Some new character art arrived, and now I’ve got pretty much all the art I need. I’ve ordered bunch of decks again from Artscow and waiting them to get shipped to my place.

Here’s art, created by Anton Brand (really recommend him if you are into this sort of artistic style).

Each of the character has hitpoints (top left) which determine how many wounds they can take before things get nasty (they won’t die though). Each character also has unique once per game ability, which they can use in tough situations. Last but not least, each character has item skill – which means they can benefit slightly more of those items during the course of the game.

Here’s the Veteran:

And here’s the Redneck.

When the new deck of cards arrive, I shall finalize balancing & testing the game… and then we get one step closer to finish line.

I finished Fallout 1 week or two ago, and one thing particular was how the choices I made in the game were represented in the end. In the game, there was certain action (see how I don’t spoil game plot.. even when the game was made 1998, ahem) that affected certain community. I could have chose a difficult path and helped the community, but I took a shortcut. I thought “whadda hell, I can’t be arsed to help ‘em” and chose the quicker option.

In the end of the game, I had won something major, but this community didn’t do so well. Thanks to my actions (or lack of them).

I don’t know why I didn’t complete the game decade ago, but I must say that the game was fun still today. It was damn hard at times, but fun too. I actually didn’t want so much combat, as I was more interested in character dialogue, sub-stories, main story and decisions that affect the game. I liked how the game didn’t hold my hand telling me “now I must go to speak to man there (let’s mark that in your map) and maybe he will tell you about secret X”. Oh noes, I had to figure out what I needed to do.

Few times it was bit irritating to wander around, few times I needed to get save files from past to get pass certain stuff… but all in all, I actually eventually learned to like it, even though I whined about lack of auto-save earlier (in Fallout 2).

Eventually, I learned to like these things that game didn’t have:

• No auto-save (I learned to save intelligently, and it didn’t cut immersion)
• No achievements (thank god)
• No hand-holding (for a long time, finding some ammo felt like a true achievement even when game didn’t tell me “Achievement!! You found goddamn ammo! Here’s a badge for you!! Aren’t you one happy camper now!?”. No, finding the ammo was achievement. I didn’t need game to tell me that. I felt intelligent for figuring out stuff.)
• No one straight path to victory: instead, I could choose what to do, and actions affected the whole outcome of the game and story. Really nice, really nice.

And it cost just $5.99 which was a steal.

Amazing that a game that was made about 14 years ago still beats many modern games. Easily.

• You have done something great
• and then some evil corporation clones your stuff.

Well, there’s few different ways to handle this:

• You can wee on their tent, and make superior PR move that gets picked everywhere around the net. (Recommended)
• You can whine how there’s evil corporations and that your stuff shouldn’t be copied.
• You can concentrate on building success that doesn’t depend on stuff that can be cloned. Match-3 games can be cloned. Tower sim can be cloned. RPGs with deep storyline is harder to clone.
• You can make shitty game that doesn’t sell anything. These are rarely cloned too.
• You can ignore em. (Pretty good plan)
• You can think what’s important, why you are making games. Profit? Passion?
• You can make gross zombie games. Big studios rarely clone those. (Hah!)

Now, regarding the “game mechanics can be cloned”. I think this is pretty good thing. Sure, ripping off somebody’s game mechanics and then cloning pretty much the whole game with different graphics is bit shitty move… but that’s how it needs to be.

Businesswise, it’s pretty profitable to be second in the market. Clone hit games, and make some changes. But that’s something hundred zillion other corporations are doing. Zynga isn’t only one cloning their way to success. If cloning was the way to go, then how come there aren’t as successful other cloners?

And this also makes one really ponder why you are making games? Are you making games that you can profit? Or are you making games mechanics & games… that are spread all over the world? Doesn’t it make one happy that by creating something cool that everybody wants to clone… something cool that others can benefit from? Isn’t that a pretty darn sweet thing?

Or, is it so that you were doing this stuff for profit? In that case, jump to one of those clone factories and see how happy things are there.

Or do you just “want fair fight”? Well, time to wake up. This is a really open market world where best offering (not necessarily best product) wins the profits. If you do game that can be cloned by a big studio, then you knew what you were against when you first started. Or did you really think that after you make your smash hit, nobody would be interested in getting the money too?

