had a bunch of game codes we no longer had a right to use.  So we created the GameMarx Indie Mega-Pack Giveaway to unload the extra codes (with permission of course).  Several XBLIG developers contributed more codes and we ended up over 50 games to giveaway.  Voice actress Rina-chan lent her talents to the promo video.  We also ran a survey of the entries and collected some data on what gamers think about XBLIGs.

Getting back to development was a wonderful feeling.  I took an idea I had for a game called Captain Dubstep and made a goal of submitting it to Dream Build Play 2012.  At this point most of us XNA developers admitted XNA was dead from Microsoft’s point of view, so I created a site called “XNA’s Last Dance” and extended an invite to XNA developers to add their blogs and commit to entering what was the last Dream Build Play competition for XNA.  This site wasn’t a success in terms of traffic, but it had a since of community behind it and I’ll probably bring over the idea of the site into GameMarx later this year.

What happened to Captain Dubstep?  Well, the game wasn’t fun but we did manage to make the deadline.  We did a whole postmortem at GMX 2012 if you care about the gritty details, but let’s just say we had no scope defined so it was a train wreck of direction changes.

I looked at the screenshots and was like “What is he talking about? It doesn’t look bad at all!” Then I watched the trailer, and was like “um, this looks like the worst thing ever created by man.  Way worse than Ouya.”

I wish I could say the rest of 2012 was as productive.  We did launch a few open source XNA based projects including XTiled and XSpriter.  Most of the time though we spent in limbo, not sure of where to go after XNA.  We changed the podcast to “mike only” and tried our hands at Let’s Play videos.  I thought exploiting my daughters by making them play NES games on camera would be internet gold, but creating a viral video is harder than it looks.  It also has become clear that making Let’s Play videos takes more time than anything else we’ve done, and would kill any time for game dev.

In May of 2013 I participated in the Ludum Dare, and in a weekend created the game Quest.  For the first time I used Unity and I loved it (after a brief period of projecting my old XNA girlfriend on it).  Unity is not like XNA in that you will do more scripting than programming, but once you get the hang of the IDE you can be much faster.  The asset store is also a huge plus for a Unity developer – tons of art is a few bucks away.

Ludum Dare has a since of community I haven’t felt since the “good ol’e days” of XNA.  If you’re a game developer, go now and mark your calendar for the next completion date.  There are three full competitions a year and mini-LD competitions just about every month.  I cannot recommend this more.

So what’s next for GameMarx and the FuncWorks crew?  I’ve had plenty of time to think on this while recovering from having all teeth extracted due to extended radiotherapy I received ten years ago (fun FuncWorks fact: both Dylan and I are cancer survivors).  The podcast will return shortly and will stay developer focused (probably with more Unity talk).  If the content is useful to other developers I cannot say but hosting it has forced me to study deeper into game design that I would have on my own.

I want to continue Let’s Plays, but with a focus on Indies.  The indier the better.  I’d like to get to a point where I can regularly cover indies in GreenLight or Kickstater.  Yes, that means betas and prototypes.  I have no interest in the review side of things, I’ll leave that to Cathy and her growing staff (besides, she isn’t a fan of Kickstarter so I won’t have to worry about her page views crushing mine).  This doesn’t mean I will play anything, I’m only going to play a game if I find it interesting at some level.  And this doesn’t mean only positive comments – sending me your baby’s prototype means I can comment on how ugly it is even if it’s really smart.  Also it has been eating paint chips so you might wanna check on that.

I’m still kicking around game ideas for FuncWorks.  I want to get out another game or two in Unity before attempting anything like ROCS.

What about Microsoft?  Well Unity means I won’t be making any XBLIGs for the Xbox360.  The Xbox One?  Who knows, even Microsoft can’t figure out what the Xbox One will be for Indies and with no plans for Indies at launch I see no reason to make any plans myself.  If they get their act together and create a viable program I’ll look into it.  Keep in mind while they announced/reversed their self publishing stance this week the XBLIG dashboard was frozen.  Microsoft has yet to put indies on an equal playing field with publisher backed games in any of their stores.  Call me jaded, but I just spent the last five years waiting for them to deliver on the promise of “democratize game distribution” and will need to see proof before believing this time is real.

Last, a big thank you to the fans and community who have shared in our journey.  I’m still surprised and smile every time someone sends us an email!

Last week, Indie Royale offered a video game bundle that was named after (and hand-picked by) our very own Cathy Vice, the Indie Gamer Chick. The bundle sold very, very well.  I know that fact pleased Cathy a great deal and it definitely put a broad smile on my face as well.  We both deeply appreciate the immense support we get from the indie gaming community as a whole. What more can I say than: YOU GUYS ROCK!

So, now it is my turn to play/review the games that are in the bundle. I wanted to have these reviews up while the bundle was “live” but, unfortunately, real life concerns got in the way of that. And since there are 11 games here total (including the bonus titles as well), I’m going to keep my opinions as concise as I possibly can.

So without further ado, here are my uncensored thoughts on the games offered in the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle:

DEAD PIXELS (CSR STUDIOS)

Fire BAAAAD!

I think I’ve mentioned this previously, but I’ve kind of had it with the whole zombie thing. I mean, really…isn’t this fucking over yet? I just don’t get the gaming community’s fascination with these undead mounds of shambling flesh.

But, I digress…

The game itself is a good deal of fun, if a bit repetitive and you can get past the played-out zombie motif. Basically, what you do in Dead Pixels is run-and-gun in a 2D, pixelated environment and shoot the everlovin’ shit out of wave after wave (well, street after street here) of increasingly difficult zombie bastards. There’s a good deal to collect and a good many weapons to choose from to aid you in your zombie killing ways. My favorite parts though were all the sly references to other games (most notably the Resident Evil series) and films. Good times.

