tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1636630065251977602024-03-13T04:36:56.750-07:00Unobserved MusingsStephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-41728947201366423292011-01-17T21:59:00.000-08:002011-01-17T22:18:47.199-08:00Obligatory 2011 Update and other such things.This blog entry will be in THREE parts.<br />
<br />
Part I:<br />
The details are still being fleshed out on this "Project" as we figure out our limitations, but I will announce it anyway - after I <br />
Part II:<br />
Introduce myself to you and narrate on what this "Project" is. Which will lead to<br />
Part III:<br />
A quick review of the iPhone4's video capabilities, the Sony Bloggie Touch MHS-TS20, and the Flip UltraHD.<br />
<br />
<br />
PART I: BrokenKings House!<br />
<a href="http://www.brokenkings.com">Broken Kings, Inc.</a> ambitiously started Broken Kings House or BKH for short, this year! It revolves around a relatively straight forward business plan. Make games with the household which consists of the following people:<br />
<br />
Stephen as financier and lead programmer,<br />
Lopi as lead designer and programmer,<br />
Josiah as lead artist and audio engineer,<br />
Jenna as artist and lead QA,<br />
and then there's me. <br />
<br />
I'm not really sure what my job is called, but I'm guessing it's queen of awesome.<br />
<br />
Two weeks in so far and we've finished <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skwerl/id413989057?mt=8">Skwerl</a>, and just about done Smoothie Operator. Woohoo!<br />
<br />
PART II-A: Yours Truly.<br />
Hello, readers of this here blog. My name is Bernadette. I will be reporting on BrokenKings news and other related (or not so related) things here from now on, as well as force Stephen to post more useful iPhoneDev tutorials and relevant business tidbits for you readers. :)<br />
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PART II-B: What is BrokenKings House?<br />
BKH is a pretty strange mix of quirkiness, passion, friendship, fun, and work. I say work because it <i>is</i> still a job for all of us, but very unlike any old job out there. It might be presumptuous to say but I think in essence, BKH is that idea which spawns the game industry dream. That awesome "HoMahgawd games are so awesome and fun and great! I wanna make games!" notion that working in the big corporate game industry for a marginal amount of time eats at, until it fizzles and dies. Where's the fun? Where's the creativity? Where's the resonant feeling of playing games with friends in the making of one? <br />
<br />
BKH is coming together to find ideas, and working together to create something out of those ideas. That's it. We plan on making a game a weekend and so far, we've concocted some seemingly random ideas which came together into little creations. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/BrokenKings">We videotape the process for posterity</a> (and perhaps the lulz) and maybe we'll look back and laugh at how hard it's been for us and see just how much we've all grown later. We've never worked as a team before this, but it amazes me how far we could push together as a team! Later, I will post about each member of the team for your reading pleasure. ;)<br />
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PART III: Filming with iPhone4, Sony Bloggie Touch MHS-TS20, and the Flip UltraHD<br />
We started filming on<a href="http://store.apple.com/ca/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone?mco=MTgxNTgzMzY"> iPhone4s</a>. <br />
That worked well enough, but we've had problems with the accelerometer, or so I think. The quality is pretty amazing for a cellphone camera when it works like it should, but it's quite a pain when it imports in weird aspect ratios and randomly decides to record in portrait. I'm still learning how to put these videos together, so problems like these are extremely annoying and time consuming. Also according to the team, it's pretty unwieldy with it being too wide and too thin. <br />
<br />
We moved on to the <a href="http://www.theflip.com/en-ca/products/ultra.aspx#/?show=0">Flip UltraHD</a>.<br />
Despite the plasticky feel and painful rate with which it drained 2 AA batteries, it was awesome! The video quality was great, it's comfortably held vertically and records in landscape mode, it did what we needed it to do. Until it decided it didn't want to work for a little while. It would not turn off, would not show up as a device when connected to <a href="http://store.apple.com/ca/configure/MC372LL/A?mco=MTc0Njg1ODg">my MBP</a>, and I had to remove the batteries to shut it down. There were 11 clips in it, but I could only see and play back the 57-second 11th video because it would freeze if I tried to access any other ones. Doing a mass delete without looking at any of the other clips fixed it, but what a waste of perfectly good footage! I figured it was a memory issue. It had no room to think about turning off when it was too full. We decided we needed something with 1. more memory, and 2. rechargeable batteries.<br />
<br />
So we went back to the store gunning for a <a href="http://store.theflip.com/en-ca/products/MinoHD8GB2HR.aspx">Flip minoHD</a>.<br />
They didn't have one in-stock, and the sales rep suggested <a href="http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10151&catalogId=10551&langId=-1&productId=8198552921666268179">Sony Bloggie Touch MHS-TS20</a> to us.<br />
We got it because it had more memory and an internal rechargeable battery, shoots in perfectly good 720p/60fps, responds better to low light, felt solid to the touch... But I will make another trip to the store tomorrow to exchange it because despite all those good things, whoever designed it forgot that their target market consists of would-be vloggers, likely to post their videos on YouTube. I say this because the camera's tripod mount is at the bottom nearest the red record button. PORTRAIT MODE! Filming in portrait mode means your content only occupies one third of the video box, one narrow stip of footage sandwiched between two, black, rectangular masses. Yay for encouraging failure to utilize the 16:9 aspect ratio of most widescreen video hosting sites! The funny thing though, is it even has a self-timer, to use so that you can be in the pictures and movies, but why did they put the tripod mount for use in portrait mode??? <br />
/end rant.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-11518045852521686652010-10-08T11:07:00.001-07:002010-10-08T11:50:19.211-07:00Making Complex Animations with Cocos2DCocos2D for iPhone is an excellent game engine for 2D game development on the iPhone platform. One of the strengths of the device is it's many built in actions and node types, as well as it's scheduling system, which allow one to create complex visual effects - be they animations or otherwise. In this post, I will talk about some techniques I have discovered for creating animations and effects in Cocos2D. A companion youtube video was also created as I used some of these techniques to create a first pass on an animation for a real iPhone game in development, currently code named "Furious Tactical". I was working on converting <a href="http://www.graphicrepublic.com/temp/attack00.html" target="blank">this flash</a> animation into code.<br /><br /><b>Ingredients:</b><br /><ul><br /><li>Scheduler</li><br /><li>Color Layer</li><br /><li>Actions</li><br /></ul><br /><br /><b>The Scheduler</b><br /><br />In any Cocos2D node that is currently added to a scene, you may schedule and unschedule events. For my animation, I created a separate attack overlay layer that holds the animation, and sits above the game layer. As such, I could schedule and unschedule events right into the layer to control it.<br /><br />Looking at the flash animation, you can see that there are several steps that must be followed:<br />1) Attacking unit slides in<br />2) Attacking unit name appears above it<br />3) Defending unit slides in<br />4) Defending unit name appears above it<br />5) Units able to attack pull back<br />6) Units able to attack charge at enemy unit<br />7) An animation/effect plays in front of attack unit<br />8) Screen shakes and flashes<br />9) Dead units fly off the screen<br />10) Surviving units grow and fade out<br /><br />If I were to rough this out in my layer, I might have code that looks something like this:<br /><br /><pre><br />-(id) init<br />{<br /> if((self = [super init]))<br /> {<br /> [self schedule:@selector(slideInAttackingUnit:)];<br /> //Store any parameters, create objects, etc.<br /> }<br />}<br /><br />-(void) slideInAttackingUnit:(ccTime) elapsedTime<br />{<br /> [self unschedule:@selector(slideInAttackingUnit:)];<br /><br /> //Do slide code<br /><br /> [self schedule:@selector(attackingUnitNameAppears:) interval:0.5f];<br />}<br /><br />//...etc...<br /></pre><br /><br />When Cocos2D schedules an event on a node, it will call that event whenever the interval passes. (If no interval is supplied, it will instead call that event every frame). In the case of this animation, we only want each event to happen once, so we unschedule the current method as soon as it is entered and then schedule the following one.<br /><br />I'm sure that the scheduler is familiar to most Cocos2D developers so I'll move on to the next section.<br /><br /><b>Color Layer</b><br /><br />If you pay close attention to the flash animation, you will see that there is actually a very short white flash when the units collide. You will also notice that there is a bit of a blueish overlay when it first starts running. Both of these can easily be accomplished using a CCColorLayer.<br /><br />Placing a Color Layer is incredibly simple; you simply initialise it with the colour you want it to be, and add it to your scene, as below:<br /><br /><pre>CCColorLayer *backgroundLayer = [[CCColorLayer alloc] initWithColor:ccc4(128, 128, 255, 100)];<br />[self addChild:backgroundLayer];<br />[backgroundLayer release];</pre><br /><br />I typically use alloc/init instead of the convenience methods where available, just to have a little more control over memory. It's a stylistic choice and except in very tight memory situations, not entirely necessary. By setting the alpha to something less than a full GLByte of 255, it can function is a nice barrier between your current layer and what's behind.<br /><br />For the white flash, using a ColorLayer in conjunction with the scheduler is quite effective. Consider the following:<br /><br /><pre>-(void) addFlash<br />{<br /> flashLayer = [[CCColorLayer alloc] initWithColor:ccc4(255, 255, 255, 255)]; //flashLayer is an instance variable<br /> [self addChild:flashLayer];<br /> [flashChild release];<br /><br /> [self schedule:@selector(removeFlash:) interval:0.05f];<br />}<br /><br />-(void) removeFlash:(ccTime) elapsedTime<br />{<br /> [self unschedule:@selector(removeFlash:)];<br /><br /> [self removeChild:flashLayer];<br /> flashLayer = nil; //will be removed from memory - we don't want dangling pointers!<br />}</pre><br /><br />This simply adds and removes a white color layer very quickly to simulate a flash. Simple!<br /><br /><b>Actions</b><br /><br />Cocos2D comes with a variety of actions. Ignoring animations, the ones I find myself using most are CCMoveTo/By, CCScaleTo/By, CCRotateTo/By, and CCFadeIn/Out.<br /><br />The difference in the transform actions, for example CCMoveTo/By, is absolute versus relative. CCMoveTo moves an object to an absolute position; CCMoveBy to a relative position. For those who don't know what that means, the names help make sense of it, but here's a quick example: Imagine that you have an object at position 200, 200. If You were to apply CCMoveTo(100, 100) to it, it would move to 100, 100. Whereas, if you were to apply CCMoveBy(100, 100) to it, it would move to 300, 300.<br /><br />It is often useful to sequence many actions together to save code; for example, in order to give the unit portriats a bit of a jump back, I use the following code:<br /><br /><pre><br /> leftSprite.position = ccp(-leftSprite.contentSize.width / 2,<br /> leftSprite.contentSize.height / 2);<br /> <br /> CCDelayTime *delay = [CCDelayTime actionWithDuration:leftDelay];<br /> CCMoveTo *move1 = [CCMoveTo actionWithDuration:0.23f position:ccp(leftSprite.contentSize.width / 2, leftSprite.contentSize.height / 2)];<br /> CCMoveTo *move2 = [CCMoveTo actionWithDuration:0.02f position:ccp(leftSprite.contentSize.width / 2 - 5, leftSprite.contentSize.height / 2)];<br /> [leftSprite runAction:[CCSequence actions:delay, move1, move2, nil]];<br /></pre><br /><br />(leftDelay is a value I use to control which of the sprites appears first). <br /><br />Take note of two things; first, the CCDelayTime at the beginning. This is useful if you want to add a delay to your animation. Next, check out the CCSequence; this allows you to string a bunch of actions together, and they will then happen one after another. CCDelayTime is pretty much only useful when used in conjunction with CCSequence, as it literally does nothing. When you have listed all of your objects, you must ad nil (the sentinel) so that the action knows to expect no more. If you don't do so, you will get the warning, "Missing sentinel in function call".Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-4580690367035407432010-09-14T11:02:00.001-07:002010-09-14T11:19:24.742-07:00A love of strategyI love strategy games. If there is one genre of games that my enjoyment of has not diminished at all despite the fact that I play much less games than I used to, that genre is strategy. (The other is Legend of Zelda. That counts as a genre, right?)<br /><br />My favorite type of strategy games are Tactical games. This is partially born from the fact that I loved RPG's when younger and Tactical RPGs were perfect, combining my love of strategy with my favorite genre. I remember spending hours playing Shining Force and Shining Force 2 - to this day, their formula, despite being very simple, is still my ideal format for how a tactical RPG should be done. <br /><br />Each tactical game I play inspires me to make one. There are always changes I would make - for example, as "realistic" as it is, I hate character death in Fire Emblem, it's the one factor that ruins the game for me. While I appreciate how carefully it requires you to plan and play, one mistake can cause a healer or mage to be vulnerable in a way you missed - and they often die in one hit, resulting in me resetting game even if I didn't lose. <br /><br />So when I received the opportunity to make a tactical game for the iPhone, in collaboration with Big Stack Studios with Bella Machina being brought on for the art side of things, I jumped. And, bringing with me the lessons brought forward from Castle Conflict, I designed what I think will be an ideal battle experience for the iPhone.<br /><br />Due to the way the project is structured, the first release will not feature any campaign - just a bunch of Skirmish Maps (think Red Alert) so that we can test the viability of the game in the market. But it has been designed for the iPhone - to be picked up and played while waiting for the bus, etc. So the gameplay has been streamlined, the interactions made simpler, so that you can have a fast and furious battle in a short period of time. For example, like in Castle Conflict, there are no health bars - in Castle Defense games, I found that they caused the game to result in big messes in the middle with very little tension because they were so slow, and given the short time frame we expect Furious to be played in, we want it to emphasize fast combat. <br /><br />We're going to be keeping fans updated through forums, youtube, blog posts and facebook as the game develops, so stay tuned for all the details as we work on this bad boy.<br /><br />In the meantime, Apple has had our update in hand since September 3rd and so I'm hoping will be approving it any day - so keep your eyes peeled for that :)Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-52042865168301477692010-08-29T11:16:00.001-07:002010-08-29T11:58:48.555-07:00Castle Conflict, a bumpy roadThis current release of Castle Conflict has been something of a frustrating one.<br /><br />To be quite frank, when we released Castle Conflict for the first time last year, it was as if something magical happened. We came up with a game idea based off of a game that we had both played before in the past. In a week, we polished it off - like it was nothing - despite the fact that I had never developed anything for the iPhone prior to that point. It just, worked. And it seems that the world knew it - it was featured by Apple and made nearly $20k before sales petered out to about $5 a day, tops. <br /><br />It took us six months to release an update. It was a surprisingly long time, due to friction in the interim and the idea that we could make another 1-week game in between while our brains sifted through ideas on what to do with Castle Conflict next. That 1-week game took 3 months to make and, to date, has earned us approximately $200. Josiah got a full time job, making it difficult for us to find a period of time to develop the app. But at the end of November, we found the time, and at the beginning of December we submitted something that was closer to our vision of what Castle Conflict could be - the game with campaign mode.<br /><br />Sales bumped up to about $20 a day, and when Christmas hit, they bumped up to near $50 a day. We still couldn't quit our day jobs (although technically, I had). We had agreed to take some time off from the project before the next update. I spent December doing client work so that I had some money in the bank.<br /><br />January rolled around and we went for the second most requested feature of Castle Conflict, multiplayer, with a planned second campaign to be released right after. Multiplayer took a long time to develop, and came mostly on my end. It is a largely unused feature in the game compared to campaign and we could have released a campaign map or two in the time it took me to make it, had we known how little use it would get. People still complain that they can never find people online to play with them, despite the fact that it is local-only multiplayer, meaning you can only challenge people via bluetooth or on the same wifi network as you. <br /><br />As soon as the dust had cleared and that update was submitted, we geared it up a notch, making our Egypt campaign. This was expected to take a week, due to the fact that we had our campaign code all written in November, but it ended up taking two. During these two weeks, I literally got up at 8 or 9 every day and worked from then until I went to bed at 11 or 12. The addition of new units and new unit skins basically broke the game and I learned more about memory fixing it than I ever expected to know. Since then, however, I have been much smarter with understanding memory on the iPhone and how it works. <br /><br />Simultaneously to this very stressful, yet creatively charged two week period, I was putting the full financial force of Broken Kings behind the project, believing that with the new campaigns and multiplayer, the game was poised to take off the way it had when featured by Apple the year before. That we had found a game that could be a sustainable business and could continue to develop for in the future. A week or two a month could yield a new update every month, our fan base would grow, the game would allow us to develop games full time. <br /><br />I spent over $7k on an advertising campaign. By this point, this was almost all that was left in the Broken Kings bank account. But so sure were we of the game that we did it anyways.<br /><br />February 22nd, our ad campaign went live, on all the large websites for iPhone games and large websites for iPhone apps we could find and afford. We had paid for ads from a well known artist, knowing that Josiah's pixel-art style wouldn't draw in as many customers and that we didn't know advertising that well, so having a pro help us out couldn't help.<br /><br />It boosted our sales by about $15 a day the day it went live. We can't even be sure how much of that was the ad campaign because our sales tended to fluctuate within at $20 range on a per-day basis. A few days later, Apple featured us, but only in the "What We're Playing" section. This free publicity boosted our sales by $30 a day. We never cracked the top 200. We were emotionally, physically, creatively, and financially exhausted when I was approached by Free App A Day and given the chance to put Castle Conflict up for a discounted price. I agreed, and this worked - we made about $3000 in the next two months after the app went free. This went to paying 2009's taxes. <br /><br />Agreeing to take a break from the project for a while, Josiah continued working and got involved in some musical projects. I started taking on consulting work, working on various projects including an iPad port of a game by a local company (The funds from that also went to taxes), an iPhone app that has yet to be released and I have yet to be paid for, then some consulting for a UK-based company that took up the end of April, all of May, and first few weeks of June. It put money in the bank, but I had made a commitment to a game studio in town that I would make a game for them this summer, for money and a small percentage. So as soon as the UK app was finished, I has to immediately put time into this new project (which is still ongoing).<br /><br />Josiah and I did plan and start the new update in April, however, with the intention of working on it on a weekly basis. That didn't last through the UK app, due to the client having a very intense deadline that we worked like mad to reach. Various other dramas and events in my personal life made it difficult for me to want to work on code after work hours. But the original plan (which has since been reshaped) was that the game I was working on locally would be complete July 31st. I even paid my roommate (who made Shiftmaze last year) to help me out that month. For a variety of reasons, the app has not yet been released and is still in development, partially due to my own over-ambition, partially due to some differences in the way that the company I am working for operates versus the way I operate on Castle Conflict. Josiah is only available full time for two days every other week, due to commitments both to his full-time job and his band. So we've never quite found the magical, creatively-charged week or two week period that we had in the previous updates. A lot of the work, we don't even do at the same time. I work when he's at work and he works on weekends. <br /><br />Yet pressure continued to mount, with reviews coming in every day from fans wanting the update, which escalated eventually to fans demanding an update, so we have been putting this update together every chance we get. But it has been nearly 4 months that we have been working on it on and off now, when before we were able to work on it for two weeks and be good. And we've ended up cutting out a fair amount of what we planned in order to get this update out faster - our original plan involved having about 50 new levels and 23 new unit types this update, but we've cut it down to a typical campaign of 20 levels and 10 new unit types, simply to get it out on time, and because we're finding it hard to find the time we'd need to put in in order to pull off a lot of the wizardry we were hoping to pull off.<br /><br />Yet, despite all this work in the past year, Castle Conflict has only made about another $9K. Of that $9K, $8K went towards advertising and about $2K went towards paying Josiah. In short, despite the bulk of the game having been created since Apple featured us hardcore last year, we haven't been able to capitalise on the promise of our initial launch. As much as we both would love this game to make us enough money that we could put more time into it, would love to release a new update on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, the need to eat makes this tricky. <br /><br />I have a decent amount of money in the bank account, enough for me to live for a few months, although that lessens if I try to pay an artist full time. Nonetheless, after this release and the release of the game I'm making for the local company, I will be looking into a plan for how to develop better in the future. Because I truly believe that communication with our audience, and a stream of new content, can lead to a successful iPhone app business. I have ideas I've talked with a few people that we want to get out there in the app store, and I'd love to bring the audience along, be able to bring these ideas to fruition faster and be more open with the audience. The past few months, I have failed on this front due to the stress related to money and client work - whereas, earlier this year I was able to put a lot into it. (Look at the Multiplayer update of Castle Conflict - it added the "next update" preview feature and the survey, and I was constantly posting youtube videos about the current progress of the app). I'd like to get back there.<br /><br />This update, we still believe will be good, if not everything we hoped it to be. But I'm going to look at it as a launching point. Besides, we already have ideas for the next update.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-69521207578774729652010-07-08T08:55:00.001-07:002010-07-08T09:06:12.838-07:00Quiet does not mean deadSo, the original CC plans of having the next update done by the end of the May never quite went to fruition. Back to back projects had lead to my having very little development time free for the project. The project I am on now is scheduled to end July 31st, and it is another game I am being paid to make for a company in my town of Calgary. The games current name is Furious Tactics and it basically takes my love of tactical games and lessons I've learned from Castle Conflict (both design wise and code wise) and merges the two into what will be one amazing tactical game. I am working with the talented Sean Dunkley on art; he may be better known to anyone who has played Sally's Spa, although he has worked on many other projects (check out his <a href="http://graphicrepublic.com/">webpage</a> to see some of what he has done). So if you are missing out on CC battles, watch out for Furious Tactics (working name) which should be out soon!