August 2011

August 3, 2011

Dark Acre Week 42 Report

THE ANSWER TO LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING

That’s one answer to “what is 42″? For Dark Acre, it’s the end of 10 months of independent game development.

Financial concerns aside, it’s been and continues to be a great experience. It’s with great pleasure that Ball of Steel was finally published this week.

It was authorized for bidding on FlashGameLicense.com in April, and then promptly forgotten about. All focus on the Acre shifted to The Child and completing the first draft of Ambia.

The game received a few well-intended pieces of feedback but no bids. This was due to a complete lack of marketing support. No Tweets, no Facebook updates, no word-of-mouth, nothing. Without the grassroots support network spreading word of the game there was no return.

While this could have been fixed with some focused activities, in the end the decision was made to publish it right away to Kongregate.com and get it out there so people could put hands on it. This is in no way a slight against the FGL.com services. They provide fantastic support, particularly concerning the fact that Ball of Steel is built in Unity. At the end of the day, though, the success or failure of an independently-published creative product depends wholly on the willingness of the developer to get out in the streets and scream about it.

Dark Acre simply didn’t make enough noise about it. Regardless, the game is out in the wild and there for any all players to give it a go and send in their feedback. Please give Ball of Steel a try if you’ve got a spare few minutes!

Note: Audio is disabled by default. Either click “Enabled” from the Initialization Menu or toggle with “M” in-game. Apologies for the confusion on that!

AMBIA DREAMIN’

The third draft of the second book in The Solarus Cycle is done! Rejoice!

I present for your enjoyment the first chapter of the book in both written form, listenable/downloadable via Soundcloud, and listenable right here:

[Lost content: embed for the audiobook version of the first chapter of Ambia]

The final audiobook pass is being done now, and the completed ebook will be published before the week 44 report. In the meantime, why not check out the first book or a free short story? Parlow’s Choice is unrelated to the Solarus Cycle but still a sci-fi flavored touch of my writing style and has been just recently published on Goodreads.com!

(I stopped using Goodreads in 2022, after deciding to aggregate my book-reading and publishing habits here. –Ed.)

NEW THEME

Up until last week, the Wombat’s Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves) had been my unofficial theme song. I got around to watching the Breaking Bad season 4 premiere and all that changed.

If you like this, and you like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, you might as well do yourself a favor and buy the whole album.

Hope you have a great week, please subscribe to Dark Acre or Circle Jack if you haven’t, and see you in seven!

P.S. If you need me, I’ll be doing this:

 

August 7, 2011

Spheres Within Spheres

DAY 4, CONTINUED

Back at the School, Unachi has some ‘practical’ training for me now. An asteroid hunt with no mining involved, for a fat stack of kredit? Sure, I can do that. She dismisses me with a wave of her hand. I guess I really didn’t make all that good of an impression the night before.

The Godsoar’s only got a single hardpoint for turrets, which the Core Scanner needs. So I can either scan, or fight, but not both at the same time. I may have to consider investing in some drones for defense when I’m out searching for sites, assuming that this archaeology thing holds my interest for that long.

Probe scanning is pretty much the same as basic scanning, with a gun. I fire off a probe and it locates the training area in no time. Again, nothing like letting the machines do the work.

Or not. Apparently, I need to quadrangulate the scanning signals in order to pin point the exact location of the specific anomaly I’m looking for.

An hour later…

I grab the confirmation chit from their training container and head back to the School. As expected, Unachi wants me to demonstrate my scanning abilities on another type of anomoly. Now that I’ve got the hang of it, it shouldn’t take long at all.

This time out it’s one of the archaeological sites. I’ve not only got to scan for and find the place, but then once I get there I’m to analyze and salvage. This is all to complex for my little brain, but if it’s just a matter of punching the right buttons in the correct order how hard could it be?

Same deal with the probe launcher, I need a hardpoint available to fit the salvager. Here’s where I find out if I can scan down a location and then refit and return while I still know where it is.

I can, it’s just a matter of bookmarking the known location. Easy as, I find the site in a few minutes, a quick dock and refit, then I’m off to unearth some relics.

Strange. I reach the site I had pinpointed and bookmarked, yet there’s nothing here. Could it have moved? Do I really need to have both the probe launcher and the salvager fitted to complete this task? In order to do that I would need to buy another ship, and I find my interest in archaeology flagging at this point.

I return to the School to look at my options. I’ve gained a fair amount of capital up to this point, and while my inital plan was to use it as inventory investment, I decide instead to purchase a smaller boat for reconaissance. The Kestrel is within my price and skill range, so I pick one up from the Market. I give the highly unoriginal name of “Seeker” and fit it for the job at hand.

As I suspected, it was a matter of both being in the location and scanning the site down. I find the acceleration gate they want me to pass through and hit it.

