Post-Mortem: One Game A Month – January

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

In my last post I decided to participate to the One Game A Month challenge. It’s basically a web page gathering and connecting people who wants to release games regularly together.
You’re not forced to do anything, you can release whatever that can be called a game, it’s not about making the game in one month but releasing something each month, even updates.
The goal, in my view, is both to work your game dev skills and to work you “release” muscle which is the hardest thing you have to do when you want a game to be successful.

Here is a quick post-mortem of my January attempt.

The context

I called the game Links, it have a very simple mechanic which I will not talk about yet as I prefer people to discover.
It’s an old concept of mine that I wanted to do for a dear friend.
I initially wanted to release it in middle of January, for her anniversary, but failed (for the following reasons), so I’m doing it for February instead now.
Keep in mind that I also have a “big” game, NetRush, that I’m working on every work day (and sometime week ends).
And also sometime I work on Art Of Sequence projects.  Actually I will work on it this whole February.
Which is why I cannot spend a lot of time on Links and early on decided to spend only one weekend on it.

 

What Went Right

Simple concept

Technically, it involve connecting icons. Which is so simple it match my objective of scaling things down.
It’s also very easy to level-design, which means I will discover the game while making it, which is always motivating pleasure.

Don’t need much resources

Even without music, simple graphics do the trick. I mean, iconic representation of concepts are the very game anyway.
It can easily be enhanced later, maybe for a future version.

What Went Wrong

Doing it like a Game Jam

As I said before, I couldn’t spend a lot of time on this game and wanted to do something that I could do in a weekend.
Theorically, it’s the perfect game for that.

In practice, I suck at Game Jams (like Ludum Dare).

This is because of globally two factors. First, I don’t have enough jam experience. I must say that after having done some, game jams aren’t really motivating me because it’s almost impossible (for me) to do something interesting without a long period of thinking about what it is I’m trying to build. But game jams aren’t really about the games themselves, they are more about sharing motivation for finishing games.
Which is why I often try to do game jams anyway, even if I don’t think it contribute to the quality of my big projects (or maybe only for the release part).

Anyway, I suck at game jams. In particular, when doing it alone. Last time I managed to finish a game jam, I did it with a friend. We finished the game 10 minutes before the deadline and were not really happy about the quality of the concept. We had several tools problems and built the game from almost nothing. However at least we finished it. But I never finish a game jam alone. Maybe because it’s harder to keep total focus on one project in such a short time as 2 days.

Which is why I shouldn’t have planned to do it in one time. I think that, until I get better at game jams, I should just work a little bit on the game regularly, like one day of each week end of the month. I’m definitely more at ease with marathon-like developments because that’s what I’m used to. I need to train myself for shorter devs, even if I did make some games in short time before, it was not really the best experience ever.

The second reason was…

Tools: Habit & Choice

Indeed when you’re making big games you don’t have the same mindset than with short dev games. As I’m working on big games on work-days, I am not really trained in tools which support really fast development of games. I did use such frameworks, like Flash and Cocos2D-X in my previous jobs, but I’m not totally at ease with them most of the time. I really want to learn Unity3D but it’s almost impossible to find time with my current works in progress.

So I initially tried to make this game with SFML (C++) only, which would have been a good choice with a longer timeframe because SFML is very good at giving you bricks to build game engine, but it’s not a ready game engine. I used it mainly because I’m very familiar with it, which should have been a big win, but for a work of 1 weekend, developing alone, it is still not good enough without engine code built around it.

After a weekend of building this game without really making yet the game-specific code, it got me a bit depressed and I stopped. I met a friend which is also making games and told him I was considering using other tools for really short devs, like Flash (which is the closest tool I know which allow very fast game dev). Other possibilties would have been Cinder (but I’m not sure it’s suited, I have no experience with it), Unity3D (overkill for my icon-based game) and Cocos2D-x (which I know is very powerful, used it to make in two weeks this when I was in japan, without knowing anything about the platform, keyboard or framework, but I really don’t like being forced to use Objective-C idioms in a C++ program…). My friend recommanded using FlashDevelop with Flixel, so I started to remake the game this way.

 

Mental Block

There have been two mental blocks. The first one was on each week end of January but the last, I had a really hard time motivating myself to work on Links. I think it was both because it’s an intimidating thing to make a game that you believe expose a bit of yourself to the public; and because I spent all other days working really hard on NetRush (and sometime AOS) on very difficult part of the game code, which might have totally sucked all energy from me, none left for the weekends. It was like reaching “the wall” but at the very first lines of code. Before I met the wall only in the middle or around the end of a project, but it was almost depressing to not being able to just dive in this.