<br /><br />I have no projects scheduled in August as of yet and am in a financial situation where I should actually be able to keep it that way. So while it is a bit delayed from what I would have liked, as soon as the client work is done and I'm not concerned with deadlines on other projects, CC is my first priority. Josiah and I have already spoken and are planning to be able to get the game done as quickly as possible come August. <br /><br />After that, my roommate, Lopi, and I have been talking about spending some time working on a couple app ideas he and I have been batting around for some time. My goal, building a company, is to be able to work on client projects less and games/apps released under my own company more often. Financial realities don't always allow this to be the case, and I love the act of doing the work, for clients or for myself, so I'm not unhappy doing client work. But in terms of going where I want to go in life, I'm hoping to be able to take projects like Castle Conflict and build on them more often :)Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-78684275302149878212010-05-22T08:39:00.000-07:002010-05-22T08:47:13.404-07:00Castle Conflict UpdateUnfortunately, the current Castle Conflict update its taking longer than expected. There is one reason for this: Castle Conflict does not make us enough money to live off of. For this reason, we are unable to make it priority over things that actually make us money.<br /><br />The original intent had been to work on it all this month and release it at the end. And we're still aiming for that deadline, but it may be more difficult to reach. Most of the art assets have already been created, but almost none of the code for the new campaign has been implemented. This is because I, the programmer, have been doing client work, and the current client work has taken up almost literally all of my available time. Things there have just wound down, so after a day or two to recover, the update will be making forward progress again. <br /><br />The new update will feature a 3rd campaign, in what we dub the "Endless Forest".Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-61459748066089685782010-04-14T09:34:00.001-07:002010-04-14T09:51:25.444-07:00The value of experiencesI don't like "distractions" or "time killers".<br /><br />We all get one life, of variable length. I'm going to ignore religion, rebirth, and all those other theories and say that the only thing that is universally accepted by all humans is that we are born, and eventually we die, and what happens after that is mysterious.<br /><br />The thing is that we are born into this amazing, wonderful world. I don't have to believe in some higher deity to realise that the world out there is full of wonder and miraculous things. In the natural world alone, there is so much to be experienced, and mankind has been quite prolific in their own right.<br /><br />I find the concept of free time hard to understand, and the same of boredom. There are so many things to do in life that are so fulfilling, that I can't understand being bored and looking for something to do to kill time. When I'm not working, there are a ton of other things I like to do - learn guitar, go for bike rides, cook, spend time with my household. And when I actually "relax", even that is as a break from all the other things I want to do, and there are so many wonderful books, so much wonderful music, and even a good movie or tv show here or there. <br /><br />In short, there are so many wonderful things to do in life that most days I don't even get to do everything I want. Or even close. And I'm constantly getting ideas for new things I would like to add to my busy schedule. Like, boy, I would love to make such and such game. I would love to read such and such book. I would love to bike to such and such location. I would love to learn how to play such and such instrument. I get ideas for things to do faster than I can do them.<br /><br />So to me, any hold on my attention is precious. There are so many amazing things that I could be doing, why would I do something mediocre, just to kill time? I'd rather be expanding time!<br /><br />I like to think that I bring this philosophy into my creative output. I never want to make something that just keeps you occupied. I never want to make something that doesn't challenge. I view everything I work on as competing with all of the amazing things that people could be doing instead, and I don't want to disappoint. <br /><br />Yet strangely, these types of experiences, these "just floating by" experiences are more numerous than they've ever been. Facebook and Twitter makes it easier for us to believe that all of our friends are interested in all the mundane aspects of our lives. TV not only forces us to make do with "whatever is on", but it attempts to brainwash us into wanting more and more of these mundane experiences. The iPhone app store is awash with people making an app with the first idea that came into their head and pumping it out as quickly as possible, in the hopes that something serendipitous will happen and they will get rich.<br /><br />Everybody has a voice, but most people don't seem to have anything interesting to say.<br /><br />Society, especially the whole "Western" society, has reached a point where less and less time is dedicated to staying alive. We have this amazing world to experience, where we can create things that really challenge people, make them think, and have lasting impacts. We have the time to do and experience the world like we never have before in history. But we seem to have this force called "boredom" imposing on our life, that drives us to seek the easiest source of minor entertainment.<br /><br />Every moment someone spends inside of a game I make is a moment that they could have been doing something else with their life. I want to make sure that it is worth the tradeoff.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-73562286099313590932010-03-09T08:58:00.000-08:002010-03-09T09:19:24.628-08:00Stortelling in games: likes/dislikesI'm going to take a break from Castle Conflict related stuff to talk a bit more about storytelling in games, something that I had hoped to have more time to do but haven't in quite some time.<br /><br />Specifically, I am going to look at two games, one that I think did storytelling amazingly well, and one that demonstrates how, in some way, story and related paraphernalia can hinder gameplay as much as help.<br /><br />The first game I want to talk about is HalfLife 2. As far as stories go, the story here is actually not too far from the fare of most video games. There is some evil force that threatens to overtake the human race, and you are set against it to destroy it. It is a bit more interesting than just that; the human race itself seems out to get you, with police men wearing what looks like gas masks out to get you at every turn. But there are people on your side to, and they refer to you as "the free man" and even fight alongside you during gameplay.<br /><br />Okay, so the story is, really, decent at best. But the actual telling of the story in Half Life is brilliant. First of all, nothing is forced on you, and I think this is a very important point about what Half Life did successfully. Yes, the game is linear; no, there aren't really any branches in the story; and yet, I felt more a part of the story in Half Life 2 than I did in games like Tales of Symphonia, where the game is -about- the story, has story scenes all the time, and allows me to make choices that effect the story. Why? Because, when story stuff was going on, I could run around, jump on things, shoot people, ignore it entirely, pay complete attention to it. In short, <i>I was still playing the game while the story was going on</i>, so it was still <i>me</i> who was experiencing the story. It quickly became something I appreciated a lot about the game.<br /><br />The other aspect was the lack of detail. As you play the game, there is no moment where someone comes up to you and says, "Okay, this is what is going on." There are some light explanations here and there, but really, you're never really told specifically what the Citadel is. who "our Benefactors" really are, or how they came to be here. (<i>note: I have never played the original Half Life, which I am sure explains some of this</i>). The player is forced to infer what is going on based on the snippets he does here; the situation that people are living in, and the environment around him. As a storytelling technique, this makes the game much more enjoyable. And for those who don't like story, and just want to shoot things with the Gravity Gun, they can outright ignore it.<br /><br /><br /><br />The next game is actually a series; specifically, Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem is pretty successful in the tactical RPG realm, having been releasing games since the SNES days. But there is one specific detail about it that bothers me, which I will get to in a moment.<br /><br />One discussion I remember having when I was taking Game Design courses was about consequences. About how, in many games, there were no consequences to the players' actions in a lot of games. The teacher talked about how he felt that consequences could be used to greater effect in a lot of games. <br /><br />I think one thing to remember with games, even games that are heavily based on storytelling, is that they are still games. They are supposed to be fun. On the one hand, I'm a fan of the idea of consequences, and I think if implemented well, they can add a lot of depth and strategy to your game. <br /><br />In Fire Emblem, they added consequences. If one of your character dies in the midst of battle, he dies forever. This might not be so bad, if there weren't a lot of weaker units (healers/mages) that suddenly seem much more useless, because you never want them close enough to the front line to be used effectively. If you do this, they will be killed. And while, in this type of games, you generally don't want your units killed, in Fire Emblem having them killed basically forces you to restart the battle or move forward for the rest of the game with a gimped army. Either option kind of sucks. And unfortunately, it is easy to have a healer off by a single square, and then have an enemy unit, out of the blue, attack it an kill it in a single hit. While this does promote awareness of careful planning, which are strong aspects of this type of game. I feel that it nonetheless is a bit too harsh.<br /><br />For this specific case, I think Rondo of Swords found a much better mid ground. There is still punishment if your unit dies in battle, but instead, it's just weaker in the following fight while it recovers. A much more balanced, enjoyable feature.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-87269868954048862402010-03-06T12:57:00.000-08:002010-03-06T13:23:19.563-08:00Learning from your fanbaseIn my last blog entry, I made the mistake about complaining about a bad review. Typically, I avoid complaining because it rarely accomplishes things, and I don't like being a whiner. But something happened as a result of my complaining - a fan of Castle Conflict went and wrote a great review. Since then, the game has got many more and with the new Egypt update out, it is doing pretty decent.Nonetheless, my last blog entry taught me two things:<br /><br />1) Fans are <b>awesome!!</b><br />2) Whining works. (Don't worry, I'm not going to start whining all the time =P)<br /><br />I have a couple Castle Conflict related blogs on my plate, things that I've learned, and this will be the first of those. I was hoping to do this one about a month ago, actually, but I've been sidetracked... now that I have some time, here it is!<br /><br />One of the things that we added to the Multiplayer update of Castle Conflict was a survey. The survey basically allows us to ask the users directly what they think about Castle Conflict. I set up the survey such that I could update it live, although I haven't done so as of yet, as I haven't had a chance to collate the results of the last survey.<br /><br />To make the survey work, I'm using PinchMedia. It's no secret that I think Pinch is amazing and have learned a lot using it. There is some fear mongering going on about the service, but I think it's a bit too much. Especially given that Castle Conflict does not use Core Location or Facebook Connect; so some of the things that people are frightened of don't even apply to our game.<br /><br />Anyways, Pinch is great because it tells you what your users do. But it's a bit more difficult to ask them outright what they think, so we added the survey. But, since we already had Pinch Media installed, instead of going through all the effort of writing a web service that would tally the results, and display it, I just made each question have a beacon, and I appended -y/-n at the end of it to mark the users response. This doesn't work perfectly; if a user takes the test more than once, for example, and answers the same question differently, I get both answers and don't know that they changed their answer. Being the optimist, I pretty much ignore all the -n answers, view by unique users instead of clicks, and tally the results that way.<br /><br />Here are the results:<br /><br />966 people finished the survey<br /><br />945 played Campaign<br /> 918 wanted more levels<br /> 916 enjoyed campaign<br /> 909 want more units<br /> 844 want unit skins<br /><br />439 would pay for more content<br /> 298 would pay for campaign levels<br /> 290 would pay for units<br /> 232 would pay for unit skins<br /> 199 would pay for multiplayer levels<br /> <br />307 played multiplayer<br /> 275 enjoyed multiplayer<br /> 218 thought multiplayer was stable<br /> 179 thought multiplayer had enough customisation<br /><br />922 Would recommend the game to their friends<br /><br />This tells me a few things.