ANTIPOLE (SATURNINE GAMES)

Is that Lionel Ritchie? When did they make a Lionel Ritchie game??

Antipole is a relatively clever platformer with a cool gravity-manipulating mechanic. You play as a lone mercenary who has to infiltrate a robot mothership and take it down to end the mechanized tyranny of the machines.

Although it was fun for a time, I must say that I bored of this title rather quickly, and once I played through four or five levels I had no desire to pick it up again. As I said, the gravity manipulating mechanic is sweet; I just would’ve liked to see it applied in some different and/or more creative ways as the game progressed.

LITTLE RACERS STREET (MILKSTONE STUDIOS)

It’s race day, bitches!

I’m not big on racing games on the whole, but I enjoyed Little Racers Street because it reminded me a great deal of one of my favorite racing games of all time, RC Pro Am. LRS doesn’t have any of the weaponry and gadgets that Pro Am had but it does offer a metric fuckton of upgrades, options and customizability for your mini-cars. It is also a blast to play and offers a pretty damn good challenge, as Pro Am did, as well.

One bad thing I came across in LRS though was that I couldn’t run the game in full-screen mode on my PC. It would crash and burn every time I tried to run it that way, so keep in mind that you may need to run it in “windowed” mode to play. Not that big a deal, but it may piss some people off…like me.

ORBITRON: REVOLUTION (FIREBASE INDUSTRIES)

Shoot all the spinny things…or else!

This game is a straight-up Defender clone with current gen visuals slapped on top of it. Now, if you are going to clone an old-school arcade game, you could do much worse than the 1980 Williams Electronics classic, I suppose. Orbitron is pretty fun to play and does offer a few twists (time trials and the like) on the traditional, shmup-styled game.

The player can choose from two ships at the outset, one red and blue, and one piloted by man and the other by a woman. There’s really no difference between the two, so, why? Essentially, what you have to do here is defend (See what I did there? You know you guys missed my scintillating wit…) an orbiting, circuitous space station from nasty alien types who are trying to blow up said space station. And if they succeed, BOOM goes the dynamite and your game is over.

Orbitron has 2D/3D graphics which are well done, but I found it hard to see some enemies at times. Also, the controls are a bit “floaty,” whereas Defender’s were spot on, which they need to be in any twitchy shmup.

Again, this an experience that I had some fun with for a time…but once I put it down that was it.

CHESTER (BRILLIANT BLUE-G GAMES)

Chester, I hate to tell you this, but your ass is on fire…

An enjoyable and breezy romp through platformer-land that obviously takes inspiration from the Rayman series and Super Mario Brothers 3, and that is in no way a knock or disparagement.

There’s tons of stuff to collect, discover and unlock in Chester and it’s all tied together with jaunty, humorous tone that’s rather infectious. It also has a cool, elemental based (water, fire and grass) power system that’s well implemented, but it also has some of the “punisher’s” failings in later levels.

And, oh yeah, the soundtrack in Chester is surprisingly rockin’ as well.

LASERCAT (MONSTER JAIL)

To quote Towelie, “I have no idea what’s goin’ on…”

I own three cats and none of them have laser based powers, I’m sad to say, and neither does the cat in this game…but it does glow/pulse in a pretty badass, lasery way.

I think I consciously avoided this game on XBLIG because it reminded me of the SNL Digital Shorts of (almost) the same name, which were funny, but one can only take so much Andy Samberg. The same goes for LaserCat, I’m afraid. I could only take so much of it. It feels like an art project/experiment more than a full-fledged game. But, to its credit, it does have an addicting quality where you want to play until you find just one more key and answer one more trivia question. At the end of the day though, LaserCat is just another platformer…with a super tight, quasi-techno soundtrack.

SPYLEAKS (HEARTBIT INTERACTIVE)

Evil guy wants you to take his money.

This is a different experience in that it is an odd hybrid of an espionage/puzzle game and a shmup. 80% of the time you’re a spy (with the overly original name of “Spy”) who is wandering around high security buildings doing spy-type things in a 2D, top-down view. The other 20% of the time, you’re uploading your spy-pal, Julian, into various computer terminals where he does his thing, which is shooting space invadery, computer-virus-things from a vertical (up and down rather than left to right) shmup perspective. Strangely enough, it works in this context and is quite entertaining. I actually laughed out loud when the game switched to this mode for the first time and not because it’s bad or anything; it was more out of total astonishment that the game actually went to shmup-land.

But, be sure to bring your thinking caps when playing SpyLeaks, kiddos, because you’ll really have to use your wits to conquer each area. This game is a challenge from the word go…and that’s a good thing. I’m of the mind that too many of today’s games spoon feed their players, but not SpyLeaks, so check it out when you have a moment; I found it surprisingly engaging.

SMOOTH OPERATORS (HEYDECK GAMES)

This must be one of the circles of Hell.

I saved this game for last because I truthfully have zero interest in a game like this. I’m not a businessman, nor will I ever be a businessman. And on the slight chance I was to ever to become a businessman, I certainly wouldn’t open and operate a fucking call center. I mean, what is fun about owning and operating a fucking call center?  Nothing. Nothing is fun about owning and operating a fucking call center. I can’t even imagine a scenario where someone would say, “Hey, you know what I want to play? A game where I open a call center and handle the day-to-day operations. You know, the minutia and all that related shit. That would be sooooo awesome!”

Only out of completeness’ sake did I give Smooth Operators a whirl…and it’s not too bad, actually. It’s clearly well designed and great deal of TLC went into the making of it. I had my business, Assclown Telephony, up and running in no time. I was adding floors to my building, hiring call center stooges and making money like a motherfuckin’ BOSS, yo.  And that’s where it’s at.