Nice. I arrive and Rulie informs me that I could use either the analyzer or the salvager. Through gritted teeth I thank her profusely for informing me of that prior to the purchase of the Seeker, I salvage the training box and head back to the School, slamming my fists into the control terminal the whole way back. It’s not that the Seeker is a bad ship, it’s more that I’d rather have the 200K in kredits.

Fortunately that’s precisely the amount I’m rewarded for the training, so I stomp off to my quarters for a well-deserved drink and a kip.

EVE Online and related people, places, and things are copyright © CCP.

 

August 18, 2011

Ambia, a Post-Mortem

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

Ambia, the second novel in the ongoing space opera The Solarus Cycle, has been approved for publishing on Amazon.com for Kindle readers!

[Lost content, likely an image promoting the ebooks.]

Ambia, and the precursor novella Tale of the Madeus, are only 99 cents each and are both available worldwide from Amazon. Tale of the Madeus is also available from the iTunes Bookstore, and Ambia will join her soon.

I hope you’ll read Ambia, my first full-length science fiction/space opera novel, and I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts and impressions! Please help me improve my craft!

(_Amazon links long dead. I self-publish now.

AFTER DEATH

As “post-mortem” implies, it’s an autopsy of sorts that creatives can perform on their work, analyzing what went right and what went wrong, and harvesting some lessons and improving on best practices for the future.

I find it a particularly fitting term, especially in light of a recent conversation with Corvus Elrod where he felt that while a project was in the production phase, it was like a living being. Once published, it was technically “dead” to the creator, and the public was then free to feast on its corpse.

Nice imagery, eh?

Some stats on Ambia:

What Went Right

1. Working From the Foundation

Tale of the Madeus, though only a novella, went very far in setting the tone of the universe of Project Zero Zero. I’d had nebulous ideas floating around in my head forever, but to have them strung together with some surface coherency was critical in spring-boarding into a larger project. Tale built nearly the entire physical structure of Solarus, and established key players and politics as well as the technology levels of the star system. It also implied that there was life in the greater universe, something that would play a key part in the writing of Ambia.

Having Tale and her development notes act as a reference “bible” while working on Ambia was invaluable.

2. Going from Macro to Micro

Tale was a story about a space battle wrapped in a bunch of exposition on technology, the universe, and traders. The core of the story was narrow, but the field it played in was, in my mind, expansive.

For Ambia I decided right away that the action would be focused on a single character, on a single planet, and around a singular objective. This tightening of the plot allowed me to really refine a lot of the ideas put forth in Tale. It also forced me pay more attention to both environmental details and character development. It seems that in writing, like in many creative endeavors, applying artificial limitations to what you’re doing can really pay off in the long run.

3. Hand-Crafting the eBook

While working on Ambia I decided to publish a short story I’d written a year ago. I detailed the experience in the Week 40 Report (Lost content. –Ed.), and basically what happened was a mis-publish to the iTunes Bookstore forced me to rebuild the e-book file from scratch. Previously I’d automated a lot of the process, so I was really ignorant to what went into creating a functional ebook.

Taking the lessons learned from building the Parlow’s Choice ebook, I was able to very efficiently produce a rather attractive publication. The formatting is exactly what I want, and I was able to insert some images (unfortunately non-story related) and have them display in crisp resolution on my iPad. I’ll be “hand-rolling” my ebooks from now on, and I have a very tight workflow that provided that much more independence to the process.

What Went Wrong

1. Taking 8 Months

I know that’s it’s irrational to think that 8 months is too long to write 50,000 good words and put them out in public, but I can’t help it. I think this feeling has a lot to do with the sequence of successes that led up to writing Ambia. I’d cleared my first winning NaNoWriMo, then written and published Tale in only a few months. It seems that the more complex the writing becomes, the longer the process of publishing it.

Will the next book take less time, or longer? I hope I can bring it out with a shorter cycle than Ambia, but as with all of my work so far I’ve spent as much time as I felt was necessary to make it the best that I possibly could.

The irony here is that once it was published I immediately felt like I hadn’t spent enough time on it! It’s no wonder that so many writers are neurotic.

2. Trying to Audiobook It

As part of my drafting process, once near final I start reading the text aloud to check for flow and consistency, especially with dialog. I thought that this time around I’d double up on the process and record it for publishing as an audiobook.

I learned a few critical things in doing this:

Now that I know what goes into crafting an audiobook, I may make future attempts, but for now it simply adds too much time to the overall process to be a worthwhile investment. If you’re interested, you can listen to and download readings of the first and second chapters on Soundcloud. (All lost content. –Ed.)

WHAT ABOUT THE CHILD, JACK?