<br />1) Multiplayer could still use some work<br />2) However, very few people have played multiplayer relative to campaign<br />3) Despite the fact that multiplayer could use some improvements, if I were to make it more stable, I would please less than 100 people (as 2/3rds of the ~300 who had already played thought it was stable already<br />4) If I were to sell new campaign maps, I would please almost as many people as have played multiplayer<br />5) If I were to release a new, free campaign, I would please three times as many people as have played multiplayer<br /><br />This tells me that, while multiplayer could use some work, the direction that the fans are interested in is campaign.<br /><br />How does this compare with what I've learned via pinch?<br /><br />In the month of February (when multiplayer was live):<br /><br />5236 People played campaign,<br /> 972 beat it and kept playing after<br /><br />1166 people created a multiplayer game<br /> 262 people challenged an existing <br /><br />Result? Not a lot of people playing multiplayer in its current incarnation.<br /><br />There is one other thing I would like to discuss in this entry, and that is "QuickPlay". Currently, I am thinking of axing it, despite the fact that it goes against some of my instincts. (According to Pinch, 2886 people played QuickPlay in February, so it is still being used). The reason for this is that it ruins the first experience. If the user starts a quickplay match and they haven't yet played, they are presented with 8 units + another button, and little idea what to expect. It can be overwhelming. Campaign is a much more controlled experience - the player gets 3 units to start, and gets to get new units one at a time, as features slowly unroll for them. Campaign also drives the user forward better.<br /><br />If I download a game for a first time, and I'm trying to figure out how much I like it, I'm more likely to click on "QuickPlay" than "Campaign". Simply because, Campaign sounds like it has a large commitment. Whereas QuickPlay sounds light and easy - "oh yeah, I can try this out, and know if I like the game." I've seen over half the people I pass the game to test it out go to QuickPlay instead of Campaign. So either Quickplay needs some reworking ... or it should be taken away. We want users to have the best first experience possible, so that they like the game more, and are more likely to spread it via word of mouth. I think that, for this to work, we need to drive them to our best experience, which is Campaign. Will this actually happen? Stay tuned for our next update (although no date is yet set for that)Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-70382750993208018592010-02-01T08:43:00.000-08:002010-02-01T09:19:18.403-08:00One of the biggest fears I've heard from many of my programmer friends is showing their code to other people. Or coding in front of other people. It's as if, they're so afraid that there's some way they could be coding things better that they don't know about, that if they showed their code to others they'd be ridiculed. Or that they think that they're doing things in a great way and are afraid to be ridiculed and find out that perhaps their way isn't so great after all.<br /><br />I don't remember having this fear for a long time. I got used to pairs programming in high school, which to a lesser extent involves sharing your code with someone. But it's more recently that my lack of fear has been obvious; I taught iPhone Dev School this weekend and was coding in front of an audience of ten others, not only showing off my coding style in real time, but making the claim that it was good enough that they should listen to me and code this way. (For sure, I was coding nothing particularly difficult in a two day course, but my <a href = "http://www.killingmichael.com/">co-instructor, Michael,</a> came up to me and said, "Man, you're brave. Coding in front of ten other people!"<br /><br />Truthfully, until he said that, I hadn't even thought about it.<br /><br />No, when it comes to code, my fear is not showing it to others. My fear is my product. Michael gave a speech this weekend with roughly the following quote: "If you're not embarassed by the first version of your product, then you've shipped too late." I agree with this notion full heartedly. But although I will publish an embarassing product to see if there is any interest in it, once I know there is an interest, I get more concerned with doing things <i>right</i>.<br /><br />I released Castle Conflict almost a year ago now. It has been a pet project of <a href = "http://www.josiahtobin.com/">Josiah's</a> and mine, and we have since released one minor and two major updates for it, with another one that we are currently planning. We have over 20 000 people who have downloaded non-pirated versions of the game at this point. While I am certain that it has been deleted by a number of these people, assuming only half of that audience liked the game enough to keep it, that means that each time we update our game, there's 10k people who might see it.<br /><br />One of the popular requests for Castle Conflict has been multiplayer. I finally spent the time teaching myself the BlueTooth and WiFi libraries on the iPhone. I finally spent time learning about syncing, time stamps, etc. I expected that I would be done January 7th, but it was not until minutes before midnight on January 21st (after skipping my weekend and spending 4 days working 12 hour shifts, something I did without noticing because I love my job so much) that I finally submitted the multiplayer update. After days of testing, checking stability, reducing crashes, keeping the devices connected as solidly as possible. etc.<br /><br />But there's a problem. I am in no means a network programmer. While I enjoyed that course in school, it was not my strong suit. And I haven't really touched anything network-program-y since 2006 in school. (Technically, I was working on Gwabs, a networked game for about a year, but by the time I was on the project most of the network code had already been written and I never touched the networking code itself). So, in terms of how to structure things, I was learning the entire way.<br /><br />Then again, the first week when Josiah and I did Castle Conflict, I was teaching myself Cocos2d. But my experience with 2D game engines is much stronger, and it's a lot harder to structure rendering wrong. <br /><br />On January 21st, I felt fairly certain that I was submitting a game that would be received well, that would give Castle Conflict a much-wanted boost in sales, and that was fairly certain. But I had a fear. I had a fear because I am not a network programmer, and while I tested everything I could think of, my instincts are not as sharp as they would be in searching for bugs in gameplay. I don't know with as much certainty where to look to make sure I haven't made any obvious mistakes. What if I missed a spot?<br /><br />Nonetheless, surely my audience would appreciate what I had made for them, the weeks I had spent getting it working on their request, the time I had spent learning and implementing? Surely, even if there were bugs, they would understand that they would be ironed out over time, and appreciate the new features that most of them were getting for free?<br /><br />Not quite so. I've got three reviews since the multiplayer update went live. One is about another game, making me wonder if the reviewer is confused, or a spammer. One was in German, and although google translate tried, it was not able to make the review completely understandable. (I did get that they liked it, though). But one said this:<br /><br /><i>"Bluetooth and WiFi gameplay always disconnects... Horrible coding and balancing."</i><br /><br />It was a one star review, the first review lower than three stars I have gotten since campaign mode was released. And while it's too early to say for sure, my sales took a turn downwards today compared to yesterday (when this review was written). Such an early review discounts all the other stuff in the game that people have already liked, and says that it sucks because this new feature I spent weeks writing and learning for - literally as much time overall as the entire rest of the game combined - is not yet perfect. And I wonder, by spending these weeks trying to give back to my users, have I potentially damaged my sales more than hurt them? (This all being said, I just checked out this guy (NeverEverSatisfied)'s stats and he's written 14 reviews on the app store, of which 12 were 1 star.)<br /><br />I'm reminded of a quote that refers to rock stars: <i>"You're only as good as your last hit single."</i> Perhaps this is true on the app store? Perhaps you're only as good as your last update?<br /><br />I wish that the iPhone app store allowed me to e-mail people who reviewed my game. For, certainly, I would love to know what problems this guy ran into. What device he was on (I was able to test on an iPhone 3G, 3Gs, and an iPod Touch 2nd Gen, but not iPhone 2G or iPod Touch First Gen). What disconnect messages he was getting. Then, perhaps, I would be able to learn from this information, update my code, and make things more stable. <br /><br />Anyways, we will continue to make wireless more and more viable as time passes. And we will continue to add more content. I have learned a couple other things from this update that I hope to blog about soon, including some classes I wrote for it.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-92010058796229943092010-01-27T11:30:00.000-08:002010-01-27T11:34:38.070-08:00iPhone Dev School Rev 3: This weekend!<a href = "http://www.killingmichael.com/">Michael Sikorsky</a> and I will be teaching iPhone Dev School again this weekend, at the University of Calgary. <br /><br />For a sample of what you can expect to learn if you attend, we have "leaked" the following recipe: <a href = "http://home.brokenkings.com/downloads/bluetooth.zip">BlueTooth Recipe</a>, which outlines how to use the GameKit library in iPhone OS 3.0. This is just one of the many things that will be covered this weekend. <br /><br />No experience is necessary; day one is spent getting everyone up to speed on how iPhone development works, what all the different pieces are, and getting familiar with the tools. In day two, we spend more time giving students quick introductions to various APIs that are available, both from apple and third parties. We also discuss the app store from our own real world experience.<br /><br />If you are interested, there are more details <a href = "http://killingmichael.com/iphone-dev-school/">on Michael's blog</a>.<br /><br />We hope to see you there!Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-12119889476717039742010-01-02T13:57:00.000-08:002010-01-02T14:13:02.335-08:00iPhones impact in Calgary in 2009<div>2009 has seen a huge increase in the visibility of apple's iPhone App Store. The app store hit it's billionth download in May, then just before the end of September it doubled that number. Over 100k apps have been developed for the app store since it launched in the summer of 2008. Even in the humble little oil, gas, and cowboy town of Calgary, we've seen a significant pool of developers working on apps for the device.</div><div><br /></div><div>The biggest category of iPhone app developers in Calgary have been those who are developing games. Companies in Calgary that are involved in this space include:</div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://www.brokenkings.com">Broken Kings</a></b></div><div><i>Broken Kings is a fledgeling Game Design company that so far has two games published on the iPhone. The first, Castle Conflict, was initially developed in 10 days, pirated over 10k times, featured by apple, and hit the top 50 in the US App Store for all apps. Their second app, Ant Attack, took longer to develop and did not sell as well. They released an update version of Castle Conflict before Christmas. The company also has two PC games that is is searching for distribution for, and does some consulting. They have one full time employee, Stephen Gazzard, and hire contractors to aid them on projects.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://www.blueunitstudios.com/">Blue Unit</a>/<a href="http://www.gamescafe.com/">GamesCafe</a></b></div><div><i>A lot of press has been given to Sally's Spa, which knocked EA's The Sims off of the #1 slot in the iPhone app store to becoming reigning champion. While it is no longer in the top slot, it still made makes large amounts of sales. The game was developed by a Calgary game development company, Games Cafe. The two man team responsible for most of the design, programming, and art then left Games Cafe to start their own iPhone game company, Blue Unit Games, although they were bought by Phoenix New Media shortly afterwards.