So, if an easy-breezy business sim is what gets your rocks off, honey, then Smooth Operators is the game for you.

But I’ll never play it again. Fuck call centers and everything about them, man.

EVIL QUEST (CHAOSOFT GAMES)

Sing it with me now: “I fell in to a burnin’ Ring of Fire…”

Hey, did someone clonk me on the head and switch out my bad ass PC for a Super Nintendo? No? Are you sure? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what happened when I was playing Evil Quest. Beyond the fact that it turns traditional, good vs. evil conventions on their heads, this is a boilerplate action role playing game. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but it does have a “been there, done that” vibe to it overall.

One other thing that stuck out to me with this game was just how awful the cutscene art is. Je-SUS, it is bad. This really doesn’t take away from the solid, if uninspired, gameplay at all, but it is rather jarring and amateurish.

48 CHAMBERS (DISCORD GAMES)

Well, this looks simple enough, right?

This is a game my wife would love and excel at…and I think it’s well done too. She digs Zuma, Bejeweled, Candy Crush and most “casual” games of that ilk, and 48 Chambers fits right into that addictive mold. It’s an interesting, little puzzle game where speed and precision are paramount. All you have to do is collect the orbs and keys then exit the chamber in the time allotted, which is easier said than done, of course.

My only real complaint here is that this title would be better suited on mobile and/or touchscreen platform and not a PC or console. If there isn’t a mobile version of 48 Chambers in the works, Discord, then you should get on that shit, pronto!

SUPER NINJA WARRIOR EXTREME (HO-HUM GAMES)

Blood and random saw blades…just what every game needs.

This game was an interesting hack-and-slash platformer with an Asian motif up until you hit the sixth or seventh level when it falls into the asinine tropes of the punisher, so that’s where I said, “FUCK YOU” and put the controller down.

Also, it has no full screen mode, so that’s a double FUCK YOU.

So, there you have it. My wrap up on the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle – 11 games all told. Six you should definitely check out, and the five I’m not so sure about.

Regardless of my thoughts on each game individually, the main reason I love these bundles, and today’s indie games in general,  is that they remind me of swapping freshly copied  5 ¼ inch floppy disks with my buddy in high school homeroom. Once I got home, slapped that bad boy in my C64’s 1541 floppy drive and typed in LOAD “$”, 8, I almost never knew what I was going to get and that excited me. Imagine that: being excited by a listing of game titles on a disk directory.

Now, I get inundated with press releases and review requests for all kinds of dazzling, interactive entertainment experiences on a daily basis and my pulse barely flickers. The problem with the majority of today’s “triple A” video games is that they lack true inspiration; they lack soul. When I pop the latest and greatest game from EA, 2K, Activision or Ubisoft into my Xbox, I pretty much know what I’m going to get. It’ll be big and loud and technically impressive…but what is it beyond that?  That’s not the case with the majority of today’s indie games and I dig that. Fuck, I’ll go as far as to say that I need that. I need that sense of awe, surprise and giddy enjoyment in my life and indie games (typically) provide that. Indie games have soul in spades.

So, to all you indie devs out there: you keep on doing the interesting things you do and I’ll be here, waiting for you to blow my mind…

If you have epilepsy, do not use this editorial as a baseline for your own ability to play games.  Consult with your doctor before attempting to play any video games. 

in order to play upcoming Xbox Live Arcade title Charlie Murder, I had to ditch my beautiful Sony 3D LCD television and instead slum it on an old projection TV with a fading image.  In addition to that, I had to bring extra lighting into my office, and wear sunglasses.  This was in addition to my normal precautions, which include a proper distance from the screen and my medications.

Photosensitive epilepsy is the hand I was dealt at age sixteen.  I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything as terrifying as my first seizure.  It’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.  But what was really terrifying about it was, I love video games.  They weren’t the only thing I was potentially about to lose out on forever, but they were the thing that at age sixteen I felt I couldn’t live without the most.  It took over a month before my doctor and various specialists were able to deduce what I had.  When I was sat down to have explained to me how my life would unfold from here on out, I remember being too scared to ask if I could play games ever again.  I couldn’t even spit it out, and the doctor excused himself to get me literature and my starter pack of medications.  Finally, I kind of whimpered to my parents “I don’t think I’ll be able to play games again.”  When the doctor walked back into the room, my father was the one who asked.  I felt a literal weight lift off my stomach and shoulders when he said “it’s not out of the question, but she’ll have to exercise caution.”

Ever since my Vintage Hero review, I’ve been besieged by endless requests to try another Mega Man-inspired XBLIG. Well, I actually did purchase Rad Raygun way back when it came out. It became one of two XBLIGs that triggered a seizure in me. The developers of Rad Raygun are not responsible for that at all. I am. I took the risk of playing it. They had warned me that they were unsure about sections of the game and that I should show caution. I played it anyway, because I was like “well, it looks like an original Game Boy game, with pale greens, blacks, and whites. I don’t think it could possibly set off a seizure.” I’m not sure where exactly the spell happened, but there was a moment that caused it. I don’t remember most of my experience with it, but according to Brian, I seemed to be enjoying it despite some objections to the controls. I would also like to say that developers TRU FUN Entertainment were super classy and apologetic about the whole thing, despite having done NOTHING wrong. I appreciated their sympathy and I will look forward to their future projects. They’re good dudes.  You can read a review by my friend Tim Hurley of TheXBLIG.com right here.

I was advised to wait until my body got used to the medication I was given.  In that time, I had exercised extreme caution towards such simple things as turning on lights or watching television.  Games require slightly more attention than passively watching TV, but at least I knew gaming would return to my life.  Then I was given the go ahead to play games, with the understanding that it could be years before I fully had a handle on what could set off a seizure, so caution and supervision would probably be required.  Also, you know how every game has one of those bullshit “remember to take a break every hour” reminders?   Yea, those would never be bullshit for me again.

