It’s that time again! Every four months I participate in Ludumdare, which is a 48 hour game making challenge. You make the whole game from scratch over the weekend, only learning the theme on Saturday morning. I’ll be doing my entry at CB2Bistro with many other Cambridge and UK people.
My goals this time are to make something a little more polished, with title screen, music, sound effects and everything in place. I’m giving myself strict time limits so that I don’t spend too long on graphics, design, or let any one task harm the project. Thankfully my new laptop is much nicer to develop on, so I should be comfortable. Also: No penguins!!!
After more than twenty years of pining, I finally broke down and bought a PC-Engine! I’ve lusted after this beautiful little console since the eighties, but I’ve never had a good reason to buy one. In particular, I especially love the aesthetic of the original Japanese PCE and the tiny ‘hu cards’, so I decided to commit to just getting Japanese games and avoiding all the CD-ROM and USA/TurboGrafx games. Look how tiny it is! I’m excited!
This is actually my first 8-bit console!! I’ve never personally owned one! The closest I came was my sister owning a NES, which stayed in her bedroom, but I got to play. I also had quality time with Master System, but that’s about it! (I have a rich history of 8-bit computer ownership too, but that’s something else…) I actually paid a bit extra to get this with an RGB Scart output mod, rather than the regular RF output, and it looks great on my TV.
So far the only game I have is Dragon Spirit, a delightful shmup featuring cute dragons and heavy anime trappings on the box art. I generally prefer shmups to get away from spaceships and ‘vector/retro’ styling, so this is right up my street. It’s tough though! I’ve ordered a few more PC Engine games, which should arrive in the coming weeks. :3
Of course, now I want to fly to Japan, trawl through Super Potato and buy a bunch of 100 yen hucards that I can’t identify. Anyone want to send me any? XD
This week I’m participating in the RPGDX 7-day RPG challenge. I have until the end of Sunday to make an RPG on the theme of ‘Alternate History’, or at least do my best! I’ve never done one of their challenges before, but I felt like doing something fresh before getting back on with my main projects, and this gives me a chance to try out some new methods.
This is the star of my RPG. As yet nameless, the game is about a time traveling photographer. She travels back in time to take photos, and then influences time through their exposure. For instance, I’m wondering whether she can stop animals from becoming extinct through creating awareness.
Of course, what I actually manage is another matter entirely. I’ve not yet finished the3D model for the character, so I need to wrap that up today. I decided to write a list of primary goals, so that if I achieve some of these I’ll feel like the challenge was a success:
Make a nice 3D character with textures. Low poly Dreamcast/PSone style.
Animate the character with walk, attack, etc.
Have facial expressions and animations for talking, taking damage, etc.
Make a 3D environment with textures that doesn’t look like ass. Similarly, quite low poly.
Textures should be neatly assigned, using proper UV unwrapping.
Dialogue system, using the conversation parsing system that I’ve been playing with for a while, but never applied to anything.
Basic inventory system. Some basic stats, like HP and Gold.
I’d also like to create some NPCs, and have something that can be played from start to finish in some limited form, but I’ll have to see how things progress. I’m going to heading to CB2 for Friendship Club, but I will probably head there early and really knuckle down.
This blog entry is brought to you by Starbucks, and a very tasty muffin. It’s 09:00, but I woke up around 06:30 and decided to walk into town. This year I’ve been working hard to spend more time appreciating the city I live in, which is one of the reasons I was keen to have a good and portable laptop, and I love to wake up early on a Saturday and make the most of my weekend. Generally I try to have real weekends, which can be hard to do if you’re an indie, as your free time and work time can blend into one another.
One thing about being indie or freelance is that you can fall into a negative spiral of panic and exhaustion. You feel pressure to create something amazing, finish it, sell it, make money. If a project is going badly, then you are faced with a few decisions. Do you work harder; ie. work evenings and weekends, to compensate? Do you scrap the project, cut your losses, and start on something new? Then you’ve lost the chunk of time and money you invested into the previous project. In theory, you ought not to let it bother you, but there’s a lot of pressure to succeed. On top of this there is pressure with regards to the projects you choose and their apparent profitability – certain genres are easier to sell than others, for example.
I took a break from game development over the last few weeks. I felt I needed a ‘holiday’, but actually what I needed was just some time to step back and consider all of my projects. Fortunately a couple of illustration jobs popped up, so I worked on those instead. Those were a lot of hard work, but it kept me from worrying about code or game design, and it also reminded me to be appreciative of my independence.
I’m now back to work and very motivated. I’ve taken the pressure off myself somewhat, and I’m focusing on smaller goals, rather than always worrying so much about the ultimate aim for each project.
RPGDX have a week long ‘make an RPG’ challenge starting on Monday, which I’m thinking about doing, but I’m undecided. I might use it as an excuse to make some cute RPG artwork if nothing else, even if it doesn’t go anywhere. I’ve been itching to make some nice 3D game art recently, after all. I’ll be sure to post updates.