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><div><b><a href="http://www.wnrs.ca/">WNRS</a></b></div><div><i>WNRS (which stands for We Are Not Rocket Scientists) and is another success story from a Calgary development house. The company includes Boris Cosic, who worked on Flapjack Finder, an app that allowed users to find Calgary Stampede Pancake Breakfasts with their iPhone. Two apps have been released by WNRS so far. The first was HallowCarver, a Halloween themed app where the users carved pumpkins with their fingers. The app was featured by apple and hit the top 50 in Canada. Their second app, a game called SnowRumble, was released in the app store shortly before Christmas.</i></div></span></i></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b><a href="http://fpmsoftware.com/www.fpmsoftware.com/Welcome.html">FPM Software</a></b></div><div><i>FPM software is a company run by Lopi Mackenzie. The company is technically incorporated as a BC corporation but its offices are now located in Calgary. Their first app, ShiftMaze, was released shortly before Christmas, and developed in coordination with Vertical Motion.</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://bnid.ca/">Big Nerds in Disguise</a></b></div><div><i>Big Nerds in Disguise is a hobby developer, meaning that the employees still work full time jobs and makes their apps at night. Their first app, Own This World, went live shortly before Christmas. Is is a location based app where players gain territory using the GPS on their iPhone. In total, BNiD has three employees; two programmers and the graphic designer/marketer. (They also wrote another app, Ask JC, that was rejected by Apple).</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://www.somacreates.com/">Soma Creates</a></b></div><div><i>Soma Creates is a company run by Josh Heidebrecht, a parent of two. Like many other companies in Calgary, Soma Creates makes games for the iPhone, but where Soma Creates is unique is that their apps are aimed at the children of people who own iPhones. Their first app, I Can Garden went live earlier this year, and is aimed at children 18 months and older. Soma Creates already have several projects planned for 2010, that follow their goal of creating apps that entertain children while at the same time unlocking their potential and inspiring their creativity.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://www.tapium.com">Tapium</a></b></div><div><i>Another young iPhone company in Calgary that develops games and does consulting. Notably, they recently worked on Hootsuite, <a href="http://mashable.com/owa/pages/winners">which won an award on Mashable</a> for best Twitter app.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://www.mindlessgoods.com/">Mindless Goods</a></b></div><div><i>Mindless Goods is a small Game design company based in Calgary that is near to releasing their first title, Bait, which is like a combination of the hit iPhone app Koi Pond and the hit PopCap game Feeding Frenzy. It is run by Greg Taylor outside of work hours.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://www.iphoenixfund.com/">iPhoenix Fund</a></b></div><div><i>The iPhoenix Fund is perhaps the biggest movements in game development in the city. It was started by Phoenix New Media, a Calgary games company that has a hit series, "Curse of the Pharaoh", on Big Fish Games. In 2009, they began iPhone operations, including the purchase of Blue Unit Studios and the start of the iPhoenix Fund, which intends to build a number of iPhone games over the next five years. Development partners that will be working with Big Stack Studios (the company Phoenix New Media is using for iPhone games) include Broken Kings, Robots and Pencils, Chayowo Games, and Phoenix New Media.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Among all the game developers, there are also some companies who dabble in more than just games. </div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://hq.robotsandpencils.com/">Robots and Pencils</a></b></div><div><i>Robots and Pencils is run by Michael J. Sikorsky and his wife, Camille Sikorsky. They consult and work on their own projects. Throughout the year, they were involved in various websites, businesses, and iPhone apps. The four iPhone apps that are live in the app store that Robots and Pencils were involved with include: Crush Factor, iHydrate, Kawi, and an app for iPhoenix Fund investors.</i> </div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, there have been several movements in Calgary that have not been related directly to the development of iPhone apps, yet have still benefited from the growth of iPhones on the market.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://killingmichael.com/iphone-dev-school/">iPhone Dev School</a>/<a href="http://calgary.iphonedevcamps.org/">iPhone Dev Camp</a></b></div><div><i>iPhone Dev School and iPhone Dev Camp are initiatives started by Michael J. Sikorsky of Robots and Pencils. He teaches iPhone Dev School with Stephen Gazzard of Broken Kings; so far, they have taught the course twice (once in Calgary and once in Edmonton). It is a weekend course, and students have gone on to write successful apps. Included among the students were Boris Cosic of WNRS, and Randy Troppman, who founded RunningMap Trackometer, an app that tracks users positions over time. (It hit #10 in the Fitness category on the iPhone). The next is being held at the University of Calgary at the end of January. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>iPhone Dev Camp is a little more loosely structured than iPhone Dev School, and at the first one (which was hosted in Autumn), the "App Track" began developing an app for the Calgary Science Center.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://appboy.com/">Appboy</a></b></div><div><i>Appboy is a website for developers to promote their apps, for people to submit app ideas, and for users to look at what apps are available. In short, it's an app-lovers hub.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="http://iphix.ca/">iPhix</a></b></div><div><i>iPhix is not involved in iPhone Development, but they still make their living off of the iPhone. This mom and pop shop specializes in fixing broken iPhone screens for less money and time than it takes Apple to do so.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>From work-at-home entrepreneurs to hobbyists working in their free time, to large funds - the iPhone has definitely made it's presence known among the development community in Calgary. 2010 should see many more exciting advancements.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br /><br /><i>Every effort has been made to keep the content in this post accurate. If any information seems incorrect, please e-mail stephen at broken kings [dot] com</i>Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-3468872791950236502009-12-16T21:21:00.000-08:002009-12-16T21:39:08.372-08:00Gameplay and Storytelling: Part 3I recently downloaded a game for the iPhone called Suviving High School, part 3. I was anticipating not liking it, because I am not a fan of current teen culture, and the game seemed likely to glorify it. The reason I felt interested in downloading it was because it seemed to be a game where story was important.<br /><br />One of my long term goals with game development is to develop a style of gameplay where what you do in the game and what you do in the story are linked. Surviving High School showed me two things: 1) This is a viable gameplay mechanic, and 2) There is a demand for it.<br /><br />Surviving High School is, in essence, a very rudimentary version of what it is that I hope to eventually accomplish. The game follows the story of you, going through high school, and along the ways you get to choose to do various things, build relationships with people, and in the end, based on how you did, things happen.<br /><br />It also handles a couple of the things that I have been concerned about quite well, specifically, how to drive the player. Up front, the player is given three main goals: Win at football, Get a car, become popular. It is, of course, essentially impossible to pull all of these things off, and the player must make choices along the lines where they are going to concentrate. Are they going to make their character strong so that he can perform 'special moves' in football? Are they going to spend time studying so that they can do better at school, so that they do well enough that their dad buys them a car? Or are they going to watch TV and skip class to be come popular? (Philosophically, that's the part I hate most - that the player was rewarded for doing such things - but whatever, I won't go into a teen-lifestyle rant today :)<br /><br />Where this game differs from my view on what I hope to eventually accomplish, down the road, with this style of gameplay is the characters interaction. What we have here is great - I actually enjoyed building up relationships with the various characters, and I really tried hard to have a good relationship with the girl who I was dating, and I really felt bad when other characters didn't get along well with my character. And I point out that this game does it very well, and it has excellent scripts and the characters are interesting and varied. But what I want to accomplish is a game where your interactions with other characters are richer. Surviving High School plays roughly like a "Choose your own adventure" game, where your relationship with characters is dependent on what you say in situations where you only get to choose one of two possible things to say.<br /><br />I want to someday have a style of gameplay where you can go, strike up a conversation with another character, and say pretty much whatever. This of course leads to many concerns, of which syntax, performance, and possibilities are among them. I have been thinking more and more about the idea of symbolic language, as used in <a href = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_of_Siboot">Siboot</a>. (This would also solve the difficulty of porting to other languages; no having to learn how to parse multiple languages!)<br /><br />Alright, so saying "Pretty much whatever" is unlikely, and it would lead to players saying dumb things to the characters. (You know that as soon as you start talking to one of those 'bots' online or wherever, you try to say the zaniest thing possible in the hopes of tripping it up). But creating a more rich, verbose interaction between characters, I believe, will really immerse the players. Because truthfully, in Surviving High School, there were many times when I didn't feel compelled to say or do either of the things that I was given the choice of doing, and felt as if I were picking the "lesser of two evils".<br /><br />There is one other area that Surviving High School did well that I still would like to potentially improve upon in my own game down the road, and that is variety of actions. In SHS, the game calls on you to do many things, from sing to act to play football to etc..., and each of these things would of course require different minigames or actions to fully work. What they have instead for most cases is word based games; you spell or choose words that are related to the actions. This nicely solves the problem of having to create many different actions for the player to perform but at the same time devalues the experience of trying to accomplish some of the things your character does. While it would be difficult to create a game where the player has many options of actions on top of the various conversation requirements this game would require, I feel that finding some solution to this would be important.<br /><br />At this point all of my ideas are experimental and I don't know how to solve all the problems I am encountering in my mental designs. Those that I am finding solutions for are often expensive or require vast amounts of technology and scripting times. It will require vast amounts of experimentation and iterations before this style of gameplay is fully realised. Perhaps I won't even be the one to realise it, but I hope to be involved to some degree.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-67445025394843562112009-12-11T10:56:00.000-08:002009-12-11T11:08:48.208-08:00Castle Conflict: Update is live!The original plan for the Castle Conflict update was for it to take eight days to develop (similar to our original development cycle of 8 days). Of course, live intervened, and during that 8 day period, I had a concert, a contract to work on, family commitments, and many other interruptions. These conditions existed the first time as well, but we we had planned this time ... well ... it took longer.<br /><br />Nonetheless, we had a game that had rough versions of all the features by the Monday after we had started, which was good because myself and the Lead Programmer from FPM Software (a new iPhone company in Calgary working on games, the first of which, Shift Maze, was submitted to the app store on Wednesday) were hosting a testing dinner that night, where friends and family got a chance to play our game. We, of course, bribed them with food.<br /><br />The app was delayed a further two weeks. One week, I was away from the code base, working on and teaching iPhone Dev School with <a href = "http://www.killingmichael.com">Michael Sikorsky</a>, who also has a game that has been or will soon be submitted to the app store.<br /><br /><a href = "http://www.josiahtobin.com/">Josiah</a> (the artist/audio developer) and I decided to take another week to finish the app, to make sure that it was a really polished experience. And so it was that, 4 and a half hours past our deadline, on the morning of December 8th, we finally clicked the 'submit' button so that Apple could view our game.