So obviously I did the happy dance of joyful elation and jumped right back into my beloved games, right?  Well, no.  I remember looking at my Xbox and picturing Russian Roulette in my head.  Literally, that’s what I thought.  I imagined a bullet being loaded into a chamber, and pushing the power button as pulling the trigger.  I didn’t play games that day.  I didn’t play them again for nearly two weeks after I had been given to go-ahead.  The next time I played a game, it was for my Nintendo DS.  With the back-light turned completely off.  It was a game called Lost in Blue, which I had previously started and not finished.  I knew it wasn’t flashy.  It was my ease-back-in game.  Eventually, epilepsy became the boogeyman.  I dealt with it on a regular basis, but not from gaming.  Nearly eight years later, and I’ve probably had seizures as a direct result of playing games maybe five times.

Two of those seizures were the result of games I was reviewing for Indie Gamer Chick.  Do you know whose fault it was that I had those spells?

Mine.  And mine alone.

My doctor made it clear to me: gaming will always be a risk, from here on out, for the rest of my life.  The fact that I can even play games today is something I’m very grateful for.  Epilepsy has limited my life in other ways.  I can’t get my driver’s license.  Nor should I attempt to get it.  I would be a risk to myself and others.  I met a fellow who lives with epilepsy who told me it was bullshit that he couldn’t get his license, even as he conceded that he couldn’t predict his spells.  I thought, “wow, you’re an incredibly selfish human being, are you not?”  Personally, if I had to choose between risking the lives of others on the road or catching the bus, I would think the bus would be a lay-up.  I guess not everyone feels that way.

I am absolutely worried sick that I won’t be able to play Rain. I would guess the game will feature lightning effects, which are typically the cause for those bright, screen-wide strobes that set off seizures in me. Will I be heartbroken if Rain turns out to be off-limits? Yes. Is it the end of the world? No way. There are thousands of games that aren’t off-limits to me. In that sense, I’m extremely lucky. Some people can’t play games at all.

You know, as a kid, I loved attending Golden State Warriors games.  I was obsessed with them.  When I was eight-years-old, I loved Latrell Sprewell so much that I convinced myself that P. J. Carlesimo’s neck must have assaulted Spree’s hands.  Today?  I can’t safely attend Warriors games, because flash bulbs explode for every player introduction, fast-break, dunk, lay-up, or if a visiting star like LeBron James so much as smiles on the bench.

Now imagine if I took my no-Warriors limitation to the extreme and said I would sue the Warriors organization, the city of Oakland, and Oracle Arena if they didn’t ban flash-photography from the building.  Not only that, but force them to also eliminate the flashy home-team introductions, and the rally-graphics from the display screens.  It would create a boring atmosphere for everyone.  Personally, I would hate myself if I caused that.  Yet, since my epilepsy became public knowledge, I’ve had many people afflicted with it say we ought to all come together and file a class-action lawsuit against the gaming industry.  Ummmm, no.  We really shouldn’t.  Because we are in fact not the center of the universe.

I’ve had eight years to accept that not every game is playable by me.  A few years ago, my father got me an Atari Flashback as novelty gift for Christmas.  Oops.  As it turns out, in the dark ages of video games, the only special effect developers had at their disposal was to make the game brightly flash strobes like it was trying to signal for a fucking helicopter to land on your TV.  You know what?  I’m remarkably lucky.  I live in an era where there are thousands of games accessible to me without fear of my personal trigger.  Not only that, but the more hours I put into gaming, the more I’m able to accurately predict when a scene is coming up that will feature my triggers, and I can simply look away.

When I’m asked if I’ve ever played an old Atari 2600 game, if my answer isn’t “yes, I played it when I was a kid” then chances are the answer will be “I can never play it.” Old Atari games rely heavily on strobe effects, which are my personal trigger. I had a seizure playing the game Haunted House on the Atari Flashback my father gave me a couple of years ago. I did play some Atari games before I developed epilepsy. I even had Activision Anthology for my Game Boy Advance and Atari’s Greatest Hits for my Xbox. Chances are I didn’t like the games too much anyway. What can I say? I’m a whippersnapper with no appreciation for the classics.

Not everyone is as lucky as me, and I do sympathize with those that aren’t.  I can’t imagine how my life would have played out if I had to quit gaming at age sixteen.  At the same time, not everyone gets to experience everything the world has to offer.  I know in America we teach that with hard work and perseverance it isn’t true, but unfortunately it is.  If your epilepsy is more severe than mine, maybe gaming is not for you.  Making threats against the game industry, or against hard-working developers is not going to make them sympathetic to your cause.  Changes to the industry will not be forced by angry lawsuits.  Angry lawsuits make people feel like they’re under attack.  Which they kind of are.  I find that not being a bitch about it makes people want to learn from me.  If I berated them for having the nerve to try to be artistic, they might end up not being interested at all in learning how to improve my gaming life.

Do I wish there was a change?  Yes.  I wish developers would make some of their special effects that have no bearing on gameplay optional.  But only if it’s cost efficient to them.  That’s not always the case, but if it is, that option could mean the difference between someone like me playing their game and someone like me only hearing about it.  A perfect example if Fez.  At the time it came out, I had been doing Indie Gamer Chick for less than a year.  My readers hadn’t quite got a feel for what was and wasn’t off-limits for me.  Today?  Hundreds of people have my back, and look out for games that are potentially dangerous for me to play.  I have hundreds of guardian angels whose vigilance protects me on a daily basis, and that is cool as hell.  But at the time Fez came out, I bought the game after some people had played it and said the flashing wasn’t “too bad.”  It took me about an hour to find out that Fez was totally off-limits for me, because I had a minor spell while playing it.