I think it will get better this month as I feel far better (and I will take some needed vacation days soon) but I’m not finished with this game yet.

The second block was certainly due to my coming birthday. Since this week, I’m 30. The week before, I couldn’t work on anything at all. I didn’t really feel depressed, but I couldn’t dive in work like I did the 4 month before each day. Maybe I just need vacations, but I think this birthday, mixed with not being happy life yet (things gets better each year), and not having a single clue as to how to celebrate this, did make me do nothing in the end. I think I’ll reserve celebration for the first release of a NetRush public version instead. But I will take a few days totally off work soon. Also, this week I feel far better and worked on Art Of Sequence.

Now I need to finish a first version of this game, “with a beginning and an end” as requested by the One Game A Month website, for February. I have a list of other short games I want to make and I really need to push this one out to motivate me doing others.

A note about game jams format

I must add that I bought and read The Game Jam Survival Guide when it was first published, but I guess I didn’t fully get all the recommendations.

As I was saying before, I’m not totally convinced by the point of game jams, other than sharing the love and practicing release, because of the short time-frame don’t allow any kind of game to be made.
However, I do believe that releasing something each month is a very good practice.

Now I’m thinking that maybe instead of doing a too short game each month, with other big projects going on in the same time, it might be a good idea to find a release timing which let me work on an idea for two or more months but release something (including updates) each month.

I have some ideas on how to do that, but I’m not sure yet. For example, there is a game I made two years ago that was a present to some friends. Fixing some details and translating the text to English (it’s in French) then releasing it publicly might be a good short project. It would then allow me to prepare another short project to be release the month after. Then after this one, a release of a version of my big game might happen. Interlocking projects might work better for me.

Any feedback on this is welcome. :)

 

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One Game A Month? YES I CAN (BUT ONLY IF IT’s SMALL GAMES)

Saturday, December 29th, 2012

In 2013 I will be participating in ONE GAME A MONTH: http://www.onegameamonth.com/

As I’m already working on a big game (NetRush) and an open source projet (Art Of Sequence), I don’t intend to make one big game a month.
I will just do a very tiny game a month, one weekend max.

The goals for me will be:
- learn some new techs (Unity and other tools)
- practice more game dev in general
- learn to SCOPE DOWN MY FUCKING PROJECTS DAMMIT!!!!
- do more art (graphics and music)

That will be EPIC and hard.
I’ll blog about it here.

I obviously fear the potential dispertion this could generate. But I also think one week end a month to do something widely different will help me on the long term.
The hard part will be to not make these games more work than 2 days.

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First steps.

Monday, December 10th, 2012

I always have a hard time figuring out who to address these posts to, other game devs or my future audience. It’s a recurring questioning that I feel act like a wall when I feel the need to write an article about something interesting. Anyhow I think it’s time to write a short report on what’s happening where I am right now, somewhere in a dark place.

Current Context

I just moved in a new flat-share with some people I don’t know at all but that so far have been very kind and are all working. Finding this place took me several weeks in which I would have half of my day lost in searching and visiting apartments. Then I had to organize and move my things there and I forgot how many book boxes I had (almost 20). It took me additional weeks just to setup my room and clean everything in the house (I was the first to come) as there were still some things to fix before it was really ok to sleep in my room. I slept in the living room almost a week.

Now all this is set and my room is both perfect to sleep and to work. Well almost perfect; I miss my whiteboard a lot.

In the end of the last week I resumed my work and worked almost all the weekend to finish what I started working on before moving.
Some important money issues spawned and are burning a part of my mental power, but it should not be something that would prevent me to work on my things. I really hope this can be fixed ASAP but it seems it will take time.

The NetRush

I will be a bit technical on this.

At some points few months ago I started to work on really game-specific code until I reached a point I figured it made no sense to continue without a strong (game-specific) engine to support some of the features that would be, in the long term, incredibly important for this game. Two of them are networking and the client/server setup (which is related). Even in solo game session (actually even when entering the game menu) there needs to be both a client and a server for the game to work correctly. This means I had to setup some kind of master/slave protocol to make sure that processes are related and not leaking.
To this day, the work necessary to make this possible is almost finished. The last part I need to write is the complete master/slave protocol, as currently it’s only a not-secure-enough part of it that I have. Once this is done (I think it wil be finished tomorrow), I’ll get back to more fun stuffs like graphics and audio rendering setup.
Also, there is definitely a need for some kind of launcher that would also act like a crash report system. I’m not sure when I will do it though.
Planning work on this game is incredibly hard so I just stopped planning and note how much time I spend on things.

edit> I also want to spend a week soon to implement tests. I didn’t write much tests because I was a bit in a hurry but now I really feel a strong need for unit tests of a lot of the basic systems.