<br /><br />Castle Conflict went live around midnight last night. The new update does not have all the features we planned, yet both Josiah and myself keep playing the game. (I have gone through campaign mode probably 10 times by now, and am still not bored of it). We are planning future updates already, now that we have the architecture in for levels and new units to be added easily.<br /><br />It has been a wild ride. But it has been fruitful!<br /><br />Screenshots of the new update:<br /><br /><img src = "http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Castle%20Conflict/IMG_0620.png" /><br /><br /><img src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Castle%20Conflict/IMG_0627.png" /><br /><br /><img src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Castle%20Conflict/IMG_0631.png" /><br /><br /><img src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Castle%20Conflict/IMG_0633.png" /><br /><br /><img src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Castle%20Conflict/Untitled.png" /><br /><br /><br />We also have a youtube video: <br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kUSN9LwHTLw&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kUSN9LwHTLw&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />(and if you go to our channel, there are also 4 videos that show the game being developed).<br /><br />And finally, the <a href = "http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/castle-conflict/id315158886?mt=8">iTunes URL :)</a>Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-33706613145753896052009-12-07T14:45:00.000-08:002009-12-07T14:51:03.608-08:00iPhone tip: don't change ${EXECUTABLE_NAME}This is a series of quick tips for people who are having a few problems, with ad-hoc iPhone builds and xCode in general.<br /><br />1) When creating an ad-hoc iPhone app, be sure to have a 512*512 png file in your app called iTunesArtwork . Just iTunesArtwork, no png at the end.<br />2) Be sure to create an Entitlements file (Add->New File->Code Signing->Entitlements). Name it whatever, and place it in the root, not in any subfolders. Then, go into the information for your target, and set the Code Signing Entitlments field to the name of that file.<br /><br />The next one is important, as I lost > 30 minutes on it: do not change ${EXECUTABLE_NAME}. This is in the information for your Target, under properties/Executable. I decided to change this, because I had one target for regular development and one for ad-hoc distribution, and I thought to myself, boy, it would be neat to be able to tell the output of these targets apart easily. So I changed that value to CC_AdHoc, and suddenly my code was exploding. The worst error I got was "CC.app: object file format invalid or unsuitable". It took me a while to realise that it was the ${EXECUTABLE_NAME} that was causing the problem, and once I did, was highly frustrated. So just leave that variable alone, it will save you a lot of problems.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-18299386939981555732009-12-03T13:30:00.000-08:002009-12-03T13:33:03.966-08:00Objective C in-code profilingTo check how long something is running in objective C:<div><br /></div><div>1) Declare an NSDate and set it to [NSDate date]</div><div>2) Run the code you want to test</div><div>3) Get an NSInterval from the NSDate by sending the timeIntervalSinceNow message</div><div><br /></div><div>So for example:</div><div><br /></div><div><pre></div><div>NSDate* date = [NSDate date];</div><div>//RUN some expensive code her</div><div>NSTimeInterval interval = [date timeIntervalSinceNow];</div><div>NSLog(@"Time running expensive code: %f", interval);</div><div></pre></div>Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-37804346558579722932009-11-17T08:20:00.000-08:002009-11-17T09:27:47.414-08:00iPhone Games / Return of Castle Conflict<b>The return of Castle Conflict / Week of no sleep round 2</b><br /><br />It is something that's been in the back of Josiah's and my mind for months now (ever since Castle Conflict first went live in May), something that we'd intended to do a lot earlier. When we first released the game, the reviews we were getting basically said, "We love this game, but there's not enough of it!". When you have users saying, "We want more of your game!", then usually, it's a good idea to give them more of it.<br /><br />All well and fair, but we felt fairly limited in what we could do. We had some significant problems, most notably, screen space; we had used up all the screen space we could, and any new units we added would require more buttons. Where would those go?<br /><br />The second was, if we only have 8 units, how do we make multiple levels?<br /><br />At the time, we were still of the mindset that iPhone games would not take us long to make. Castle Conflict had taken us 1 day of prototyping + 8 days developing + 1 day finalising. And those weren't full days. Furthermore, we had an idea for another game that we thought would not take long to make: Ant Attack. Surely, if we made Castle Conflict in a week, we could make Ant Attack in one, maybe two? And during that week, we could let our subconcious work on ideas for how to fix Castle Conflict. Surely, our users could wait a week for another update?<br /><br />That ended up not being the case. The truth is, we don't work together full-time. I had a couple of computer games I was finishing up at the time. Josiah is also working on a computer game and a band project. To make matters further delayed, we each had a summer vacation of greater than one week planned, but neither of us at the same time.<br /><br />Ant Attack ended up taking us 4 weeks of development, but because of our varied schedules, did not get released until the middle of October, at which point I was in the midst of a move. So it is with a huge sigh of relief that we were able to sit down, solve the aforementioned problems of Castle Conflict, and free a block of time to finish it.<br /><br />Let this be a lesson to all future iPhone developers: Make your update for your game as soon as possible! What we should have thought in May, and will think next time, is "Surely this audience who might want Ant Attack can wait a week until our existing audience is pleased with the update they have told us they want." Because, you don't know how often those weeks of productivity are going to be available to you. And you want to address the audience that already exists, not one that might not.<br /><br /><b>What update?</b><br /><br />In order for this to be feasible in the time we have available (once again, just one week), we are once again structuring this update in a tiered manner, and those tiers are:<br /><br />1) Campaign Mode, New unit pack 1<br />2) Quick Play Cleanup<br />3) Campaign Mode Cleanup<br />4) New Unit Pack 2<br />5) New Unit Pack 3<br />6) Multiplayer<br /><br />Sadly, multiplayer is last, and we don't really expect to get it in this update, as much as we would like to. Luckily, updating is easy to do.<br /><br /><b>Planning is Key!</b><br /><br />We have one week for this project, so once again, we are using as many productivity tools as possible to keep things organised and moving smoothly.<br /><br />1) MSN: We are working from different cities, so the ability to communicate in real time is a huge need. MSN allows us to do that.<br /><br />2) XP-Dev: We are once again using this online tool to manage our tasks and plan our project. The software has been updated, so before where we had to rank our tasks by integral values to determine their importance, this time we were able to split our tasks across multiple iterations, as outline above.<br /><br />3) Mockups/Flow charts: Okay, so we are very 'indy', and I use the free Mac 'Paintbrush' software to make these, so they don't look as professional as those done in Visio or another equivalent software. Nonetheless, sometimes the best way to communicate is visually, so we use images as below to communicate ideas before spending hours working on implementation and graphics for them:<br /><br /><img style="width: 393px; height: 262px;" src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Castle%20Conflict/WorldMap.png" /><br /><img style="width: 399px; height: 399px;" src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Castle%20Conflict/flow.png" />Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-22511111381992098472009-11-13T12:43:00.000-08:002009-11-13T13:37:02.926-08:00Storytelling in Games: Part 2The Game Industry likes to refer to itself as art. They like to talk about how they allow the players to have deeper experiences in the story than the player has had before. I am not going to comment on whether or not games count as art (I think it's subjective and on a case by case basis), but the storytelling is an interesting aspect.<br /><br />When a reader reads a book, they often feel strong connections to their characters. They get to hear what their characters think, feel, dream, hope, etc. It can reach a point where, if a reader is truly immersed, they feel like they ARE a character. Games give players one more step into that immersion. They let players actually BE that character. But this is a problem, because games usually have the following constraints:<br /><br />1) A linear or semi-linear story<br />2) A path for their protagonist<br />3) Other characters that the player interacts with.<br /><br />I'm going to use Tales of Symphonia, an RPG for the GameCube, as an example of this. Let's consider the story. You play as a main character, Lloyd, who is trying to save the world. Lloyd does so by running around, killing random monsters, levelling up, and beating bosses. Over time, he encounters other characters, which join his party. Now let's examine how the above effect the players perception of themselves as Lloyd:<br /><br /><b>A linear or semi-linear story</b><br /><br />Lloyd really has about one goal, and he can only really approach one ending. "Defeat the bad guys, save the world." The plot is a bit more complex, but that is the overriding choice that the player makes. There are certain dungeons to which the player must go, to collect certain things, to reach this ending. The player does not get much of a choice in that; they have to follow a roughly linear, designed path to 'whats next'. <br /><br />Tales of Symphonia is what I would classify as 'semi-linear'. The player can make choices along the way that effect the ending, either by effecting the relationship between their character and other characters, and they can even change the end a bit. But there are finite choices that they can make, and these are NOT tied to the gameplay. Throughout the game, the player is given several binary decisions, and based on which ones they select, the ending varies. So, the player CAN influence the ending of the game, but to do so is almost a seperate section of the game then how they PLAY the game. It does not matter how many random monsters you kill, or how strong your character is. The core gameplay is not the deciding factor.<br /><br /><b>A Path for the Protagonist</b><br /><br />In Tales of Symphonia, the player is guided by other characters and clues as to where to go next. There are not really a ton of options, for the player must hit all certain spots, and experience certain events, before the story can advance. "Side Quests" are the closest thing to additional story, but they often include supplementary or inconsequential story, and do not actually move the key plot forward.<br /><br />The metaphor that the game promotes for the path to victory does not leave the player with a lot of time to figure out their own way of creating a path to victory. They must follow the path that the game has set forth for them.<br /><br /><b>Other Characters that the player interacts with</b><br /><br />Oh boy, this is the hardest part to tell in a story. In a book, the characters have a free range to say whatever the author wants them to say, and interactions can be as complex or simple as any scene allows. The same is true for theater, movies, television, radio, and pretty much any other drama with dialogue.<br /><br />But in games, we run into a problem. The player has to interact with other characters, but we can't really create verbose responses for everything that the player can say. In Tales of Symphonia, Lloyd has his own personality and talks for the player. That is one solution, although it breaks the illusion that we are Lloyd, and it works really strange with the scenes where Lloyd gives you a choice of two different things to say. Suddenly, we are Lloyd, but normally we are not? The amount we get to shape our character is pretty minimal.<br /><br />Games have handled this in a variety of different ways over the years. In the Legend of Zelda, you never see what it is that Link says, only the responses that the NPC's give. So you can imagine that Link said whatever you want, as long as it makes sense with that response. In the Monkey Island and similar series, the player doesn't say anything until the player makes a choice about what to say, and then the computer has a series of canned responses. So there is more options, but ultimately, it often results in the player trying to say everything to see what they can learn from the NPC's, even if it means taking similar dialogue paths again and again.