I know Phil Fish is persona non grata today, but actually either he or someone for Polytron Corporation were mortified that Fez posed a risk for me.  They couldn’t believe it, because the game had passed Microsoft’s seizure risk certification.  What they weren’t aware of was that certification only applies to those without a preexisting condition.  If a person already has epilepsy, it means nothing to them.  Is that Microsoft’s fault?  Absolutely not.  Is it Phil Fish or Polytron’s fault I had a seizure while playing Fez?  No.  It’s my fault.  I assumed the risk of playing a game, as my doctor made clear to me.  That risk was realized and I had a spell.  Fish and Polytron couldn’t have been classier in the aftermath of it.  My only regret is I couldn’t play their game more.  I was apparently enjoying it.

I wish gaming had a database for people with photosensitive epilepsy.  Something as comprehensive as GameFAQs, only it listed potential risks and triggers for games.  Who would contribute to this?  Well, judging from the fact that I have hundreds of fans who on a daily basis warn me about games, movies, TV, or even random YouTube videos that could be a risk for me, I’m willing to bet gamers of all stripes would be eager to contribute.  But, it’s not as easy as just listing the whole flashy, strobe-effect thing for everyone.  Epilepsy doesn’t work like that.  There are thousands of known triggers across the epilepsy spectrum.  Some people are sensitive to flashes, like me.  Some people are sensitive to repetitive patterns.  Some people are even known to be sensitive towards specific colors.  And once you have a feel for what someone’s trigger is, you’re not even taking into account their personal degree of sensitivity.  In theory, everyone is vulnerable to epilepsy.  That’s why certification like Microsoft’s exists.  But for me?  My sensitivity is all over the place.  Sometimes it takes a lot to set me off.  Then you instances like the one time I had a seizure from looking at my desk lamp, looking away for a moment, then looking back at it.

Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll be able to play Fez. I was sort of counting on a Vita or 3DS port, which I could play with the back-lighting turned off. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

Obviously a database could not include everything.  But if we could isolate the statistical top-triggers among the epileptic population and list possible risks of those in each game, we could open up gaming to thousands of people who don’t have the type of support system I’ve built up over the last two years.  We could also use it to educate developers.  I don’t want to compromise anyone’s artistic vision.  I’m not that selfish.  But if they can make those effects optional, that would be awesome.  In fact, over a dozen XBLIG games have added such switches after the developers met me.  I’m proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish as Indie Gamer Chick, but the getting the gift of having a game with a switch that lessens the potential risk for me to play it?  It makes me tear up every time.  We all have a chance to give this gift to an entire community of potential gamers.  I don’t know how we’ll do it, but let’s make this happen.

I support the Epilepsy Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that aims to not only learn possible ways of treating epilepsy, but also strives to improve the quality of living among those who live with it.  Their tireless work has been invaluable to my life, and the lives of millions of others.  Follow them on Twitter (they only have 9,400 followers.  Paris Hilton has eleven million followers.  There is no justice) and if you have the means, please donate to them.  Every little bit helps.

Let’s open up how we’ll tackle this database thing in the comments.  I’m also hearing from my Twitter fans about possibly expanding the idea to include other limitations, such as color blindness, or games that can be played with one hand for those missing limbs.  Let’s make this an actual discussion.  I’ve said for two years now, I have the best fans in the world.  Let’s prove me right on that.

I want to thank my friend Cyril Lachel of DefunctGames.com for being one of the guys who always keeps an eye out for me on the gaming thing, not to mention countless guys and gals on Facebook and Twitter.  When I said you’re my guardian angels, I wasn’t being cute.  It’s true.

Dear Phil,

We’ve hung out a few times and enjoyed some beverages and rather animated conversations together. I don’t know you that well outside of those interactions. I found Fez to be refreshing in a chic retro way (you were doing that style before many others, which is a tiny bit hipster, sorry!) and the fact that you were so much of the project reminds me of myself in the Jazz Jackrabbit era. Waking up every day (or in some instances, the early afternoon) to sit right back down and stare at that PC as you paint your own mystery, pixel by pixel, line of code after line of code can wear you down. Not to mention the sheer magnitude of legal bullshit involved in running your own legitimate business as well as whatever the heck was going on with your old partner in Indie Game: The Movie.

I also know that, when it comes to any form of journalism, be it a profile piece or a reality TV show or documentary the viewer or consumer only sees what the author wants them to see, through their often very skewed lens. I’ve said before that I identified with your frustration at PAX showing off your baby for the first time. That pressure is only amplified when Pajot and crew are sticking a camera in your face. Any grown person might act strange under that pressure.

Right before the Beer-Twitter explosion I saw that you acquired your Oculus Rift and your tweets about it were extremely exciting. I could only imagine what talented, nutty Phil would craft for a device that I believe in so much that I put my own fucking money into it. (There’s your disclaimer.) I’d like to think that I know a good thing when I see it in life.

Read this fantastic article on Giant Bomb on your situation and the internet in general. I personally have been called every name in the book. Even back in, what, 1999 when I made a website about scanning cats on a flatbed scanner (look it up, folks, I exploited cats online before it was cool!) I got hate mail that was insane. Someone telling me that I should have “died in a gas chamber” (assuming my last name is of Polish/Jewish heritage; only half right.)

My first time being flamed online happened when I was 15 on a BBS the summer my father died suddenly from heart issues. I was learning how to code and I wrote a simple screen saver; one of those dancing multi colored lines programs. I released it to a BBS and someone anonymously posted “Your dead father could have coded something better.” I was furious, hurt, and I replied with an implied death threat. The website called my house and I got in trouble for the comment, but the damage was done. I went back to mowing my neighbor’s two acre lawn with his shitty push mower for ten bucks and Bionic Commando. ;)

My skin started to thicken, as did my resolve to do something with my life.

