March 2013

March 4, 2013

Pouring CONCRETE

And then there were two.

In spite of the reduced number of days in February I pulled everything together & published CONCRETE an hour before midnight on February 28th, 2013. It is monetized in a manner identical to The Apartment before it. Even though I spent 16 days more on this project than the previous, I feel that it’s something of a flawed execution. I’ll get into the details below.

As before a debt of gratitude is owed to friends, family, & fans. A special heartfelt thanks goes out to the following people:

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. #1GAM\ As with the previous entry, the drive to complete & publish was fueled mostly by the structure the #1GAM initiative provides. If I find financial success through these 12 games, I’ll owe most if not all of it to Christer.

2. Expanded Framework\ Unity is my engine, but on top of that engine the chassis & transmission that make these games possible is an improved version of my Ludum Dare no.25 codebase.

I took 6 days at the start of February, & I’ll likely take as long this month to continue to maintain the code & make adjustments where necessary. Having a base of code that I know inside & out has been essential to achieving results.

3. Being Ambitious\ This is a double-edged sword, as you’ll see in the “wrongs” below, but I feel it’s critical to push the envelope as hard as I’m comfortable with.

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. [Arnold Toynbee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Toynbee)

That & although there’s no clean quote to pull from, I also admire musician Jack White’s attitude towards his performances, in how he’s said that he’ll make things ever-harder for himself to avoid falling into a comfortable routine. I’ve known for years that the feeling of discomfort is a warning sign, & something to fight with tooth & nail in order to be constantly improving myself.

4. Keeping it “Art”\ The artist statement established with The Apartment remains the same here. I’m exploring the same themes & ideas founded in that first project, & carrying them forward in search of some kind of logical conclusion.

Although I’ve added more “game” to the experience of CONCRETE, it still remains at its core a narrative search for meaning in isolation.

This also frees me up from having to discuss the mechanics of the thing at too much length. It is what it is, & barring any serious game-breaking bugs will remain intact as it was published, warts & all.

5. Keeping it Primitive\ Left this for last, but it could have easily been first. I did not add a single note of audio, nor one pixel of texturing until I was certain the game systems were working well enough. I say well enough because there’s always something that needs polishing or tuning, but by making sure the actual game worked before implementing any of the audio/visual assets was a huge boon.

For one, it lowers the build time & keeps the project lean. For another, art—generally speaking—does not bug out or break the game. It may bloat the size & load times, but those types of optimizations & fixes are far easier to make than finding the holes in your for-loops or mis-triggered bools.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. Working Until Drop-Dead\ So last month I said I’d be leaving more time for testing & polish. I guess I lied, or was naïve in thinking that somehow trying to produce a game that was easily twice if not three times as large as the previous would somehow magically produce an equivalent amount of QA time.

I was recording & implementing all of the voiceover two hours before publishing. Fortunately it slotted right into the framework without issue, but had it not I would have been hooped.

There is also a list sitting next to me of featured I’d meant to implement. I’m not going to go into them, but the list is long & taunts me. I’ll be slowly adding them in over time, but it would have been nice to have them “out in the wild” & gathering feedback now.

2. Playing With Cached Versions

I wasn’t doing this & didn’t catch a major game-breaking OSX bug that involved ripping out the entire function set for the cyberspace deck & replacing it with an ugly but functional alternative.

3. Gamedev > Health\ Oh this terrible, terrible pit. It’s like a black hole that sucks you in.

I used to run marathons. Lift tons of iron. Fight a lot. Now I’m becoming that archetypical blob of a developer who’s prioritized the computers over health. This is absolutely something I must change, without delay.

As soon as I post this I’m going for a run.

4. Insufficient Testing\ The experience has 3 endings, a complete voice-over, a dialog system, a weapons-use system, a crafting system, & numerous other improvements & additions. Unfortunately all of that tinkering left precious little time to tune & improve the playability of the thing.

Had I added no new features & just produced content for a month, would it have been better? Perhaps, but then there’d be no cyberspace deck, no other characters talking to you, & no sniping.

The life of a game developer is largely one of decision & compromise. If you are uncomfortable or unable to do those things, you may wish to choose another career/hobby.

5. A Tendency to Push Verts\ Next month I’d like to add “didn’t bother producing finished 3D models until late in the cycle” to no.5 of the rights above.

I have this habit of polishing a primitive placeholder model in 3D Studio Max until it’s more or less final before dropping it into the game, even in the early stages of development. I like to make sure it’s ready to take textures & is “game optimized”. This eats a ton of time away from ensuring the game system is working, so going forward I’ll hopefully be able to reign in this crippling desire.

MARCH ONWARD

As of this posting the response to CONCRETE has been rather flat. I’m totally okay with this, as I made something I’m proud of & enjoy playing. Yes, it has more than a few warts but each one of those is a hard-earned lesson that I can apply to future projects.

This is the real gift that Christer’s #1GAM has given us, the incentive & drive to publish our stuff. There is great truth in the axiom that as long as you continue to produce & learn from your mistakes that you will never truly fail, & that you’re only ever 3 feet from gold.

See you in 24 days.

A failed Kickstarter only means that the people who have disposable income, access to computers, the Internet & the spare time to swallow your pitch & sundry materials didn’t feel like paying you to make whatever it was that you wanted to make. Also a stark reminder that the world doesn’t owe you one fucking thing. DAJ

March 24, 2013

Month 30 Report

FAILURE IS AN OPTION

There’s nothing you can learn from a failure. If you sit there with a failure & try to figure out how you failed, then you just fucked yourself… ‘cause then all of a sudden it’s ‘be careful’.George Lois

One way to reframe that would be: “When shit’s not working out, go on to the next bold adventure”.

#1GAM no.03, the March entry, wasn’t working out. It’s the first of my games to offer a true branched dialog system, and while the system itself was a clean implementaton that was easy to use the results were less than satisfying.

I refuse to release mediocre work into the “canon”. I started asking for funding with the release of The Apartment, and that went well. [CONCRETE]/gamedev/concrete), the second entry, had no traction. I’m proud of both results, and as VAULT spiraled out of control I became ever-less impressed with what was happening.

This is the test-build, the very ugly prototype version. This is as far as it will go. (An archived link of the once-playable build. –Ed.)

#1GAM OR ONE GAME?

Good things take time. The question of whether to keep to the 30-31 day production schedules has become evermore pressing as time goes on. I’m in a luxurious position compared to many other developers: I can devote 100% of my time & attention to producing whatever I want.

A lot of good has come from participating in McFunkypants’s initiative. 2.25 new games for the ludology & a very promising & robust 3D point-and-click adventure framework are nothing to sneeze at.

It’s time to go bigger again.

Ludum Dare 48 no.26 is coming up in April. That should provide an “easy out” for a #1GAM entry for that month. From now until then I’ll be leaving the realm of the point-and-click & working on something with a bit more mechanical depth. There should be more to report on in 30 days.

DARK ACRE BOOKS

As part of the drive for full self-publishing the Solarus books have been removed from Amazon.com. Unfortunately Amazon’s rules for books enrolled in their “Prime” system are strict & state that they hold exclusive publishing rights for 90 days after de-listing, even though they are no longer hosting the materials themselves. Further reason to be wary of who you get in bed with.

That’s it for March. Thanks as always for staying tuned & we’ll see you again soon.

2013.03.01 – 2013.03.30

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