<br /><br />In the Computer Science industry, programmers have been trying to get computers to talk for years. A.L.I.C.E. is an example of a bot that was scripted, but after tons of work on ai and intelligent sentence responses and parsing, the bot could still get confused by complex sentences. While the technology has doubtless advanced in the years since, it is still unlikely that the technology exists for a computer agent who could respond intelligently to any statement the player could construct, let alone adapt that entity to have a growing, changing relationship with the player, interact with the player in non-speech methods, and then expand that to have many such characters in the game world.<br /><br />So, in short, this is the biggest difficulty encountering story-game evangelists. Interestingly, a method of dealing with this was developed by Chris Crawford on a Mac game in the '80s called Siboot. Essnetially, a limited number of symbols was used to represent different things that the player could say, and so the player communicated with other characters in a symbolic manner. He gives an excellent explanation of it in his book "Chris Crawford on Game Design", which I highly recommend reading.<br /><br /><br />These are only some of the difficulties that story's must overcome in games, but step one of the battle is understanding the problems to overcome.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-55404436992253116092009-10-18T14:24:00.001-07:002009-10-18T14:52:23.163-07:00iPhone Dev Camp KeynoteiPhone Dev Camp is in the process of wrapping up even now. During the course of the camp, we were all able to share some valuable lessons. Here I will share some links to some of the interesting libraries and tools that were discussed:<br /><br /><a href = "http://monotouch.net/">MonoTouch</a> - A development environment for creating iPhone apps in C# with .net<br /><br /><a href = "http://www.ideaswarm.com/">App Vis</a> - A place to download a visualizer for your iPhone Apps status.<br /><br /><a href = "http://fivesecondtest.com/">Five Second Test</a> - Interface feedback<br /><br /><a href = "http://www.slideshare.net/llopis/squeezing-every-drop-of-performance-out-of-the-iphone">Squeezing every drop of performance out of the iPhone</a> - A slideshow by someone who really tried to get a smoothly operating app.<br /><br /><a href = "http://drobnik.com/touch/anticrack">Anti-Crack</a> - piracy prevention for your iPhone Apps<br /><br /><a href = "http://www.pinchmedia.com/#pinchanalytics">Pinch Media</a> - I've talked about them before in this blog, but they came up a bit during the camp. A website for a great library to learn about how users are using your application.<br /><br /><a href = "http://www.iphoenixfund.com/">iPhoenix Fund</a> - A fund for developing 133 iPhone apps<br /><br /><br />I myself gave a keynote today, about Cocos2D and developing games quickly. Although I do not think it has as much value without someone speaking to it, it has been requested that I share the keynote presentation. For those interested, a link to it exists at: <a href = "http://www.brokenkings.com/downloads/keynote1ids.key">this link</a>.<br /><br />As I type this, those participating in the app track are finishing up development on their app. They gave a demo of what they had a couple hours ago, and it really is amazing how quickly they came up with an app idea and began to implement it. If I understand correctly, the app is actually going to be used at the Calgary Science Center.<br /><br />The camp was a lot of fun and overall a large success. If you are in the Calgary area, interested in iPhone development, and missed out, I urge you to attend the next one. I will post with details in my blog about it when I know them, instead of the day before like I did this time.<br /><br />Thanks again to <a href = "http://www.killingmichael.com/">Michael Sikorsky</a> for organising and hosting the event!Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-57174366647404085562009-10-16T18:54:00.000-07:002009-10-16T18:57:27.880-07:00iPhone Dev CampI'm a little late in posting about this, but tomorrow and Sunday are iPhone Dev Camp in Calgary.<br /><br />If you are interested in iPhone Development and want to meet some of the people in Calgary who are involved with it, if you have $25 and a weekend off, if you would like to hear some Keynotes by those involved in the scene in Calgary...then come along!<br /><br />Details can be found at:<br /><br />http://yyc.iphonedevcamps.org/iphone-camp-1<br /><br />I will be Keynoting on Sunday about my experience with Castle Conflict and using the Cocos2D for iPhone game engine.<br /><br />In other news, Ant Attack was submitted to the App Store on Tuesday, October 13th, at about 9:30 pm, so it should hopefully be live on October 27th-28th.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-91335789411438009902009-09-27T09:16:00.000-07:002009-09-27T09:54:24.892-07:00Storytelling and Games, Part 1I love stories. Stories can do so much; they can take you to a far away world when the stresses of the real one are too much. They can educate you on history, science, people, and more. They can make you cry, laugh, gasp. They can introduce you to new characters that can come to feel like friends to you.<br /><br />My preferred medium for story telling is books. For a myriad of reasons, I find it difficult to find a story in any other medium that can engage me as much as a well written book can. There are a few reasons for this:<br /><br />1. My favorite part of a story usually ends up being the characters. Nothing lets you get more into the mind of your character than being able to hear their thoughts directly.<br /><br />2. I like long, engaging plots. My favorite books are usually greater than 700 pages long. It's a lot easier for a book to get written that is 700 pages long than to have a movie or tv series with the same plot produced. In the TV series, each new character, backstory, and locale adds to the budget, and the lengthier a book, the more of these that are likely to exist. A book can add new locales without having to get board approval for a budget raise.<br /><br />3. Movies are often 'ADD' oriented - people want to sit down, have an epic experience, then walk out and be done. Oftentime, they don't carry anything with them after a movie. A book, on the other hand, is more difficult to read in a single sitting, and the characters could be with you for days, weeks, months, even years (depending on the speed that you read), making them feel that much more important to you.<br /><br />4. In general, I am not a huge fan of typical Hollywood-isms. (Big Explosions, car chases, end of the world, clues hidden about that reveal over time how the movie will climax, etc.) <br /><br />5. I'm not good at reading epic poetry.<br /><br />Granted that there are plenty of things that you can do with television and movies that cannot be done with books. I would not even think of reading a book about Kung-Fu if there was a movie done about the book starring Jackie Chan. In fact, the visual medium can be an excellent way to tell a story in a different way then a book.<br /><br />Let's take for example a similar idea and see how well it translates into books versus movies, and then I will talk about how it translates to games:<br /><br />The Scene: A man walks into a room where another man was killed. Various clues are littered about the room.<br /><br />In a book: This type of scene can work very well in a book. The author can describe each of the clues, and even describe the man's reaction to each one; perhaps he knows what some of them mean. This makes the reader feel smarter, but still puzzled; what do the other ones mean?<br /><br />In tv: Tv's advantage is it does not have to call attention to every clue that is in the scene. It's on the screen; it is up to the viewer to locate and puzzle over the various clues. If there is a bloody handprint on the window sill, and the viewer sees it, they can draw a conclusion that the murderer escaped through the window. They are rewarded for their powers of observation.<br /><br />Unfortunately, this form of visual storytelling is rarely used. Modern viewers don't have the patience to look at a still shot for very long; next time you watch TV, count how many times the camera stays in the same spot for longer than 4 seconds, without some form of shaking, zooming or panning going on. It won't happen very often. So while this type of story telling can indeed be used, what happens more is there will be a dramatic effect, probably a snapshot, drawing attention to each relevant clue. This is so that the viewer doesn't get lost if they don't notice the handprint on the windowsill, but it does mean that viewers are spoon fed more.<br /><br />In games: Being a visual medium, games have the same advantages that TV has, but since the player is in control, they have a bit more freedom. Placing clues around the game that the player can discover by moving through the world does not cause impatience, because the players are able to spend as much time looking at and investigating said objects as desired.<br /><br /><br />As the above example shows, games have the chance to take an experience that is good in books and good on tv, but make it something more. Suddenly, instead of observing the clues being discovered, the player is discovering the clues themselves. (This has, in fact, been used in many games over the years, from Hugo's House of Horrors to Myst to Hidden Object games, etc.)<br /><br />Games have the potential to do some really neat, and interesting, things with storytelling. The unfortunate thing is that, they are not done very often. To many game designers, story telling means tossing in some cut scenes between the action in the game, where we learn that a) the world is in jeopardy of being destroyed / taken over, b) we are humanity's last hope because of prophecy/some equipment we have/our past, and c) the enemy is evil and stands for nothing good, so killing him would not only be perfectly okay, but probably better for everyone involved. Also, killing him solves all of our problems.<br /><br />There are, of course, other stories, but that's the general feeling a lot of games go through. (Think: Legend of Zelda, Tales of Symphonia, Legend of Mana, Half Life 2, etc. etc...)<br /><br />So why is it that a lot of games, this medium that has the potential to tell some truly interesting stories, are telling stories that pale in comparison to most things that hollywood, tv, and literature are capable of coming up with? What makes a good story, and how can games make it better?<br /><br />I hope to answer these questions over time, and will hopefully have time to continue writing this blog series as observations are made. I would like to draw one initial conclusion:<br /><br />Most games are designed as games first, with the story tacked on afterward to drive the player, so the game and story do not necessarily work together. In order for a game to have a truly magnificent story told, the gameplay and story have to be designed to work in harmony.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-51674422665299759642009-09-17T14:33:00.000-07:002009-09-17T14:39:41.969-07:00iPhone TipIf you are getting security errors (Error launching remote program: security policy error) when trying to run an iPhone app on your iPhone with the correct provisioning profile, go into the organiser window and uninstall all provisioning profiles that may be expired, as they apparently can cause trouble.<br /><br />Discovered this from a comment in the following blog post: http://isagoksu.com/2009/development/iphone/how-to-get-rid-of-security-policy-error/<br /><br />While I'm here, may as well toss up a couple current Ant Attack screenshots, the game we are currently working on for the iPhone. The goal is simple: kill ants, buy things to kill more ants.<br /><br /><img src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/diffTargets.png" /><br />The ants scattering<br /><br /><img src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/queenAnt.png" /><br />The queen ant that the player will uncover at the end of the levelStephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-59802758093543877442009-06-17T08:21:00.001-07:002009-06-17T09:06:35.750-07:00Lessons learned from Castle Conflict - marketing and designCastle Conflict is not doing poorly. It is not making me Flight Control levels of money, but it certainly is not leaving me penniless either. I think the app has been alive long enough, and I've heard enough from the users, that I can begin to draw some conclusions.<br /><br /><b>Marketing</b><br />First off, Castle Conflicts marketing campaign has not done a lot for the game. It has been reviewed on many websites, appeared on many websites, been cracked on many sites, even received a couple of youtube videos. They haven't been without value - I've recieved small boosts from such websites. For example, around the time of the apps first review, the app was getting about 15 sales a day, but the following day, it had 27. At that point, it was easy to measure that the review had given the app a boost of about 10 sales a day. It was not a particularly great review, but it still helped a bit. I cannot measure if we would have got more sales if we were better reviewed, but it seems likely to me.