October 2010
October 7, 2010
Getting By With a Little Help From My Friends
[Lost content: likely the video from the Dark Acre IndieGoGo campaign.]
School’s out forever, and the time has come for me to put my money where my mouth is.
Development has already begun on not one, but two full-fledged games!
The first is a very basic platformer where the player jumps and falls while avoiding certain death via environmental hazards and enemies. Vague enough? Come talk to me sometime, I’ll give you details face-to-face.
The second is a space-trader along the vein of Star Command, Star Control, or the classic Elite. It will be a streamlined experience for the web with a unique artistic bent and heavily supplemented by lore and a novella! A chance for me to flex not only my game development skills but also try my hand at authoring a proper story.
I’m building both of these experiences in Unity 3D. At the moment I’m doing pre-production and testing using the free license of the engine, but having access to the Pro license would be a huge boon not only to myself, but also in the quality of the end result to you, the potential user.
Would you like to support Dark Acre Game Production, and help me make my start in the dangerous and exciting waters of the games industry? Here’s your chance:
Jump over to my Project Zero Zero page at IndieGoGo, check out my proposal, and if you can please make a donation. If you can’t, but want to support the project, please help spread the word via Facebook, Twitter, or even just E-mail the link around.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you can help me out in any way possible.
October 18, 2010
On Facebook Eccentricity
I feel the need to post this, as some people may be wondering why I’ve declined or ignored their requests to be “friends” on Facebook.
[Lost content: likely a variant of the Facebook logo.]
We’re living in the era of the social network, and it’s become so ubiquitous that I get the feeling that a lot of people believe that their successes ride on the number of Facebook friends or people that follow them on Twitter.
A few thousand followers/friends might be a powerful tool to use for marketing or self-promotion, indeed. I would never dispute the value of using any of these systems as conduits for whatever personal messages we might have. But at the end of the day, an individual still needs to be producing or providing something of value if their audience is going to let them profit from it.
So what’s the harm in letting someone I don’t even know be my “friend” on Facebook? Nothing, really. It depends on how much of a perceived value that “friendship” holds.
You’ll notice I’m using quotation marks, and for those of you who know me you can picture my face twisted into its typical sarcastic sneer as I talk about this.
The word “Friend” itself has become a devalued currency by social networking, and by Facebook in particular. Perhaps if Mr. Zuckerberg had allowed other levels of relationship, such as “Acquaintance” or “Referral”, we could have avoided the loss of value. Unfortunately he did not, and we’re stuck with adding everyone we know as Friends straight off the bat, whether they’ve proven themselves as such or not.
Now, I’m getting old. Old enough to recognize I’m no longer “with it” when it comes to popular trends, and I know that I’m becoming one of those curmudgeonly guys that waxes long and nostalgic about all things and their passing. While I embrace the technology of today and that still to come I still pine for the simpler times. I now mourn the loss in value of the term “Friend” and I’m not about to let it die without a fight.
So herein lies my little personal battle, my individual war against this commoditization of trust. The bulk of my philosophy can be found here, summarized rather neatly by the concept of the “monkeysphere”. I had no term for this phenomenon until I came across the article in a cross-link from one of Sirlin’s blog posts, but I was happy to find it because I’d been aware of it but never really had a proper way to describe it.
I remember listening to Marilyn Manson many years ago singing the line “The death of one is a tragedy / the death of millions just a statistic” and really understanding what that meant. And now I use this gathered wisdom and apply it one of the few ways that I can: my Facebook Friends list.
In keeping with the basic premise of the monkeysphere I have capped my Facebook friends list at 150. This list has seen rotation as people have dropped off of the face of the earth to be replaced by more current faces, but it never rises above this ceiling.
Silly? Eccentric? Certainly. But there is a lot of personal value in this action and it’s important that you understand where I’m coming from so as to avoid both confusion and ire. The 150 people that I have in that social space are people whom I’ve met, trust, and would actually let sleep on my couch if they needed to. While those who are not on that list may also be worthy of that level of personal connection, it’s unproven to me. And I’m one of those stubborn bastards that needs to see and feel things to believe in them.
To be completely honest, if Facebook required a true friendship from any of the connections on it I dare say there’d be few people with more than a dozen little faces in their “Friends” boxes.
Now, when it comes to Twitter, I have no compunctions about adding whoever feels the need to make a connection there. And I don’t see why someone would rather use Facebook than Twitter for direct communication anyways. If two people decide to make a connection on Twitter they instantly gain pseudo-private messaging function and access to whatever web presence they’ve chosen to make public.
So in this I’ve made Twitter the larger public forum and Facebook the private. I hope this clears up any confusion and staves off any ill feelings. I don’t mean to ignore anyone but if you really want to be my Facebook friend, how about we start with becoming “real life” friends first, and go from there? And if you’re absolutely dying to use Facebook as a way of connecting to all things Dark Acre, you’ll be happy to know there is an official business page there (Taken down in 2015 when Dark Acre officially folded. –Ed), and I’ve imposed no artificial limitations on it.
