Announcing Color Tangle for Flash, FB, and iPhone
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 08/20/2011
I’ve been neglecting my blog even more than usual since joining CrowdStar last February (working on Happy Island and It Girl), but honestly I haven’t had a ton to report for personal projects. Until yesterday, when I finally released Color Tangle as a standalone flash game on Kongregate and Newgrounds, aFacebook app, a standalone website with Facebook Connect, and an iphone app.
I’d played single-color knot games before, but never had any interest in building one. I was actually working on a prototype for an explosive based game using APE (the same physics engine in Filler) when I had the idea to use APE’s grouping system to create collision rules–particles that collide with some but not all of the other “stuff” on the screen. I whipped up a quick prototype, and instantly recalled other knot games I’d played. It seemed like a perfect fit! I had the “first” level up and running in less than a day. I’d been looking for a simple project (and this is a very simple game) to try a multi-platform (facebook, web, iphone) launch, and this seemed like a perfect candidate.
The next task was building an editor–which took about a week. WIth editor complete and a dozen puzzles or so in hand, I next built out the website from scratch (Ruby on Rails hosted on Heroku). I got to play with Sass and Compass (which are awesome), got to play with the Facebook API (not so awesome), and experimented with the blueprint CSS framework (also awesome). I built a widget using LocalConnection so players on external sites could connect to the game via FB connect (which I thought was pretty damn slick). I even started on the iPhone app using OpenFrameworks, getting it to the point where I could play my handful of levels.
It was right about that point that a recruiter pitched me on joining CrowdStar, and the project just… died. In my year and a half plus at CS, I’ve learned more about web programming and games than any other time in my life, and I really haven’t had a lot of time to tinker.
I could’ve just released it–the flash app was working, the website was working, and the facebook app all worked. But I learned from Filler how important it was to be first to market on mobile, so I just let the project sit for a few months while I threw myself into my work on Happy Island. I jumped off of Happy Island and started working on It Girl in June. Between that and getting married last October, I had no free time at all for tinkering. My schedule finally started cooling off around February/March of this year, so I picked the iPhone version up and “finished” it. The only problem was puzzles. Creating a couple puzzles on most nights, it took me roughly 2 months to get up to the 50 puzzles I thought I needed for launch. I submitted the app to Apple in June and it was approved the first time around. I set a release date of August 25 (my birthday) to give me a couple of months to polish up the webiste.
Having not touched the website code for over a year, the FB API was horribly out of date. I got distracted by another project along the way (look for another iPhone app soon), but my self-imposed deadline of August 25 finally gave me the pressure I needed to get my ass in gear. After a couple of weekends to get everything migrated over from FBML to pure iframe Canvas, I invited a few friends to start testing it last weekend and launched it fully yesterday.
I don’t think it will do all that well on FB (I know just a little more about designing for FB now that I’ve been doing it for a year and half), but I wanted to carry the original project vision through to completion. In the end, it was a really fun technical project, and I really enjoy playing it.
7 Movie Ads I Want to See on Facebook
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 01/29/2010
I’ve seen a few of these movie promotion ads on Facebook now, and I’m pretty much astounded at how big of a waste of money they are. The problem with an ad like this is the fact that there are only two ways I can interact with it: I can either become a fan of “From Paris with Love” or I can blacklist the ad for any number of reasons. I don’t want to blacklist it, because I actually prefer seeing movie ads about 100x more than seeing ads for “Scholarships for Dads” or “Christian Singles” or GroupOn…
The problem is–they’re not even asking the right question. Am I going to go see it in theaters? Sure. I loved Taken, and while I’m skeptical of Travolta’s ability to play a fast-and-loose action hero, I have tremendous faith in Luc Besson as a writer/producer of fun action movies. Solidly on board, solidly planning to go see the movie they’re promoting, there’s still no way I’m ever going to become a fan of From Paris with Love on Facebook. Or–likely–any other movie on Facebook. For one thing–whether I become a fan or not has nothing to do with whether my friends go see the movie. If they haven’t decided one way or another on it by this point, my becoming a fan is going to amount to a drop in the ocean. Secondly, I have no interest in helping some viral marketing firm (“We get u lots ov fans!!!11!”) get a higher bonus because they hit some fan threshold. The obvious disconnect between the people who actually make the movies and the people who promote them just astounds me. What kind of ads do I want to see? Here are 7 ads I would’ve clicked on:
- Ask me if I’m planning on seeing the movie in theaters. If I click “no,” you can tailor future ads towards your stronger “change someone’s mind” content instead of showing me the same thing over and over and over again. If I click “yes,” you can start showing more interesting ads that might eventually get me to become a fan. (To be fair, I’ve seen polls on movies–but they’re usually some asinine unrelated question written by a marketing intern).
- Don’t promote the movie itself–promote the people within the movie. Had this ad said something like “Become a fan of Luc Besson,” I probably would’ve clicked it in a heartbeat. I don’t even know if he has a fan page, but (assuming he does) that gets any of his future marketing material right into my stream. Becoming a fan of an actual person says something to my friends, while becoming a fan of some movie that just came out says I’m gullible and pay too much attention to ads.
- Build a Flash game for the film (and hire an indie flash developer to do it–there are lots of us) and promote the From Paris with Love game.
- Link to an interesting article on the Film (Digg does a great job of this)–a behind the scenes article or an interview with John Travolta. Something more engaging than “please please pay attention to me.”