Yesterday my ‘pogo sketch’ stylus arrived in the mail. It’s a pen with a squishy conductive foam tip that works on the iPad, and it’s generally regarded as the best option. It cost me £15 including shipping to the UK, which isn’t cheap for such a basic device, but apparently the cheaper options are a waste of money.
This is the pen in question. It’s actually pretty small, but long enough to be comfortable my fairly large man-hands. I wish it had a pen cap, I worry about the foam tip getting damaged in my pocket or bag.
So this is my second image using the stylus, which I did whilst eating breakfast and watching the morning news. I actually had a laptop nearby running gmail etc as usual, and I even had a wacom tablet there too, but once I’m using a tablet it feels a lot like ‘work’. This was very relaxing to draw. The nature of the stylus (or indeed, using your finger) is that it tends to be behave a lot more like painting than drawing. You don’t have the same sort of tight line control as a pen or tablet, but you get all the motion in there, and you can zoom and pan easily to go in for detail when necessary. At first it seemed clumsy, but now I’m starting to enjoy using it, and I found myself using the iPad to write/draw game design notes whilst coding yesterday.
You can watch the progress of this drawing here. You can see that I originally sketched this small, and then scaled it up and started working on it in detail instead. I flipped the artwork a couple of times too, which is something I find essential for checking symmetry. Autodesk Sketchpad doesn’t have this feature, but Brushes and Art Studio both do.
When I first received the iPad I wasn’t very excited. I didn’t really have any good use for it, and I didn’t enjoy typing on it at all. Browsing was neither as portable as my iphone nor as good as my laptop. However, as always, it’s really down to the apps you get. I bought and played a lot of games that I really enjoy, and these art packages are really coming into their own for me.
Also, I’m seriously considering drawing a comic with it! This is an ultra fast sketch of a rough comic page, but I think that with the upscaling ‘Brushes Viewer’, and a little tidy up work (bubbles and panel borders etc), I could create all the artwork for a comic on the iPad comfortably enough. It’s weird, because it feels like a break from a computer, when this is patently untrue!
It’s time for TIGJamUK3, so soon I’ll be heading to CB2 Bistro and getting my game on! There are plans for 3-hour collaborations and challenges, and some people will be working on new game ideas too. There were some talks of making an RPG of some sort, as well as some ultra low-resolution stuff. Exciting!
I’ll post some updates over the weekend. Please look forward to some pretty shitty games! XD
It’s an exciting day here at Starfruit HQ. I just received two new pieces of hardware which will impact my work significantly over the coming years! The first is fairly straight forward… it’s an iPad!
I’ve already announced that I’ll be releasing Tumbledrop on iPad, so now that I have the hardware I can start development on it properly. Call me old fashioned, but when possible I prefer to have the hardware I’m developing for! I went for a 3G 32GB model just so that I can use it when traveling if need be, as I can just pay for one day’s usage. So, there might be some interesting iPad games coming in the future…
Far more interesting (and expensive…) is my new laptop! Amazingly, I decided not to get a macbook of any sort, and instead opted for the Sony Vaio-Z. It has a 13″ screen, Core i7 CPU, nvidia 330m GPU, 4GB ram, and lots of other really high specs! My current laptop is a Toshiba Portege A200, which is a very compact but competent little laptop, and it’s served me well for the last five years. I adore the compact form factor, and I loved having a Windows machine at all times, but I hated that it wasn’t powerful enough for much gaming, or heavy 3D graphics work.
Now I have a very powerful and portable laptop I’ll be able to work away from my desk more often. I’m looking forward to being able to work on Unity games, and do lots of 3D modeling without the discomfort of a low-spec machine. It also allows me to play PC games (especially indie games) in the living room, or hooked up to my TV, which helps to give me more time for relaxation in general.
Whilst these are just pieces of technology, they help me to do my job (and live my life) more effectively. It also feels nice to have something shiny after a long period of hard work. Even indies deserve to have something nice once in a while!
With that in mind, I will probably play some PC games this weekend. Any recommendations? I might start Dragon Age again, or play some Fuel, but I’m open to suggestion.
Every Tuesday afternoon I uproot from my regular work environment and head to a local bistro with my laptop!
It’s part of ‘Cambridge Friendship Club’ (otherwise known as CB2Indies), in which several indie developers get together and work. It’s a great opportunity to get out of the house, and I use it in lieu of my previous ‘Fun Friday’ as a day to work on experimental projects. We’ve been doing it for about five weeks now, and I’m definitely enjoying the routine. It also goes some way to counteract the maddening isolation from working all alone all the time.
I might start doing some full days working away from home, as often all I need is a laptop and an internet connection! I’m learning to take advantage of my indie status, without letting my work hours eat all of my time.
This weekend was Ludum Dare, a 48 hour game making challenge. This is my fifth time, and the theme was ‘Islands’!
This time was different, because several of us went to a cafe and did LD together, so it was two days tapping on a laptop. I wasn’t able to wrap up the game as neatly as my previous entries, but I was very pleased with the results. What do you think?
Hayden Scott-Baron (Dock) is a professional game developer. He worked on Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, LostWinds and various other games before going independent in 2009. (Read more).