Never underestimate the intestinal fortitude of the anonymous loser hiding behind a monitor and his or her ability to sling vitriol at someone who willingly puts themselves out there. The fact of the matter, Phil, is that you were trending worldwide on Twitter. How many game developers can say that? Does no one realize that while you may seem somewhat unstable at times you also have Andy Kaufman as your Twitter AVI? (Kids, google Andy, and suddenly Phil might just make more sense to you. Or watch “Man On The Moon.”)

Never forget that the internet can be a fantastic thing, but it can also be fantastically dumb. Reddit is a wonderful community for finding out funny memes or random facts until they falsely accuse someone of being the Boston Bomber or go out of their way to protect the r/creepshots loser. And never forget that the Internet can be one big game of telephone amplified by anonymous myopic monkeys jamming on keyboards who are so angry about their meatball sandwich.

(How do you think I feel when my wife reads a tweet to her that says “come sit on my face” or “you are a bitch”?)

Someone on Twitter asked me how to deal with haters. I have some experience on the subject for well over 20 years now. Blow says you can’t ignore it because by the time you’ve read the words it’s too late. The key with the idiots is to outwit them because the idiot uses hate (and poor spelling/grammar) because the idiot does not know how to be witty. Watch what people like Ricky Gervais and Patton Oswalt do on Twitter. Heck, like him or not, even Piers Morgan is pretty good at fending them off.

Every idiot that you outwit wins you five times the fans and that much more respect.

The other key is to absorb all of that hate into one big fireball of motivation inside of your belly and then pour all of that energy into your work until you can unleash one big giant motherfucking HADOKEN upon the community that wins awards and sells millions and then the haters will truly be eating a giant bushel of dicks as you roll in a pile of money, acclaim, and community love.

You don’t owe a damned thing to any gaming journalist. We’ve seen the rise of many “Rush Limbaughs” in the gaming industry, people who do videos or podcasts digging a finger into an open wound that gets the gaming community going because, hits. You DO owe a great product to your community, something I hope you’ll resume doing some time in the near future. The industry needs people like you to speak with their hearts before their brains because I’m tired of hearing the PR approved appropriate response. I’m tired of games that feel like they’ve been developed by focus groups or clueless executives going “Hey that Call of Duty is big, we need one of those!”

Besides, at the end of the day, that cycle of community feedback and crafting that big fireball is entirely too addictive.

Come back, Phil. We miss you already. Maybe I’ll be right behind you, returning with Adamantium skin.

-Cliff

Self-published indie games may not be only for the Xbox One. The makers of Pinball Arcade say they're clear to self-publish to Xbox Live Arcade beginning in August. That's when Microsoft will have more to say about the program at Gamescom. We've reached out to an Xbox Live representative for comment.

Read more...

Google Play has been kind to Radiangames over the past month.  Fireball SE was prominently featured there for 3 weeks, and now that it’s gone, CRUSH and Ballistic SE are featured.  Why they chose those 3 games (instead of Inferno+, Slydris, and Bombcats), I’m not really sure.  But I’ll take it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past month, it’s that I need to release my games on multiple platforms in order for them to be successful.  For the past 1.5 years, I had been focusing exclusively on iPhone and iPad (aka iOS), and almost the entire past year was on 1 game on iOS (Bombcats).  That was a huge mistake on my part, and it almost caused the complete annihilation of Radiangames.

Even ignoring the Google Play featuring, it was well worth the time to port my games to other platforms and put them in places where they have a chance to be successful.  The secondary Android stores (Amazon, Nook, Samsung, etc) aren’t as lucrative, but are also worthwhile and there’s always a chance a feature or two there could make a significant impact.  I consider OUYA more of a unique platform, and so far it makes more than the secondary Android stores (for me), but nothing close to Google Play or iOS.

It took me a long time (too long) to figure this out, but my original plan for Radiangames, which was lots of small, polished, fun games, actually works.  But it only works when I release the games on multiple platforms.  XBLIG alone was enough.  Neither was PC.  Neither was iOS.  Android and OUYA wouldn’t be either (even with features).

Honestly, I liked focusing on a single platform better.  But we live in a multi-platform world now, and there are some great tools (Unity, Monogame, GameMaker, etc) that make it possible to make multi-platform games with a bit of extra work.

The Next Release?

I don’t know what the next release of mine will be.  I’m mostly working on the exciting new publisher project, but in my free time I’ll be doing updates, ports, and maybe even a new CRUSH-sized game or two before that releases.  Hopefully it won’t be long either way.

Procedural content generators are bits of code written into your game that can create new pieces of game content at any time – even when the game is running! Game developers have tried to procedurally generate everything from 3D worlds to musical soundtracks. Adding some generation to your game is a great way to plug in extra value: players love it because they get new, unpredictable and exciting content each time they play.

In this tutorial, we’ll look at a great method for generating random levels, and try to stretch the boundaries of what you might think can be generated.

If you’re interested in reading more about the topics of procedural content generation, level design, AI, or cellular automata, be sure to check these other posts out:

• Creating Life: Conway’s Game of Life
• Portal 2 Level Design: Creating Puzzles to Challenge Your Players
• StarCraft II Level Design: Aesthetic Design and Editor Tips
• Coding a Custom Sequence Generator to Render a Starscape
• Gamedev Glossary: Sequence Generators and Pseudorandom Number Generators

Welcome to the Caves!

In this tutorial, we’re going to build a cave generator. Caves are great for all sorts of game genres and settings, but they particularly remind me of old dungeons in role-playing games.