- Instead of a canned one-sentence synopsis, just put in a bite-sized piece of trivia with a “like” button. We call them “nuggets” on ShowtimeFu, though we’re a little behind in entering them. A “like” is much less of an investment than fanning something, and I’m much more likely to use them.
- Give me a link to add a similar movie to my queue on Netflix. “Get ready for From Paris with Love by watching Taken”
- Now that I’m 5 or 6 steps down the funnel and I’ve had plenty of positive interactions with your campaign… now is the time to ask me to become a fan of the movie. Don’t just give me marketing drivel, though–remind me of how into the movie I am: “You’re going to see it in theaters, you’ve played the game, you’ve read the trivia, and you’re already a fan of the cast. Isn’t it time to become a fan of the film?”
Okay, I still may not click on #7, but my chances of responding are probably up around 50% instead of 0%, which is a bajillion-times increase. Funnels are used for all kinds of things on websites, so I don’t see why people don’t set up ad funnels to guide people towards the desired result.
Bring on the Gesture Based Operating Systems
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 01/25/2010
I was moving iTunes onto my second monitor just now (placed to the right of my main screen), and the song playing just happened to fade 100% right as I did it. My initial response was, “Oh crap, what did I do?” Almost immediately, though, the sound went back to the left channel and my confusion waned. This wasn’t some newly unearthed OS X gesture, but merely a coincidental alignment of gesture and result. I think the fact that my brain created that causality speaks volumes about gesture-based operating systems in general, though.
Though there are lots of other reasons why I switched to a Mac (the ease of web development being chief among them), but the biggest difference in my mind between Windows and Macs is Cupertino’s love of gesture-based interfaces (which I share). My last Windows machine was a small 8″ tablet running tablet XP–the form factor was perfect for me, but the touch as an interface was way behind the mouse. I build quite a few little interface prototypes in Processing at the time, but there really wasn’t a way to take a small little self-contained java demo and push its conventions onto the OS as a whole (I’m certainly not an OS programmer).
Between the built-in gestures in OS X, the iPhone, multitouch trackpads, and the new multitouch mouse, Apple is kicking Microsoft’s ass on the gesture front. Surface and the Courier are promising, but neither of them are exactly nearing the consumer market at this point. Why not build a touch controller for the XBox? Something small (maybe, uh, Zune sized?) which could act as a secondary display for inventory or controls. There’s nothing stopping them from doing this, and assuming it was available to XNA developers this would instantly get me interested in building more games for the platform (the Zune requirement would mean even less people would buy them, but heck–no one’s buying indie games anyway).
There are rumors swirling that the new Apple tablet will have somewhat of a learning curve, so I’m hoping it’s some kind of new gestural interface. Since it’s not being unveiled for another couple of days, I thought I might as well fantasize a little about my ultimate tablet device:
- An 8″ convertible multi-touch screen with a physical keyboard (I know the Apple won’t have one, but I think an 8″ keyboard is about the smallest still-functional keyboard–and it blows away any virtual keyboard I’ve ever used)
- In lieu of a physical keyboard, a way to dock the thing to a physical keyboard for extended typing.
- An IR emitter with a rich interface for controlling the TV (and a cloud-based Tivo would be nice, too)
- I’d love to be able to just “fling” content from a tablet PC onto a desktop when in blue tooth proximity. Just grab the file, do a little fling gesture, and the file magically lands on the other computer’s desktop. No cords needed.
- iPhone tethering for internet access on the go–or just toss in 3G to the device itself
- The same compass/accelerometer technology currently used in the iPhone.
- A system for slaving the device to a full computer for use as a tablet-based input device. I can’t count how many times I wished I could plug my tablet XP machine into my full desktop running Photoshop to do a quick sketch. Actually, this is dreaming small–I want any piece of hardware to be able to take control of the thing and use it however it wants. Alarm clock dock? Sure. X-Ray machine? Sure. Car dashboard? Sure.
Fingers crossed for Wednesday.
Plastic Attack! Post-Mortem
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 10/16/2009
Winners for the Batman: Brave and the Bold game contest were announced back in August, but the individual games were released one-a-week for the 10 following weeks. My game, Plastic Attack! (play it here), launched some time in September, right as I was on my way out to the East Coast for a couple of weeks. Now that I’m back and things are somewhat starting to settle back down to normal, I thought it would be fitting to go back and take a deeper look at the game from start to finish.
The Prototype and the Pitch
When Mochi announced a pitch contest back in March, I was already knee-deep in code for other projects. I had plenty of prototypes lying around, though, so I dusted off one I’d been meaning to expand and built a simple HTML page explaining my pitch. If you scroll down on that page, you’ll see a simple mechanics demo I built in Processing one night while I was at Georgia Tech. The idea was to do a simple platformer starring a ball with realistic squash and stretch animations. As you can tell from the demo, the ball can’t just “jump”–it first contracts down a bit and then flings itself upwards. The other balls were there simply to give the “main ball” something to bounce on, but even there you can see the core idea of “bouncing on things that are destructible.”
The thing I’m most proud of with Plastic Attack!, though, is how similar the end product is to the pitch I delivered. I knew there was a fairly quick turnaround (roughly two months from start to final submission), so I didn’t go crazy. Knowing how much I wanted to deliver was absolutely essential for such a short timeline, and it made it easy to fend off feature creep and even cut some features that would’ve taken too long to polish properly.