I’ve found that trying to be both a writer of science fiction and a maker of video games comes with a cost. I can fairly easily manage the creative, or building phases of both endeavors simultaneously. But whenever either one enters the publishing phase it completely takes over and the stress levels rise to near unmanageable levels. I haven’t done really any work on the Child in the two weeks that I’ve been finaling Ambia. Ambia is done just in time for Ludum Dare 48 #21. This is really quite perfect timing, and should give me the boot in the backside I need to get back on track with the game development side of things.

[Lost content, likely an image link for the LD48 #21 project page.]

I’ve set up a project page for LD48 #21, and you can check out #19 and #20 as well. If you’re “in” I wish you the best of luck and hope you have as fantastic an experience with it as I have. I value Ludum Dare 48 above all other exercises for sharpening my game development skills. If you’re following along at home, thanks for your support and I hope I can bring a fresh and entertaining experience to you come Sunday evening!

As always, thanks for reading and please subscribe to Dark Acre if you haven’t, follow me on Twitter, and/or encircle me on Google Plus. Oh, and there’s a Facebook page for you to Like as well.

See you on Monday for the Ludum Dare 48 #21 post-mortem!

P.S. Check out Corvus Elrod’s blog-thing for some intelligent discussion on game development.

 

August 24, 2011

Dark Acre Week 45 Report

LUDUM DARED

Another Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making competition has come and gone. This was was a big challenge for me, and you can read all about it on the project page.

It was, as always, a really great experience.

IN OTHER NEWS

Here’s a quick summary of what’s going to be up with Jack and the Dark Acre over the next month:

That last bullet is the most critical to me. I need to decompress, I can only take so much of this lonely sojourn before I start feeling a bit mental. Tokyo’s as good a place as any to really let loose and get the ya-ya’s out. That trip will come from the 13th of September and run for two weeks, so I’ll actually be flying back and somewhere over the Pacific when Dark Acre turns 1 and Year Zero officially ends.

[Lost content, image. Alt-text: “Tokyo, by Nao Enomoto. Click the image to check her out on Google Plus!]

That’s it for this week. As always I invite you to subscribe to this blog and enCircle me on Google Plus! Oh, and there’s some contest running over at About.me where I could win my face on a billboard in Times Square. That would be crazy, right? Please help me win one of the slots by voting for my profile.

Thanks, friends. We’ll see you in seven!

 

August 31, 2011

Dark Acre Week 46 Report

AMBIA AND PARLOW’S CHOICE ON ITUNES

[Lost content: Click here to get Ambia from iTunes for only 99¢!] [Lost content: Click here to get Parlow’s Choice from iTunes for free!] [Lost content, likely an image promoting the eBooks]

With these successful self-publishes, all of the currently available and finalized fiction has been cast out into the world. This means I’m staring at a blank slate once again, and it’s a little terrifying.

I know where I want to go with the Solarus Cycle, and I can feel the pressure building behind the self-made dam that I erect in my mind between each creative flood. I have to let the waterline rise to the point where ideas start slopping over the top of the barricade before I open the gates and let some of it out.

I’ve been picking away at a half-finished short story in the interim, so there’s still the daily practice of writing. I try to do two hours, first thing every morning, and this hasn’t changed.

But I’ll be damned if I don’t need a vacation.

P.S.

I normally end these posts with a personal aside, and it’s here this week that I’ll quietly announce the delay of The Child.

I apologize profusely. This project has been my greatest challenge yet, and has already consumed two full 8-week development cycles. It looks like it may consume a 3rd.

There are four key factors to any successful game production: Quality, Cost, Time, and Gameplay.

I have learned just how intimately these factors play off of each other. There is a very real, very brutal push-pull relationship from these four vectors, with the result being the balance achieved between them during production.

Based on the trickle of feedback I’ve received since completing Ludum Dare 48 #20, it’s been made abundantly clear to me that people are anticipating The Child, and have already started developing expectations that match and in many cases exceed my own.

With The Child I feel that this is the first project that has evolved beyond the “throw something at the wall and see if it sticks” phase to the “oh no, it’s stuck” phase. I want it to be the best that I can possibly accomplish and yet still deliver it within a reasonable time frame.

Many more of the details of the production process and delays will be made available in the eventual post-mortem. For anyone curious, for now please put it all down to “Jack’s still very much an amateur learning the ropes” and that I’m applying what limited knowledge I’ve gained in the past two years to try and make this the finest result I’ve come up with yet.

Thank you very much for your patience thus far. It’s not like there’s not enough games to play/books to read without having my contribution in the field, but rest assured that there will be more content from the Dark Acre just as soon as humanly possible.

As always, I invite you to subscribe to the Acre, Circle me on Google Plus, follow the Games, Books, and personal B.S. on Twitter, and join the Facebook page.

Thank you for reading, and see you in seven!

2011.08.01 – 2011.08.30

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