I'm Not Playing

I'm Not Playing was my first 'jam' game. It won the Fight Magic Run battle, themed 'Independence'. FiMaRu had a very small pool of participants, so the achievement didn't go to my head. More valuable to me was the positive reinforcement that - yes! - I can make a game in 48 hours, as opposed to planning to develop a game in a short time and actually have it spiral into months and months.

I'm Not Playing is about a platform prototype sprite, called sprite_6, who becomes self-aware and ultimately rebels against her developer.

For a while I'd had an idea for a game lying dormant in the back of my head. Part of the game's challenge would be that the player would have to stuggle with and figure out the game's controls, like some kind of puzzle, as opposed to the controls being obedient and reactive to the player's every wish, like in other games. It's not a unique idea; many of us have played a game where our character's controls are temporarily reversed, for example, and left becomes right and right left. But I wanted to try to make a game based entirely around this concept, and explore its limits.

'Independence' gave me the chance to do just that, and even inspired a simple plot to give some structure and purpose to the mechanics.

The jam format can be exhausting, but it offers invaluable experience, and I'm pleased with the results I got. I've marked the next Ludum Dare in my calendar.

Ascent

It's been 3 months since I finished Ascent. Ascent is a personal game, because it centres on themes I'm passionate about. Without hyperbole, it contains no less than my philosophy of what I consider to be the meaning of life.

I feel I should write at least something about it before moving, finally, onto newer projects.

It had mixed reviews on Newgrounds. It was badly received by those who mistook it as being a religious game, when it is emphatically not a religious game. Actually, during development I thought my message was, if anything, too blunt. But perhaps just as the developer is in a bad position to judge the difficulty of his own game, so is he in a bad position to judge the subtlety of the point he's trying to make.

Poe's law comes in to play here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law, and I don't resent those who may have misunderstood Ascent. Nor would I change anything. If I were to simplify the game down to the point where there was no room for misunderstanding, then it would restrict its potential for interpretation; some of the best feedback for Ascent made me see its message from angles that I hadn't considered before.

I did increase the timer based on the feedback I received, but resisted calls for it to be scrapped entirely. The timer is not an arbitrary method of increasing the difficulty and longevity of the game. Its place is to serve the message.

I was pleased with the exposure Ascent got on Newgrounds. Tom liked the game enough to send it straight to the front page, bypassing the usual vetting procedure, and from there it attracted 60,000+ views and became the most popular game of that month. Very encouraging, for someone who released it on Newgrounds only as an afterthought, and expected the 400-something plays it generated on Kongregate to be about the extent of exposure it was likely to garner. In future, if it's feedback and exposure I need, Newgrounds will be the first place to consider.

The cardinal skills of indie game development

I often worry that I'm wasting my time procrastinating browsing youtube, wikipedia or facebook, when I should be developing games, or improving the skills that help to develop games.

This post is inspired by these recurring thoughts. Earlier today, travelling on the metro, I wrote down what I think are the four core skills I'll need to be a good one-man game studio:

maths
programming
art
music

I then wrote how strong I thought I was in each area. There is no objective metric here; I just wrote down what I felt about my own abilities in relation to where I want them to be. Assuming a scale out of 10:

maths: 2
programming: 3
art: 3
music: 4

I then wrote today's date to the side of the four figures. For too long, a number of these skills have remained stagnant. I stockpile books and cram online tutorial after online tutorial into unseen favourites folders, never looking inside to see the contents. This post represents a change.

Week by week I'm going to record how many hours I'm putting into each skill. The idea is to compete with myself; so when I'm looking at a report at week's end, those are the figures I'll be aiming to beat in the coming week. After several months of this, collecting the reports together and plotting them out on a graph should reveal a pleasing upward trend.

I'll reasses how strong I am at the four cardinal skills some months down the line.

But what's the use of improving the above skills, if they're not actually employed in the creation of games? There must be a fifth, golden metric. The most important metric: game development itself. It's not something I'll mark out of ten at intervals; that's something I'd rather the players of my games judge. But it is certainly something - indeed, the main thing - I can strive to put more and more hours' work into, so this criteria will be way up there, competing for my hours at the very top.

Rebound

As a first game, Rebound has taught me many valuable lessons.

The first lesson is that everyone is right when they say don't spend too much time on your first game. I guess I had to learn it by experience.


The second lesson was practical experience with my toolset. Rebound was doubly useful for this purpose, since after creating the game in Game Maker I decided to port it to Construct 2. Besides allowing me to get used to how each program functions, recreating the same game allowed for a closer comparison between the two.

I'm going to stick with both. I really like C2's work flow, its power, efficiency and user-friendliness. But I also like being able to mix code with drag and drop as seamlessly as GM allows. This act of writing code feels like I'm expanding my skillset (and indeed, my little experience with GML has already given me a valuable leg-up with learning C).

Although wrappers are available to turn a C2 project into a native application, C2's focus is on HTML5, and HTML5 right now is experiencing some growing pains and operates differently in different browsers. Rebound plays perfectly in Chrome, is jerky in Firefox and downright sluggish in Internet Explorer. These are the browsers I've tested myself. In Safari, running on Mac OSx, the game crashes the browser every time, so I'm informed.

This won't stop me developing HTML5 games - I'm glad to be gaining valuable experience in this growing area when it's at such a young stage - but if I have more ambitious projects, designed from the outset to be a native application, then I'll take them to Game Maker.

Before Rebound made the leap from exe to browser I made some design changes, most important being a change to the pace of the game. For the curious, the GM version can be downloaded here (press escape to skip the title screen).


The third lesson I learnt from Rebound was about the entire process of uploading my game to my web host, and then integrating the game from there into various game portals supporting HTML5 via iframe. Now I feel pretty comfortable being able to distribute a game to the relevant channels.

In all, I consider Rebound an extremely useful practice run, but one I wish I'd spent less time on, and one I'm ready to put to bed with this blog post.

Blog making

Why blog?

To offer a parallel to others venturing down the path of games design. If others can take something away from my experiences, to be inspired by my successes, to avoid repeating my failures, then so much the better.

But mainly I blog for myself. Sometimes it's good and healthy to pluck out a thought from the swirling mass and try to fix and give a more solid shape to it in the form of the written, published word.

Why make games?

Feeling the creative impulse - a desire to share an idea, feeling or experience I've had - the different mediums come up one after another offering themselves to this process. With each having its own strengths, it'd be a shame to close myself off to one avenue of expression. With game design I don't have to do that. Designing a game is a synthesizing process whereby the different mediums might come together under one banner, reinforcing and inspiring each other in the process.

Games are recent things, and questions about the artistic potential of games are more recent still. Whereas a new painter, writer, musician or filmmaker is faced with a daunting archive, filled floor to ceiling with past masterpieces that set the bar in their art, the game maker is faced with something more akin to an open field of boundless potential, expanding as far as the eye can see. At a time when this potential is being increasingly recognised and explored, it's exciting to be starting down this path.