Production
Between the time I submitted my pitch and when the “production” phase of the contest actually started, I knew I needed to refine my workflow if I had any chance of finishing on time. Filler 2, though I like the end result, was a jumbled mess of code–after all, it was first time using “real” Flash and not just pure actionscript. To that end, I was able to squeak out Polar Games: Breakdown in April and lay down a fair bit of code that is now sort of my “stock” engine for handling things like data storage, screen management, and other useful bits. The first alpha of the game was pretty rough, though large pieces of the final game were in place: a complex keyboard input manager, a randomly generated “level” (which isn’t always “beatable” in the demo below), parallax scrolling (up & down), a 2D camera system, and a key-sequence finale. Having planned to use canned Batman animations, the only thing missing (well, the biggest thing missing) is actually the notion of squash/stretch from the original mechanics demo.
After playing the Alpha, the Warner Bros. representatives got back to me with pretty much the best idea ever: instead of trying to shove Batman animations into this game, why not use Plastic Man and stay closer to the original mechanics demo? Brilliant! There’s something to be said for working with established IP–these guys really knew their content. That one piece of advice completely turned the game around for me–not that I would’ve mailed it in with Batman animations, but using Plastic Man realigned the development to be exactly the game I wanted to make. I set out to do just that.
As soon as the alpha was a little more polished, I abandoned the notion of a random level generator entirely. The results just weren’t good enough to warrant spending more time on it, so it had to go. Though it looks like a platformer, in my head the game was supposed to play more like a racing game–where track knowledge is a key component to success or failure. The levels were constructed in such a way as to allow the player to sprint from start to finish, with occasional breaks (like the two-bounce platforms) thrown in to add difficulty. I ended up building ten levels which could be played independently (each taking ~35 to 45 seconds to complete) for medals and a “Marathon Mode” which required you to get through all ten as fast as possible (with deaths resetting you to the current level).
After doing Filler for the XBox, I was really in a “controller” frame of mind. I wrote a KeyboardManager class that basically turns it into a game controller. When you initialize it, you take any keys you like and assign actions to them. The keyboard state is polled during the game loop and builds a corresponding array of everything that happened: new keypresses, keys released, and keys still down. I liked how it worked so much that I made most of the menus respond to keyboard input on top of the usual mouse stuff for buttons. A nice side-result of this approach is that most of the platform code is fairly platform-independent. It would be fairly trivial to take my XBox controller code and plug in into the platforming code with very little effort.
What Went Wrong
Throughout the production of the game, there were only really three curveballs. Soon after reviewing the Alpha, they mentioned that the resolution had to be 688×375, not the 640×480 I was building. The proper resolution was actually in the original email, so it was totally my fault. Much of the features parallax scrolling, how high you can jump, etc. had been tuned to 640×480, so that took a bit of retooling. I should have made it liquid to begin with, though, so in the end it actually improved the underlying code.
The second problem was my grandiose idea of squash and stretch. The problem with forcing the character to press down before allowing a jump is that it created roughly a 100-millisecond delay between when the spacebar was hit and when the character actually left the ground. The Warner guys didn’t like it, so they asked me to cut it. I defended my bouncing, but what I ultimately realized is that it wasn’t so much the bounce code that was the problem but the overall difficulty of the game itself (by this time several players had mentioned that they couldn’t beat the first level–more on that below). There were two options to simplify things: re-design all the levels from scratch to make them easier, or make the controls more responsive. Given the tight schedule, it was a no-brainer. The Warner guys loved it without the delay and I got to keep working on other stuff.
The final issue had to do with high scores. Towards the final Betas, I learned that the game would need to have a single “end point” with one high score. What I had was 10 levels (each with their own “low score”), and several Marathons (my original build had a straight runthrough all 10 levels, a first-5 set, a last-5 set, an odd set, and an even set). Converting the time into a point score is trivial–just take a “max” value and subtract the player’s score. Getting the game down to a single exit point, though, was slightly more worrisome. I ended up cutting all but the “full” Marathon (all ten levels in a row), which I think might’ve been a mistake (I don’t know what the right answer was, either, though). The barrier for entry on submitting a high score is just insanely high in the final build: before playing Marathon mode, you must “complete” (get at least a bronze medal) all ten levels. Though I can beat any of them in under 45 seconds, watching a few first-time players try it I’ve seen them take up to 30 minutes to beat the first level (far longer than a normal user who wasn’t playing as a favor would likely give the game). Assuming that they do finish all ten levels, they then have to finish the marathon itself–my best time is somewhere around 5 minutes, but my worst times are in the 15-20 minute range. That’s just way too long to have to play before being allowed to submit a score.
Besides the three production hiccups, I’ll also toss on a more philosophical issue summed up by a game riddle:
Q: How far can Mario jump?
A: The width of the hole in front of him.
Technically, Mario can jump further if he’s sprinting, but I think the point comes across. In most platformers (including the 2D Marios), a hole is merely one obstacle of many. Jumping is important, but it’s a binary decision. When there’s a hole, you jump over it. You don’t have to think about the hole too much–the combination of pressing the jump button and holding forward will carry you over it. The jump length in Plastic Attack! is dynamic–you move forward only as long as you hold forward down. The amount of time you stay in the air is fixed, and the default length of the jump (assuming you hold forward) is equivalent to the double-jump (it will clear two floor tiles). Whereas the “standard” platformer makes the single-jump the default action, in Plastic Attack! it’s really easy to overshoot your target (and fall to your death). Though I found it very intuitive to just ease off the forward motion when I get to where I wanted to go, it’s actually a LOT harder than I originally thought it would be.
Designing for Failure
My favorite thing about the game, though, is how hard it is. Wait, what?