I’m having quite some fun drafting the world setting of the game too. Reading some post-cyberpunk books, some books about writing sci-fi and being inspired by totally related topics from these last years real-world events. We certainly live interesting times. This all make me realize again that it’s really the perfect time to release a game like NetRush. So I need to get first versions out ASAP. It stresses me a lot too.

I’ve been tinkering with some game features ideas that I need to push back in the “feature creep” box for now as it would certainly take ages (or a teammate) to have them ready in the beginning of next year (or maybe I’m just being pessimist). However I think at some point I’ll implement some of these ideas, maybe after the first release, because it would make this game quite unusual and unique (I mean, even more). For the sake of being able to release something soon, I just have to force myself to not think too much about these ideas that blow my mind. Hard times.

Art Of Sequence

I didn’t get back to AOS code these last months for several reasons, one being a big problem with some of the libraries I use for the editor tool (AOS Designer – AOSD). I think I know how to fix it now but I also think I should finish some of the important work on NetRush first before going back to AOS fully focused. That’s part of the dilemma of being alone working on projects: if you don’t work on a project, it’s not advancing AT ALL if there is no other team member. Getting sick, having to fix some non-project issues outside, trying to keep up with a social life, any interruption makes projects stop totally until you resume work. I so really wish I had a coworker. But in the current context it’s almost impossible. AOS is open source but don’t get much attention from developers, mainly because the purpose of this project isn’t very clear to a lot. I’m not surprised but it’s still annoying sometimes.

On the good news, I still took time to discuss about the project with some people in companies that are in the same domain and I hope it will help getting more resources for AOS. We’ll see.

On Other Topics

There is a game idea I would like to realize in the next year but with NetRush and AOS I don’t have enough hands to do it. I’m in the process of setting up a small team that would make the game, me being just a game designer. The goal would be to have a first version of the game without me being on all fronts as for NetRush. I will not spend much time on it as it’s fairly clear for me and the hard part will be to communicate the design directives efficiently.

I also have great plans to fix my “digital presence” problem. All my websites are in a poor state, including the one of my future company and I need to fix this at some point. I’ve put some thinking about how to proceed, but my current estimate is that it will take several weeks to setup all I need, even assuming I’m setting up static pages. Again it would be different with someone to do it for me, but I have no money to spend on this and I can’t rely on good will for this kind of work (I consider it commercial). I decided to push the time I will work on this to when I will feel it to be absolutely necessary.

Part of the time I’ve not been working on my projects was to prepare to setup my future company to support both projects. I met an accountant that told me I looked really prepared so I guess I am. I now have a clearer idea of how it will be done but I also now know that it will not be done before I start selling something, like the first NetRush version. What I’m not fully decided yet is how I will sell the game. I have some idea but I think I should decide only next year.

The Dark Place

On the mental side, I’m only now starting to feel the famous depressive state of mind that any “indie” game dev (or artist?) will get by working a lot on such a huge project as NetRush. I’m not depressed, but with the time I spent not advancing on NetRush and AOS, it really made me feel bad and now I have a strong pressure (that I made myself) to get to a faster pace of work. It’s really hard and I recently surprised myself wondering if it was all worth. Of course it is! Maybe it’s only the cold of winter mixed with money problems that makes me be a bit bitter. Anyway I know the best thing I can do is to just continue forward as much as I can, until I can’t anymore.

There is a strangely good thing that I realized recently: I don’t feel lost. Yeah sure it’s hard to do what I do, alone, isolated and having to be the sole believer in my own projects. However I don’t feel like I don’t know what to do to get forward. I think years of thinking about doing this prepared me for whatever is coming and that’s a very good thing.

One thing that I strongly miss is to work on some narratives. I miss making comics. I made a long webcomics page few months ago but didn’t publish it yet because it lacks some polish. I can’t find a time slot to be able to do some comics regularly and it’s making me feel bad. I think I’ll have to slow down programming as soon as I have the first testable NetRush game.

 

That’s all for this time. I hope to write on more specific topic next time. Maybe screenshots?

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Why do they make games?

Thursday, September 27th, 2012

While Laurent, Daniele and I were trying to answer the question “Why do you make video games?”, without any coordination, tons of very well known game developers were being asked the same thing.

Here is their answers.

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