As always, thank you for reading. Let’s stay in touch.
October 20, 2010
Dark Acre Week 1 Report
If you’ve checked out the production schedule, you’ll know that I take only one day off a week, Wednesday. Today marks the first official “weekend”, so I thought I’d share with you all the current state of affairs.
Nearly 100 people have “Liked” the Dark Acre Facebook page. Thanks for letting me invade your walls with my venture, and if you haven’t already, why not? Head over and give that “Like” button a healthy smack.
Over the next week I will be adding official pages to this blog that give more details on the exact nature of the production process and what the intended results are, namely the two main projects that are currently in pre-production.
I can tell you right now that I intend to release 3 to 4 working mobile/web browser games over the next year, with each of these “mini” releases contributing to a larger opus.
More details to come, and as they used to say in advertising, “Watch this space!”
Now, before I venture out of doors and try to restore my vitamin D count back to normal human levels, I present for your edification quite possibly the most mind-blowing thing I’ve learned in this first week of being an independent game developer:
October 27, 2010
Dark Acre Week 2 Report
National Novel Writing Month is nearly upon us, assuming you’re aware and participating, like I am.
If I did those lists that so many blogs are fond of doing (lists drive traffic: they’re easy to read and people love counting) then “being able to finally fully participate in NaNoWriMo” would definitely be in the top ten of “Things Jack Can Enjoy Because He’s an Independent Game Designer”.
I’ve tried several times in the past, last year reaching around 7,000 words before succumbing to a brutal first month of Game Design at Vancouver Film School. Personally, I lacked the superhuman dedication it took to balance a 2x-credit technical school and vomit out at least 1,666.6 words a day for 30 days.
This year however, for the very fist time in my life, I’m setting my own hours. With this luxury comes both the full responsibility for my output and also the freedom to fill those hours however I choose.
NaNoWriMo, I CHOOSE YOU!
If you too have the time and passion to make a novel appear out of thin air in a month, join me by “buddying” me on the NaNoWriMo site. (NaNoWriMo shut down in 2025. –Ed.)
Yes Jack, your fantasies of killing yourself at the keyboard in November are fascinating, but how are the Projects going, you ask? I’m happy to report that it was a stunning week overall.
Now just a hair’s breadth under 20,000 words, the Project Zero Zero support novella’s first draft is officially a novella as defined by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. I’m totally satisfied with my progress so far, and a very small taste of the fictional flavor can be experienced at the head of the Project Zero Zero page.
I’m going to let the draft sit for the month of November, for the reasons mentioned above, then attack with revisions and rewrites in December, producing a preview chapter and starting the marketing engine then.
As for Project Zero One, feast your eyes on this:
[Lost content: likely a screenshot of the leaderboard function for Project Zero One]
The pre-Alpha now contains most of the core functionality and feature-set for the game. The major progress this week comes in the form of a persistent web-hosted Leaderboard. I had zero experience with mySQL aside from setting up this blog and forgetting about it, and I didn’t even know what PHP was until this week, nevermind how Unity was able to talk to it and make things like happen.
I’ll be using this newfound knowledge to set up telemetry collection that will show me what players are doing in the game, creating a ton of value from the remote testing. Remember, if you want to be a part of this early stage of development and really make things happen for me and Dark Acre Game Development there [was] a way!
So, all in all it’s been a pretty good week. Here’s a few quick impressions of some of the games I’ve been playing between bouts of development:
Super Meat Boy. I like it because it’s hard, and it’s hard because you have to learn how to play it and then master the control of the avatar. In the age of golden breadcrumb trails and player hand-holding, this is breath of fresh air. Recommended buy on XBLA this week because come November it’ll cost more.
Super Crate Box. I like it for the same reasons I like Super Meat Boy, and this one’s free for PC users. If you’re looking at this on a PC, you have no excuse not to click that link and download it. It’s punishing and you fail because you are bad at the game, not because the game is bad. I think this should be the design mantra for these kind of games.
Costume Quest. It’s from Double Fine, but by all accounts Tim Schaefer (of Psychonauts and Brutal Legend fame) didn’t really have his hands in the development of it. It’s cute, the lack of voices is a bit jarring, and it’s clearly designed for small children. Fortunately, I tend to think like a small child so this was right up my alley. I’m not sure how charming it will be after Halloween, though.
Finally, I leave you with this, keeping in the spirit of the season. Remember kids: if you’re going to design a kick-ass costume, make sure one of your parents is an electrical/computer engineer and/or professional prop-maker/makeup artist/tailor. You can skip to the last two minutes if you’re really pressed for time, and thanks for reading!
2010.10.01 – 2010.10.30