I like hard games. I don’t want every game to be hard, but every now and then I thrive on a little challenge. Though I may have gone a little too far, difficulty factored into the design of the game from the very beginning. One of my absolute biggest pet peeves when it comes to games like this is what happens when you fail. Typically there will be a transition to a new screen, perhaps with some exposition or animations on how you’ll never save the universe if you keep falling to your death. At that point you’re given an option to give up or try again. In a good game, you can just press space to continue. If you really want to piss me off, you’ll require that the user click on one of the buttons to continue. I’ll put it in bold, because I think it’s that important: if your game is played with the keyboard, there’s no excuse for making your player switch to the mouse to continue playing. This is the number one reason I stop playing a keyboard-controlled Flash game, and I just don’t understand the reasoning behind it. High score submission? Fine, use the mouse. Main menus and instructions? Fine, use the mouse. Once your player commits to the gameplay part of your game, though, do them a favor and let them hang out there on the keyboard until they’re sick of playing.
More than just letting them stick to the keyboard, I wanted to design for failure. In fact, I want my players to fail. If they can play through a whole level the first time and get a medal, then I feel like I did a really crappy job designing that level. This goes back to challenge–I’ve played too many games with 50 or 100 levels that I never finish. If I don’t get a level that I fail on before I get up to level 10 or 15, I’ll stop playing a game. If there’s no difficulty, it’s just an activity–I might as well flip on the TV at that point. It’s by overcoming those failures that getting a bronze, a silver, or a gold medal actually assumes some meaning. There’s a chance that I’ll turn off a lot of players who get frustrated before getting that first medal, but my hope is that those who make it through will feel like they’ve accomplished something.
With my mini-rants out of the way, back to what happens when you die. Because dying happens so much, I felt like the process of restarting a level should be absolutely effortless. No animations that will get annoying by death #137, no waiting for recap screens to finish–I decided to just go ahead and restart the level. If the player doesn’t want to play any more, they’re most likely going to close the window anyway. If they do want to back out, they can always pause the game and exit to the main menu from there. Because the “cost” of failure is so low, I was actually pretty satisfied with the final level of difficulty.
What Didn’t Make It
There’s only one major feature that I ended up cutting: checkpoints. I didn’t want to just do checkpoints, though, I wanted to do checkpoints right. Because the game is essentially a really hard racing game, several playtesters suggested that I add checkpoints to smooth out the difficulty curve. Instead of restarting the whole race from scratch, you’d merely go back to the last checkpoint. Being a racing game, though, I would want to penalize players in some way–tacking on penalty time or just letting the clock continue to run. While this would be a blessing for beginning players just learning the levels, it completely runs afoul of my “design for failure.” Any expert player is going to reset the race as soon as they take any kind of penalty. If you’re going for a high score, there’s just no room for error. By simplifying the game for beginning players, I would’ve reintroduced the “annoying death loop” for expert players: mess up, pause, reset, start again–mess up, pause, reset, start again. In the end I just couldn’t do it.
Now that I’ve had time to think about it, my solution would be to actually commoditize checkpoints within the game world. Instead of having fixed checkpoints, they would be carried with you at all times in limited supply. For a ten-level game, you’d have 10 checkpoints to use… “ever.” If you need five checkpoints to make your way through one of the levels, those five checkpoints would be “left” in that level permanently. Should you manage to play through again and use only three checkpoints, it would free up two of them back into your pool of checkpoints. A beginning player could use as many checkpoints as necessary to beat a level and then work on refining their approach and reclaiming their “lost” checkpoints before moving onto the next level. A pro player, on the other hand, wouldn’t need to drop any checkpoints and thus could play through the entire level without needing to reset should they happen to fall. A similar mechanic was used to great success in a game called SeppuKuties a little while back.
Ultimately I didn’t have time to finish planning and balancing the feature during the hectic production schedule, so I ended up cutting it altogether.
Next Up
I took a break from the world of bouncing to get the XBox version of Filler out, but now I’m in full production on my own version with an artist friend. The game will be called Free Bouncing (think free running). I still have a lot of decisions to make with respect to things like microtransactions (vs just ads) and user generated content. Check out the teaser images below:
Filler for XBox and More Thoughts on Indie Games
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 10/10/2009
The night before hopping on a cruise last month, Filler finally went live for the XBox (September 13th). Coming up on almost a month of data, I wanted to take a look back at the XBox version’s development process and comment on Microsoft’s Indie Games in general. I actually had a solid prototype working on the XBox over a year ago, before the service even launched. I had way too many other projects on my plate, so the XBox version kept getting pushed to the back. After finishing up the Batman: Brave and the Bold contest game in early July (I’ll do a post-mortem on that one as soon as I get a thumbs up), I felt it was finally time to clear the XBox version from my to-do list.
Finishing Up
From each time I’d worked on the game for a week or two at a time, there was quite a bit of code in place. I’d completely stripped down APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) and the original Filler codebase to be as abstract as possible, then moved that code directly into XNA. I won’t say I got it 100% MVC, but it was pretty damn close. The majority of work, then, was all about building up the actual display and menus for the XBox version. Building the interfaces was pretty easy–though the lack of an interface builder means it’s a lot of “tweak, compile, check, and repeat”–not so dissimilar from coding Flash games in pure AS3.