Take a look at the demo below to see the kinds of output you’ll be able to get. Click ‘New World’ to produce a new cave to look at. We’ll talk about what the different settings do in due course.

This generator actually returns us a big two-dimensional array of blocks, each of which is either solid or empty. So in fact, you could use this generator for all sorts of games besides dungeon-crawlers: random levels for strategy games, tilemaps for platform games, perhaps even as arenas for a multiplayer shooter! If you look carefully, flipping the solid and empty blocks makes an island-generator too. It all uses the same code and output, which makes this a really flexible tool.

Let’s get started by asking a simple question: what on earth is a cellular automaton, anyway?

Getting Started With Cells

In the 1970s, a mathematician called John Conway published a description of The Game Of Life, sometimes just called Life. Life wasn’t really a game; it was more like a simulation that took a grid of cells (that could be either alive or dead) and applied some simple rules to them.

Four rules were applied to each cell in every step of the simulation:

1. If a living cell has less than two living neighbours, it dies.
2. If a living cell has two or three living neighbours, it stays alive.
3. If a living cell has more than three living neighbours, it dies.
4. If a dead cell has exactly three living neighbours, it becomes alive.

Nice and simple! Yet if you try out different combinations of starting grids, you can get very strange outcomes. Infinite loops, machines that spit out shapes, and more. The Game of Life is an example of a cellular automaton – a grid of cells that are governed by certain rules.

We’re going to implement a system very similar to Life, but instead of producing funny patterns and shapes, it’s going to create amazing cave systems for our games.

Implementing a Cellular Automaton

We’re going to represent our cellular grid as a two-dimensional array of Boolean (true or false) values. This suits us because we’re only interested in whether a tile is solid or not.

Here’s us initialising our grid of cells:

boolean[][] cellmap = new boolean[width][height];

Tip: Notice that the first index is the x-coordinate for the array, and the second index is the y-coordinate. This makes accessing the array more natural in code.

In most programming languages, this array will initialise with all its values set to false. That’s fine for us! If an array index (x,y) is false, we’ll say that the cell is empty; if it’s true, that tile will be solid rock.

Each one of these array positions represents one of the ‘cells’ in our cellular grid. Now we need to set up our grid so we can begin building our caves.

We’re going to start out by randomly setting each cell to either dead or alive. Each cell will have the same random chance of being made alive, and you should make sure that this chance value is set in a variable somewhere, because we’ll definitely want to tweak it later and having it somewhere easy to access will help us with that. I’ll use 45% to start off with.

float chanceToStartAlive = 0.45f;

public boolean[][] initialiseMap(boolean[][] map){
	for(int x=0; x<width; x++){
		for(int y=0; y<height; y++){
			if(random() < chanceToStartAlive){
				map[x][y] = true;
			}
		}
	}
	return map;
}

If we run this code, we end up with a big grid of cells like the one above that are randomly alive or dead. It’s messy, and it definitely doesn’t look like any cave system I’ve ever seen. So what’s next?

Growing Our Caves

Remember the rules that governed the cells in The Game Of Life? Each time the simulation went ahead by one step, every cell would check the rules of Life and see if it would change to being alive or dead. We’re going to use exactly the same idea to build our caves – we’ll write a function now that loops over every cell in the grid, and applies some basic rules to decide whether it lives or dies.

As you’ll see later, we’re going to use this bit of code more than once, so putting it in its own function means we can call it as many or as few times as we like. We’ll give it a nice informative name like doSimulationStep(), too.

What does the function need to do? Well first, we’re going to make a new grid that we can put our updated cell values in. To understand why we need to do this, remember that to calculate the new value of a cell in the grid, we need to look at its eight neighbours:

But if we’ve already calculated the new value of some of the cells and put them back in the grid, then our calculation will be a mix of new and old data, like this:

Oops! That’s not what we want at all. So each time we calculate a new cell value, instead of putting it back in the old map, we’re going to write it to a new one.

Let’s begin writing that doSimulationStep() function, then:

public doSimulationStep(boolean[][] oldMap){
	boolean[][] newMap = new boolean[width][height];
	//...

We want to consider each cell in the grid in turn, and count how many of its neighbours are alive and dead. Counting your neighbours in an array is one of those boring bits of code you’ll have to write a million times. Here’s a quick implementation of it in a function I’ve called countAliveNeighbours():

//Returns the number of cells in a ring around (x,y) that are alive.
public countAliveNeighbours(boolean[][] map, int x, int y){
	int count = 0;
	for(int i=-1; i<2; i++){
		for(int j=-1; j<2; j++){
			int neighbour_x = x+i;
			int neighbour_y = y+j;
			//If we're looking at the middle point
			if(i == 0 && j == 0){
				//Do nothing, we don't want to add ourselves in!
			}
			//In case the index we're looking at it off the edge of the map
			else if(neighbour_x < 0 || neighbour_y < 0 || neighbour_x >= map.length || neighbour_y >= map[0].length){
				count = count + 1;
			}
			//Otherwise, a normal check of the neighbour
			else if(map[neighour_x][neighbour_y]){
				count = count + 1;
			}
		}
	}
}

A couple of things about this function:

First, the for loops are a little weird if you’ve not done something like this before. The idea is that we want to look at all the cells that are around the point (x,y). If you look at the illustration below, you can see how the indices we want are one less, equal to, and one more then the original index. Our two for loops give us just that, starting at -1, and looping through to +1. We then add that to the original index inside the for loop to find each neighbour.

Second, notice how if we’re checking a grid reference that isn’t real (for instance, it’s off the edge of the map) we count it as a neighbour. I prefer this for cave generation because it tends to help fill in the edges of the map, but you can experiment by not doing this if you like.