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the first release was full of design problems, which I will get to shortly, and we did not get a lot of great reviews off the bat.<br /><br />Another avenue of advertising that did next to nothing was facebook ads. We got plenty of impressions (49K in a single day), but very few turn to clicks (11), which is to be expected. However, those 11 clicks were made on a day when the game had only 17 sales, so the chances that each click became a purchase is highly unlucky. Cutting the facebook ad dropped sales to 14, and the game had been on a downward trend at that point, so it can't even be said with certainty that cutting the facebook ad had anything to do with that.<br /><br />Luckily for us, about a week and a half after our game went live, we received one of those dreamt of e-mails from apple. It was so exciting that I didn't even believe it at first. "To Broken Kings, we at apple really love your game and want to promote it..." That doesn't happen to just anyone, and we quickly provided the assets requested. Our sales jumped from 11 on a Monday to 1.2K on the Tuesday. They dropped to about 880 a day and settled there for a week (until the app dropped a page in the 'New and Noteworthy' and 'What We're Playing' pages). We put it on sale and it managed to hover at about 700 sales on page two, and on page three it's getting between 2 and 3 hundred sales a day.<br /><br />The app has been reviewed on many sites since that time but it's a little less clear how much of an effect those have had. The sales data has not changed overly much since apple started promoting us, other than when it moves down a page, so it's clear the reviews have yet to do anything stunning for us. On that note, we haven't taken advantage of any paid advertising opportunities other than facebook, so hopefully in the next blog entry we will have something to say about that.<br /><br /><b>In short:</b><br />Facebook ads - not effective<br />Having your game reviewed on an app website - Remotely effective (perhaps more on a good review)<br />Getting featured by Apple - Highly effective, highly recommended<br /><br /><b>Mistakes</b><br /><br />We made two mistakes, one when developing Castle Conflict, and then one after when we sold Castle Conflict. They were:<br /><br />1) Releasing the game with a single level, and<br />2) Charging $1.99<br /><br /><b>Releaseing the game with a single level</b><br />The first mistake was a design mistake - we released the game with only a single level. This is not a mistake immmediately, but you have to know that your game is a single level game before you release it as a single level game. I was looking at Flight Control when I made the decision that a single level would be enough for Castle Conflict, but I failed to notice two key differences:<br />1) In flight control, you are driven to keep playing because you get a new high score at the end. The game always goes until you lose, but you will usually think, "Oh, I could have done better!". As such, it inherently drives players to play again.<br />2) In flight control, the only person you have to beat is yourself. In that sense, it does not rely on an ai remaining interesting, as Castle Conflict does.<br /><br />As I've mentioned before, this game was inspired by and largely based off of Medieval Clash. Medieval Clash was a free gamemaker game that I played in my youth when I was still fiddling around with gamemaker in my free time. Like this game, it had only one level, with the challenge being adjusted based on the users settings (difficulty, how fast the trees grow, etc). We mimicked that, because it had worked so well (for us) when playing Medieval Clash.<br /><br />To push players along, however, we checked how well they did and, if it was rather well, we would suggest to the player, "Why not advance to the next difficulty?". In an update we released (that just went live yesterday after 18 days in the queue), we made this pop up no matter how well the player did, as long as they won. Otherwise, players wouldn't know why to play again. What would be different? My statistics from Pinch have revealed that not everyone visits the settings page, so many people play the game a couple times on easy, and if they are not good at it, they won't see the point in continuing. <br /><br />Players NEED motivation. There are several things that can motivate a player: growth, advancement, beating a score are notable ones that I have uncovered. Castle Conflict did none of those things. Each game starts on a clean slate, so there is no growth. The game does not score you. It may advance you, but only if you do well. Without this, the player will be lost in the game after playing it once. We had assumed - wrongfully - that the player would want to play again because of the gameplay alone. That was what had driven us to play Medieval Clash again and again in the first place, why shouldn't it work on our end users? We were, of course, a lot more passionate about the game (enough so to make a game based off of it) then we could fairly expect an average user to be.<br /><br />There was one other difference between our app and Medieval Clash, however. The settings for Medieval Clash were on the title page, whereas our settings are hidden away on a settings page. This was essential because the iPhone screen has less space than a computer screen, but it makes the customisability aspect of the game less obvious.<br /><br /><b>Charging $1.99</b><br />We thought (and still think) that Castle Conflict was a fun game. We thought that players would most definitely get their moneys worth from it. And we had worked hard - skipping sleep, working around other responsibilities, taking no leisure time (other than one afternoon when we were far ahead) to get it out there. We figured, if we weren't getting a dollar a sale, it hadn't been worth it. So we priced the app at $1.99, so that after Apples cut of 30%, we'd still have $1.39.<br /><br />This was pride, and it led us to make a bad decision. Our game may be worth $1.99 on an online game website, it may even be worth more, but on the iPhone, games that provide hours of entertainment often sell for $0.99. As such, any game that costs more must have an obvious reason for costing more. If not, players will get upset that they are paying more and not getting more - and we received several reviews, both in itunes and out of, saying that the app would be great if it had cost $0.99, but wasn't worth it for $1.99. A lesson for any developer hoping to take something from our experience is - unless your game has some really obvious boost above other games (being 3D, being more like a console game experience, etc.), it's probably better to just charge $0.99, and prevent anyone from complaining about the price (as this will hurt your sales). <br /><br />We noticed this, but even after apple promoted us, we didn't change our price. Our app hit #48 by the Friday after we were promoted it, and if we had put it on sale that weekend, we may have cracked the top 25 with all the additional sales we could have gotten at half the price. But we didn't, until the app started sliding off the charts. when it was in position #98, in a panic to prevent it from falling off the top 50, we put it on sale at $0.99, and it pushed the app back up to #80 - but we missed the opportunity to really have the app go far. Of course, we could not have known how much of a hit our sales would take when apple moved our app down a page in the featured apps, but it still hurts to think about where we could have been.<br /><br />I was going to talk a little bit more about some design things I think have worked that other games have done, but I think I shall leave that as a future blog entry.<br /><br />Final Note: We got another youtube review, and it was quite nice:<br /><br /><object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/IhKq0Q26s8o&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/IhKq0Q26s8o&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-68125601937873081002009-06-10T19:37:00.000-07:002009-06-10T19:51:43.734-07:00Population Control TeaserPopulation Control is an interesting project. I actually started it while still in college, as my final project for my artificial intelligence class. It quickly became my favorite project from college, and during the day where we introduce ourselves to industry, I had it running on my computer the entire time to show off.<br /><br />I always had fun tinkering with it, and most people I've shown it to think that it is actually a game that could make money. Of course, people I know are biased in my favour, so that doesn't make them right - but I loved the game idea enough, and had enough fun playing it, so I decided to give it a shot.<br /><br />This project has become a joint collaboration with <a href="http://www.robotsandpencils.com/">Robots and Pencils</a>, a small company run by the same guy I helped teach iPhone Dev School with recently, <a href="http://www.killingmichael.com">Michael Sikorsky</a>, as well as his wife, Camille, who is doing the art.<br /><br /><a href="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/pop1.png"><img style="width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/pop1.png" border="0" /></a><br />This is what the game looked like originally, when I programmed it in college, complete with programmer art. You may even recognise the sheep from this game as being what I selected as my avatar on blogspot. While the game may have been solid, it definitely lacked the art necessary to crack it in todays market. Luckily, Camille seems to be a genius at making animals cute, and what we currently have looks something like the screenshots below:<br /><br /><a href="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-30-58.png"><img style="width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-30-58.png" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-30-35.png"><img style="width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-30-35.png" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-30-40.png"> <img style="width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-30-40.png" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-31-09.png"><img style="width: 400px; height: 306px;" src="http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/therabidwombat/Population%20Control/PopulationControl2009-06-1020-31-09.png" /></a><br /><br />We are hoping to have the game at a state where we can begin a distributor hunt very soon. Hopefully in that time, I will have a chance to discuss some of the behind the scenes details of the game in this blog.Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-163663006525197760.post-16855987162601245692009-06-05T16:20:00.000-07:002009-06-05T16:34:49.701-07:00Pinch Media UpdateI have previously discussed Pinch Media and piracy, and I would like to take a moment to commend Pinch Media for a move they made recently.<br /><br />Now, Pinch Media actually allows you to filter your data by how many users are real users, and how many users are pirates. I don't know yet how accurate this data is but the numbers that they have so far line up with what I have been finding on my own.<br /><br />Their system is not entirely without limitations, however - for example, you cannot compare how many pirates have performed each action vs. how many paid users have. It is not yet a perfect system, but it is definitely a nice system.<br /><br />This, of course, comes as Castle Conflicts first update should be coming near to propagating to the app store. In the update, I had included code that detected if a cracked version of Castle Conflict was run and - if so - actually supplied a SEPARATE application id, so that I could compare stats. I will probably be taking this code out with my following update, unless I find the observations in behaviour in-game of pirates vs. non-pirates striking.<br /><br />However, Pinch Media does reveal a few interesting pieces of data with this new update:<br /><br />1) Of Castle Conflicts users, currently <b>about 47% (6510) are pirated</b> - meaning that we just recently cracked the halfway mark of paid vs nonpaid.<br /><br />2) However, only 35% of all game sessions were by pirates - <b>non-pirated users play the game roughly twice as much as pirated users do!</b> (My states corroborate an increase in usage by paid users - before we started receiving more sales, when we had many pirates, our usage stats indicated that users were running the app approximately 3.12 sessions each. However, that number has since gone up to roughly 4.61 sessions per user (63,831 sessions over 13, 847 total users)<br /><br />3) <b>Users spend more time playing when they didn't pirate the app</b> - there is not a hugely significant number, and it is hard to judge overall as these numbers fluctuate from day to day, but on a normal day, a paid user runs the app approximately 17+ minutes (with the longest average session to date being 33 minutes), but a cracked user on averate runs it 15 minutes (with the longest average session to date being 24 minutes).Stephen (The Gazzardian)http://www.blogger.com/profile/06832303163180491279noreply@blogger.com1