Having played tons of Indie Games for WorthThePoints, I also had a pretty good list of things about the service (and the XBox 360 in general) that bugged me. Top among that is the prevailing idea that one profile directly maps to one human player. While I know why they did it that way (more Gold accounts), I personally think the profile system in the XBox is terrible for multi-user households. Content is attached to profiles instead of machines, which means we’re always logging different profiles in and out to figure out which profile has the proper permissions or features unlocked in a given game (that’s directed at you, Rock Band). Because Indie Games are even more rigorously locked to single profiles, I wanted to build my own system which would function more like the “save” slots of the old SNES and Playstation games I used to play.
Gameplay
Besides adding a co-op multiplayer component, I really didn’t want to just release “another Filler” for the XBox. The original Filler was only tuned through about level 15 (the highest I thought anyone would make it), so I was totally unprepared when people were up in the 60′s and 70′s a couple of days after I released it. Besides the physics breaking down, the difficulty of the game itself completely plateaued past around Level 15. Both the number of lives and the number of balls allowed spiraled way out of proportion to how many were actually needed to beat a given level. For Filler 2, I tried to correct this by combining the lives and balls into one value. The problem with this approach was that experienced players need way less balls than new players. Starting the game with 10 balls was reasonable for a first time player, but it gave expert players such a huge cushion to work with that there was never really any danger in losing.
The limit on how many balls could be placed was mostly put in place to put players from “cheating” and simply filling up the board with hundreds of tiny balls. To move towards making that the core win/lose state, then, was promoting a feature that was only added for convenience’s sake. For the XBox version, then, I wanted to get back to the notion of lives while thinking of a better solution to limit how many balls could be placed on screen. I tried lots of things: a power meter that depleted, holes in the floor that let small balls slip out, special enemy balls with a variety of powers (including popping small balls).
While playing with the notion of special enemy balls, I actually stumbled onto a pretty fun game mode which I may code up and release as a standalone version at some point. One of these special balls had erosive powers–every time it bounced into a filler ball, that ball would shrink a little bit. It was this mechanic which finally provided the difficulty curve I was looking for–though not as originally implemented. By making all the filler balls shrink at a constant rate (like filling, the “shrink” rate is proportional to the area instead of the radius, which means big balls shrink slowly and small balls shrink quickly), I actually solved three problems for the price of one.
The “fill the board with small balls” strategy became worthless–before the screen is even half way full, the first balls dropped in this manner start to “pop” and take lives away. Second, even when playing in the “proper” manner the new shrink rate adds a time-crunch component which was missing from the first two versions of the game. Most importantly, the shrinking balls smooth out the difficulty curve–they’re practically a nonfactor in first ten levels and don’t really start to have a major impact until around level 15… where the difficulty was previously plateauing. From a pure gameplay point of view, then, I firmly believe the XBox version of Filler is the most well balanced version to date. If I ever do another Flash version of the “core” game (and not a spin-off), it’ll be nice to have that part of the equation “solved.”
Peer Review
I submitted Filler to peer review for the first time on August 8th. It would go on to fail twice–both more for quirks in the framework than what I’d consider bugs on my part. The SpriteFont class takes an optional parameter when instantiating it, a single character which is used in the event that your code tells the SpriteFont to render a character which isn’t contained in that font (i.e. a character with an accent on it). Rather than doing something sensible like defaulting to a space (or simply rendering nothing), a call to render one of these characters causes the whole game to crash. Again, this is something that’s part of the XNA framework and not something inherent to C# itself. The fix? Adding a ‘-’ to the initializer for my fonts, which took about 30 seconds. The penalty? Besides the five days it spent in review before the crash was found, it had to spend another eight days in review “jail.” The published cooldown for a rejection from peer review is seven days, but your jail time doesn’t start until the day after you pull it from peer review (or get rejected, I assume). So if you pull it at 5 AM, it’s practically an 8-day wait.
After resubmitting the game on August 21, it took only a day for another crash to show up. If you try to open the marketplace menu with a silver account (i.e. a non-paying XBox Live account), the game crashes. All the accounts on my box are Gold, so I never even thought to create another one to test from. For a framework that does its best to handle all of the transactional details for you (trial modes are automatic, purchases are handled completely outside the game), it boggles my mind that the framework itself doesn’t pop up an alert with something to the effect of “You must be a Gold member to access this content.” The fix? Testing to see if the acting player is Gold or not and popping up an alert if they’re not–about five minutes of coding. The penalty? Another 8 days in peer review jail.
I’m not trying to say I’m completely without blame–if I’d spent another couple of weeks reading every detail of the framework documentation I might’ve been able to find these crashes before submitting. And I don’t think the “7-day” jail is a bad thing. The idea of it–to prevent people from dumping buggy games onto the service with no QA is noble, but I think it does more harm to well-intentioned developers than the “lazy” developers it was meant to stop. A better system might take into account the severity of the bugs and the submission history of the developer.
I was traveling when Filler failed the second time, so I was unable to submit again until September 2nd. Right around the time I submitted it for the last time, I posted some of my thoughts on the review process to the XNA forums:
What are essentially two framework quirks have cost the game nearly three weeks (it usually takes a few days before anyone bothers to review). These are mistakes I’ll know to look for next time (if I choose to continue developing for XNA), but the end result is that the submission process is unnecessarily cumbersome to first-time XNA developers–the very people Microsoft should be bending over backwards to court! I hope that there’s enough backlog some day for MSFT to actually hire someone to wade through it–a community relations job or a full-time tester.
This may sound douchey, but I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in playtesting or reviewing a game that hasn’t come out yet. I honestly believe I add more value to XBLIG by spending my time on development of new games and reviewing published games than by wading through unpublished games. Zman mentioned how few people are trying to make XBLIG a real business, and that’s because no one expects EA to playtest Call of Duty before it’s released (especially Activision!). You do your best to make your game, get it bug free, submit it to MSFT. If there are bugs you release patches.