So now, let’s go back to our doSimulationStep() function and add in some more code:

public boolean[][] doSimulationStep(boolean[][] oldMap){
	boolean[][] newMap = new boolean[width][height];
	//Loop over each row and column of the map
	for(int x=0; x<oldMap.length; x++){
		for(int y=0; y<oldMap[0].length; y++){
			int nbs = countAliveNeighbours(oldMap, x, y);
			//The new value is based on our simulation rules
			//First, if a cell is alive but has too few neighbours, kill it.
			if(oldMap[x][y]){
				if(nbs < deathLimit){
 					newMap[x][y] = false;
  				}
 				else{
 					newMap[x][y] = true;
  				}
  			} //Otherwise, if the cell is dead now, check if it has the right number of neighbours to be 'born'
  			else{
  				if(nbs > birthLimit){
					newMap[x][y] = true;
				}
				else{
					newMap[x][y] = false;
				}
			}
		}
	}
	return newMap;
}

This loops over the whole map, applying our rules to each grid cell to compute the new value and placing it in newMap. The rules are simpler than the Game of Life – we have two special variables, one for birthing dead cells (birthLimit), and one for killing live cells (deathLimit). If living cells are surrounded by less than deathLimit cells they die, and if dead cells are near at least birthLimit cells they become alive. Nice and simple!

All that’s left at the end is a final touch to return the updated map. This function represents a single step of our cellular automaton’s rules – the next step is to understand what happens as we apply it once, twice or more times to our initial starting map.

Tweaking and Tuning

Let’s look at what the main generation code now looks like, using the code we’ve written so far.

public boolean[][] generateMap(){
	//Create a new map
	boolean[][] cellmap = new boolean[width][height];
	//Set up the map with random values
	cellmap = initialiseMap(cellmap);
	//And now run the simulation for a set number of steps
	for(int i=0; i<numberOfSteps; i++){
		cellmap = doSimulationStep(cellmap);
	}
}

The only really new bit of code is a for loop that runs our simulation method a set number of times. Again, pop it in a variable so we can change it, because we’re going to start playing with these values now!

So far we’ve set these variables:

• chanceToStartAlive sets how dense the initial grid is with living cells.
• starvationLimit is the lower neighbour limit at which cells start dying.
• overpopLimit is the upper neighbour limit at which cells start dying.
• birthNumber is the number of neighbours that cause a dead cell to become alive.
• numberOfSteps is the number of times we perform the simulation step.

You can fiddle with these variables in the demo at the top of the page. Each value will change the demo dramatically, so have a play around and see what suits.

One of the most interesting changes you can make is to the numberOfSteps variable. As you run the simulation for more steps, the roughness of the map disappears, and islands smooth away into nothing. I’ve added in a button so that you can call the function manually yourself, and see the effects. Experiment a bit and you’ll find a combination of settings that suits your style and the kind of levels your game needs.

With that, you’re done. Congratulations – you’ve just made a procedural level generator, well done! Sit back, run and re-run your code, and smile at the weird and wonderful cave systems that come out. Welcome to the world of procedural generation.

Taking It Further

If you’re staring at your lovely cave generator and wondering what else you can do with it, here are a couple of ‘extra credit’ assignment ideas:

Using Flood Fill to Do Quality Checking

Flood fill is a very simple algorithm that you can use to find all the spaces in an array that connect to a particular point. Just like the name suggests, the algorithm works a bit like pouring a bucket of water into your level – it spreads out from the starting point and fills in all the corners.

Flood fill is great for cellular automata because you can use it to see how big a particular cave is. If you run the demo a few times you’ll notice that some maps are made up of one big cave, while others have a few smaller caves that are separated from each other. Flood fill can help you detect how big a cave is, and then either regenerate the level if it’s too small, or decide where you want the player to start if you think it’s big enough. There’s a great outline of flood fill on Wikipedia.

Quick and Simple Treasure Placement

Placing treasure in cool areas sometimes requires a lot of code, but we can actually write quite a simple bit of code to place treasure out of the way in our cave systems. We already have our code that counts how many neighbours a square has, so by looping over our finished cave system, we can see how surrounded by walls a particular square is.

If an empty grid cell is surrounded by lots of solid walls, it’s probably at the very end of a corridor or tucked away in the walls of the cave system. This is a great place to hide treasure – so by doing a simple check of our neighbours we can slip treasure into corners and down alleyways.

public void placeTreasure(boolean[][] world){
	//How hidden does a spot need to be for treasure?
	//I find 5 or 6 is good. 6 for very rare treasure.
	int treasureHiddenLimit = 5;
	for (int x=0; x < worldWidth; x++){
		for (int y=0; y < worldHeight; y++){
 			if(!world[x][y]){
 				int nbs = countAliveNeighbours(world, x, y);
  				if(nbs >= treasureHiddenLimit){
					placeTreasure(x, y);
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

This isn’t perfect. It sometimes puts treasure in inaccessible holes in the cave system, and sometimes the spots will be quite obvious, too. But, in a pinch, it’s a great way to scatter collectibles around your level. Try it out in the demo by hitting the placeTreasure() button!

Conclusions and Further Reading

This tutorial showed you how to build a basic but complete procedural generator. With just a few simple steps we wrote code that can create new levels in the blink of an eye. Hopefully this has given you a taster of the potential of building procedural content generators for your games!

If you want to read more, Roguebasin is a great source of information on procedural generation systems. It mostly focuses on roguelike games, but many of its techniques can be used in other types of game, and there’s lots of inspiration for procedurally generating other parts of a game too!

If you want more on Procedural Content Generation or Cellular Automata, here’s a great online version of The Game Of Life (although I highly recommend typing “Conway’s Game Of Life” into Google). You might also like Wolfram Tones, a charming experiment in using cellular automata to generate music!

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