Those sentiments were met with nearly universal scorn by the “main players” in the forum, but I stand by them 100%. At times it seems as though the Microsoft employees and most of the MVPs which frequent the forums (though certainly not all) have had rose-colored glasses permanently attached to their heads. There seems to be an overwhelming belief that if they hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” for long enough that the community will magically come together in a supporting environment where everyone does peer reviews. By voicing my opinions, though, the most common response was “don’t expect me to ever review one of your games. Good luck getting anything released.”
They claim that there are legal reasons Microsoft itself can’t approve apps, but that argument just doesn’t hold up–Apple has approved almost 80,000 apps since the XBox Indie Games channel launched (last November), and all without peer review. After pretty much giving up on ever getting the game out, some more reviewers checked it out while I was on the east coast and it finally got approved on September 13th–over a month after “finishing” the game.
Reception
Sales so far have been pretty tepid, which hasn’t been too surprising given other games’ lackluster sales. Though there are still a few days left, it looks like the game will sell less than 100 copies in its first full month (currently sitting at 83 with 4 days left). More disappointing than the actual sales, though, are the trial downloads: in almost a full month, only 2,520 trial copies were downloaded. 2,000 of those were in the first three days (while on the New Release list). In the last week, daily downloads have ranged from 2-6 trials per day. I’ve stuck with it for a couple of years now, so clearly I’m a fan of Filler’s gameplay–but I certainly don’t think it’s the greatest game out there. Still, it’s rated in the top 20% of all games on the service (at least, last time I checked). For sales to fall so flat so soon tells me two things:
- Though I considered the work I put into the challenges, multiplayer, and profile systems enough to bump the game up from a $1 game to a $3 game, I get the sense that players (and customers) don’t actually give a crap about those features and would rather just have the core gameplay for $1.
- As an ecosystem, the Indie Games Channel only has enough traffic to support the top 25 or so games in the system. The iPhone has enough users that even an “average” game can see several purchases per day, whereas an “average” game for the XBox will be lucky to get 2-3 trial downloads per day.
The breakout success of “I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1″ has shown that there’s a place for content without any “extra” features at $1. If I had to go back and do it again, I would’ve just released the game without profiles and challenges months ago for the lowest price point. Extra work on the game doesn’t really get you anything on the Indie Game Channel (versus what we’re seeing in “Premium” flash games that can command user payments), so if I release more games for the platform they’ll definitely fall within that $1 “throwaway” style game.
Hello World 2.0
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 09/25/2009
My blogging has fallen off as of late, mostly because one of the biggest items on my to-do list has been migrating the whole thing over to a new host. After returning from a 2-week vacation to the East Coast and Carribean, I had 5 posts outlined and ready to go. I got on last night to tackle the first, only to find that my old blog was in complete disarray. While I was gone, it seems as though Yahoo decided to finally upgrade from WordPress 2.0.2 to the latest version (2.8.4, I think). While I applaud them for finally upgrading it, the process could’ve been handled a little more smoothly. Over the years, I’d cobbled together a boatload of little tweaks and adjustments to my WP install, all of which were now gone. That in itself isn’t as bad as it sounds–most of the hacks were tweaks to simulate newer WP functionality. Where it totally sucks, though, is how they handled the upgrade. Instead of simply dumping the new files over the old ones they completely wiped out my blog directory and copied ONLY the wp-content folder. Because of the poor 2.0.2 install on Yahoo’s host, I never bothered with using the built-in content management system for blog images. I just added a ‘/images’ folder to my blog install and manually uploaded anything I wanted to include in a post. All of those images are now gone (and not backed up anywhere), so the vast majority of my old posts are now imageless.
That was the final push I needed to kick Yahoo’s hosting to the curb, but there are more changes here than the domain itself. The whole blog had been getting more and more bloated as I added games and pages, so a reboot was certainly in order. Instead of trying to be some sort of weird amalgamation of self-made-portal and blog and repository for old classwork, this site is now just a blog. The games are still up and playable, but the 100 or so hits a day they were getting is hardly worth the effort of maintaining a bastardized WP install. The new “Games” tab is much more portfolio-like and generally much cleaner than the old site. I’ve also ditched all the ads until traffic is more impressive. I’m sure there will be some bugs and broken links (and as soon as the domain transfers I’ll try to get some 301s up), but now that the Great Upgrade of 2009 is complete I can finally get back to doing some writing.
Upcoming posts include two new games launched, a review milestone at WTP, why I decided to kill one site, and a brand new site that a friend and I just launched. Stay tuned!
UPDATE: Well, looks like I hit the perfect storm of domain transfer FAIL. Dreamhost was having hiccups on their registration server which sort of left the old site in limbo (it normally takes a week or so anyway, but this tacked on another few days). They finally got things sorted out and the transfer went through last night. 301s and such should be up and running now!
Filler for the iPhone, ScoreCaching, and Filler 2
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 05/15/2009
Filler for the iPhone
At long last, Filler is now available on iTunes (you can see my little splash page + iTunes link here) for $1.99. I’ve never outsourced anything before, so it was a bit of a learning experience. I ended up working very closely with the team at ChaYoWo–they’re probably happier to be rid of my long bug reports than they are to actually launch the game (I kid). I’m very satisfied with the final product–even if it doesn’t sell a single copy, there’s a certain joy in being able to play my game wherever I go now. There are a couple of interesting things that happened during the development of the iPhone version.
The first thing I usually hear when people see I’m working on an iPhone version is that I should make it tilt-enabled so you can move the balls around. The problem is… that makes the game stupid easy. It’s not really that hard of a game to begin with (but man is it good to kill 5 minutes while you’re waiting for a bus…), so adding in more mechanics to simplify things just seemed like the wrong direction. Another idea I had was to use the tilt to move around the cursor, and have a button for making filler balls. We actually coded this one up, but… uh… it was terrible. In the end we decided not to use tilt and to keep the gameplay closer to the original Flash version.
One thing I noticed while playing early builds (which I also noticed while playing various clones that are already on sale) is that your fingers really do get in the way of dragging the Filler balls around while they inflate. Most of the strategies for the Flash version involve creating balls near the top of the screen and then using them as shields while they fall. “Finger-blockage” is at its worst when your finger is at the top of the screen, though, greatly diminishing the usefulness of those strategies. While playing those early builds, I did something radical: turned my iPhone upside down. Success! Sure, the balls are floating up instead of falling down–but man it was great to see the whole screen. Asking players to flip their phones upside down is just silly, though, so I did the sensible thing and reversed gravity.
ScoreCaching
While the ChaYoWo guys were coding the app to my demanding specs, I got to work on another integral piece: ScoreCaching (Update: ScoreCaching has been killed). Most of the iPhone games I’ve played with online leaderboards do just that–global online leaderboards. I wanted a little more than that, so I figured I might as well build it myself. ScoreCaching combines the idea of online leaderboards with geographic location (think Geocaching). Instead of comparing your scores to everyone in the world, why not compare your scores against everyone nearby? Even better, why not leave your scores behind as a mark of your achievement? Just as people used to line up at arcade boxes with the hopes of leaving their initials in the number one spot, ScoreCaching will (eventually) allow players to mark specific places. What’s your high score for the Golden Gate Bridge? What about Times Square? How about the pub down the street? Those features are a little ways out still, but for now you can compare your scores with your friends and those around you.
Filler 2 (Flash)
When Shockwave offered to sponsor Filler 2 as a three-month exclusive, it seemd as if the stars were aligning perfectly. That would give me extra time to finish up the iPhone version, ScoreCaching, and the XBox Community Games version (whoops!). I didn’t quite finish the XBox version (though I did write a hell of a lot of reviews over at Worth the Points), but Shockwave’s exclusive is up and now the rest of the internet can finally enjoy Filler 2. Kongregate, the totally-kick-ass sponsor of the original Filler, is reprising its role for the second go-around. You can play it over on Kongregate here or play it on my site with the link on the sidebar–I’ll start spreading it around the rest of the net sometime next week. If you run a flash portal, feel free to snag the SWF off my site (the one on Kong is site-locked until I verify it’s totally bug-free). If you’d like to license the game for your site (ad-free), drop me a line at learnyourabcs@gmail.com.
What’s Next?
On top of everything else, I’m also one of the developers in Mochi’s Brave and the Bold Contest. A $4k (minimum) payout is okay, but let’s get something straight–it’s freakin Batman. I watched the original Batman cartoon every day for years as a kid (I was a Marvel kid when it came to comics, but the Batman cartoon was awesome). Getting to develop an original game concept with one of my favorite characters–that’s a sweet deal. I’ve also got a handful of other finished prototypes in the pipe that are currently on hold until I can clear some of this development logjam.
As always, stay tuned to this space for interesting facts and figures on how everything is doing.
A Couple of Community Games Thoughts
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 04/16/2009
In the last week, there were a couple of newsworthy items (loosely) related to Microsoft’s Community Games initiative. Their most recent news post over at the XNA Creator’s Club web site has a list of review sites which cover community games. They got a lot of details wrong for Worth the Points, but hey–there’s no such thing as bad press! More important than the tiny little traffic bump, game developers are now more aware that there are in fact sites out there promoting their games. While I have gotten a couple of emails asking for reviews in the past, since that news post went live they’ve started trickling in with greater regularity (about 1 a day).
The biggest problem with the community games review space right now has nothing to do with those of us that are actually reviewing games–it’s the larger review sites who don’t review them. Run a Google search for pretty much any community game (for example, google two recent games we reviewed–FreaKick or Planet Crashmania 9,000,000) and you get a litany of results from the “bigger” players in the game review space: IGN, Gamespot, GameRankings, GameFAQs, GameStats, Gamespy. All of these sites automatically create pages for all the XBox games, but the problem is that they don’t actually cover any of the community games. After a half-dozen search results yielding no actual content, it’s no wonder that only the developers themselves (who are willing to scour through pages of results for any press) seem to be finding the actual reviews. Unfortunately, the only solution to this problem is time.
The second newsworthy item was the announcement that Amazon has started carrying XBox Live Arcade games. There are some kinks (you’re actually buying download codes, which means you have to punch them into your box manually), but this has the potential to be a huge boon for arcade games in general. While they don’t carry any Community Games yet, it’s a short leap from Arcade titles to Community titles (assuming Amazon doesn’t have any hang-ups over the lack of rating). Putting the community games on Amazon would instantly solve the number one request by community developers: game ratings. WTP and other review sites allow users to rate games, but for it to really be a useful feature you need a TON of ratings–something Amazon could provide. Having community games listed on Amazon would also create an instant revenue stream for any site reviewing community games (referral links). I doubt the conversions would be all that high (it would be MUCH better if Microsoft had their own referral program, as you can actualy tell your XBox to buy/download games through their marketplace site), but it would probably beat ads. The more I think about it, the more I think Microsoft should just let Amazon run THEIR marketplace–they’ve got way more experience in the space.
Polar Games: Breakdown
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 04/09/2009
I’m slowly rolling a simple new game out to portals called Polar Games: Breakdown (follow the link to play it). This was actually a prototype I’d had lying around for ages and ages (originally done in Processing a couple of years ago, then ported to Flash), but never gotten around to finishing. Mochi and Whirled were both running contests that finished at the end of March, so I needed something simple that I could do in about a month. I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here, but I just loved the idea of wrapping a traditonal grid-based tile game around a circle. I’ve got a few more of these “Polar Games” prototypes that I’ll probably finish up at some point.
The game’s main game mode was always going to be puzzles. I’d hoped to do 100 before releasing the game, but writing the puzzles by hand just proved too time-intensive. Forty puzzles are in the game now, and assuming the game doesn’t tank completely (*cough* Nibblets *cough*) I’ll think about continuing on with the final 60 puzzles. In the meantime, though, I hit on the idea of adding a “Daily Puzzle.” Using the date as a random seed, all players will get the exact same puzzle each day. There’s no guarantee that the puzzles will be solvable (most won’t be), but hopefully that adds a little more strategic competion than the longer, more-luck-based Score mode.
The basic mechanics for Score Mode are really not that different from Collapse. I wanted to break away from using a game timer, though, and create something more meditative. Instead of having new blocks come “up” every time a timer finishes, I just have new ones fill in infinitely. The polar bears “judge” your every move, and based on how many tiles you clear will either give bonus health or take away life. As health fades from 25 down to 0, the sky darkens and the music slowly gets quiet. Once you hit 0, the whole thing goes red and you’ve got 5 turns to get back into positive territory before the game ends. As you clear various colors, the meters on the right side of the board fill up. Clicking on them clears all tiles of that color, which allows you to build some pretty monolithic color groups. This transforms the mechanic from a frantic “click any group of 3″ to something a little slower, where the goal is to methodically build up giant chains while keeping an eye on your health.
To play the multiplayer version, you’ll have to check the game out on Whirled. The multiplayer mode plays much like the Score Mode, save for the fact that the board is split into four quadrants. Each quadrant is the home base of one player (empty seats are filled by AIs), and players take turn making moves. Tiles cleared in your own quadrant replenish your health, while tiles cleared in an opponent’s quadrant take away health. Every 10 rounds, a damage multiplier increases the amount of damage players do to each other. Using one of your “clear all” powerups doesn’t count as a turn, meaning you can set up an epic clear to heal yourself or attack your opponents. If your life falls to zero (or lower), you will be unable to deal damage to other players until you get your life back above zero.
Whether the game is a hit or not, building it has been incredibly valuable. The first few games I did were in “pure code” and compiled with MXMLC. Filler 2 was the first time I used Flash, and the process was… rough. This time around I had a much clearer picture of what I wanted to accomplish in Flash compared to what I wanted to do in raw code, and the actual development process was a breeze on this one. Pieces of a generic Flash game engine (and, just as importantly, a build process) are beginning to fall into place (sound and data managers, game boards, UI classes). Prototyping is still my favorite part of the game building process, so the more I can shrink the window between prototype and launch the happier I’ll be as a developer. =]
Worth the Points: XBox Live Arcade Community Game Reviews
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 02/19/2009
I was hard at work on the Flash version of Filler 2 when the XBox Live Community Games initiative launched, so I didn’t have time to get the XBox version out as a launch title. I was very impressed by the whole idea, but I found Microsoft’s game store to be less then helpful in finding out which games were good and which games were crap. For the regular Arcade titles, there’s an expectation of quality. If it’s a type of game you’d normally be interested in, they’re at least worth a demo download to give them a shot. There’s no expectation of quality on the community games (at least, not yet), so I found myself downloading crap demo after crap demo and thinking there must be a better way. I’d heard about CommunityEngine, which was more blog oriented and less “purely” social than something like Insoshi–and the license was a heck of a lot more favorable. I also had no experience with Amazon EC2, which was something I wanted to fix. A community games review site seemed like a perfect opportunity to test both out, so I went for it.
Without further adieu (or just click the banner above), feel free to check out Worth the Points: XBox Live Arcade Community Game Reviews. The site’s actually been “live” since around Christmas time. I’ve been slowly funneling traffic (both through a test of the MochiAds self-serve ads and from the ads in front of the original Filler, which is still being played ~10k times a day) towards it to make sure it didn’t break and fixing bugs as I spot them, but I think most of the major kinks have been worked out. We play a lot of games in my house, so I figured it was our civic responsibility to wade through the mountain of crap and try to find a few gems–and there are definitely some out there.
A lot of my crazy side projects don’t make it this far, but I saw this one as a good excuse to get some friends involved on something, so my twin brother, an old high school friend, and my roommate are all “featured writers” for the site (for the time beings). I once thought I’d open it up so anyone could write community game reviews (after all, there are more games being released than we can even keep up with)–but ultimately decided a tighter focus on just the four of us would work better in the long run.
There are already sixteen reviews posted, and I’ll try to prod everyone to do one or two a week. You can go directly to the games which got the thumbs up or which games didn’t make the cut, browse games by overall rating (users can rate games from 0-10), genre, or tags. Hopefully giving credit where credit is due (or at least finding a few games that don’t totally suck) will help legitimize the community games as a viable platform.