“But this kills innovation”
Tough luck. And yes, for some genres at least. At one point Match-3 games were selling like pancakes. They were hot stuff (not sure how they do nowadays). Now, is the innovation in match-3 games killed? I suppose. There’s every now and then one new different match-3 game but I feel the market is pretty saturated.

So, if you do some popular gaming thing that can be cloned, of course you can except that there won’t be innovation.

We can cry and bite our legs off, but that doesn’t change anything. If we are worried about cloning, then we should do stuff that’s hard to clone.

We know that there’s cloners waiting for the next hit game. That’s perfectly fine. I mean, creating a clone isn’t going to guarantee success. It’s risky. Not all cloners are profitable. It takes heaps of effort too, and is not “easy way” to go.

There’s people doing games for passion, and not getting money. That’s perfectly fine too. Whining about “but rules should favor me as [insert random reason here]” is not going to cut it. If you don’t like the rules, you can go play somewhere else.

So… who’s evil?
I think it’s quite natural to think that Zynga is “evil” or “doing wrong” when they clone a game. They are a company who want to make profit. They have business strategy that is targeted to maximizing profit. They might steal an idea or two, but so does everybody else. They might clone stuff they can clone, but so is everybody else. Zynga is just doing things better than many other corporations.

I’m not saying Zynga is less evil than me (slightly richer though). They simply seem to have different values from me. I try steal every game idea I can, but I try add something unique, something of my own in the creation. I want to do something I like doing, and something I like to experience. If somebody was to clone that stuff and make profits, that’s pretty cool. Next time they need ideas, they know where to find me.

I feel that the chaps at nimblebit chose the right way to deal with Zynga’s copy & “we wanna buy you” offer. They turned this into a PR thing which favors them. Zynga can clone the game, but they cannot clone the fact that nimblebit has the “small good guys against big evil corporation” edge that can make an interesting story. Nimblebit managed to create a cool story out of the situation, and I’m pretty sure they benefit from this.

That’s the name of the game.

P.S. And if Zynga is successful, do you really think that other big players won’t notice it and challenge them? This zoo is filled with predators who are ready to attack each other as well.

Here you go:

1. Have big loading times and use word “loading” when switching between places.
2. Show the same dialogue options over and over (if you wanna ensure that “character might need that info”, then make so that character has journal where conversation was stored)
3. Hold the players hand by (1) first letting character tell what to do, (2) then showing text telling what to do, (3) then pointing the next goal on the map regarding what to do and (4) showing hint “maybe I should go there” in the journal. (This one is tricky: on the other hand you don’t want to player to be lost not knowing what to do next… but on the other hand too much information kills immersion. Check this video ‘if Quake was done today’)
4. Making player guess what you thought that should be done next. If player knows what should happen next, but your game user interface prevents (in RPG, not talking about car driving game) him from reaching the goal, that kills immersion. There’s a great article about this at Raph Koster’s site.
5. Make character pick dialogue option he thinks is ok, when in reality the other party takes it as offense. This too can be tricky, but bear in mind that as a not-native English speaking chap, I might miss some nuances of conversations… and sometimes I might pick dialogue option that I thought was friendly, when in reality it was offensive. There’s no easy way to get past through this option though, and not sure what’s a good solution (other than accept the fact that this way I learn better English…)

Anything to add to this list? Complaints or solutions?

The audience of this blog are mainly game developers, so that affects the outcome of the poll. My not so wild guess is that if audience would be mainly gamers, the percentage would be much, much higher. As you can see from the earlier blog post replies, some folks do play all the games they buy.

I presume there are also gamers who don’t play all the games they buy, but what is quite certain that game developers like to *just* buy the games.

Why would this be? My guess is one or some of the following reasons apply:

• For research purposes: hearing about some game and then testing mechanics can be enough for a game developer to buy the game.
• To bring old memories back. Every now and then there’s new game that you played 20 years ago and either a remake or similar game appears, and you just want to add it in your collection.
• To increase your collection, you hoarder.
• To support game development. This can be somewhat funny… that game developers buy each others games to support development. I do this too.

And I bet there’s some other reasons (feel free to add).

But whatever the reason, it is quite strange that nowadays we buy games we won’t quite likely even play.

Why is that?

Should we all start making intro screens from now on?

I don’t know what happened to the dog, but then I encountered a game over screen showing bones of a dead human. Text indicated that it was bad thing for mankind too as they were not saved.

Then I saw the start menu.

Then… I started wondering if there was auto-saves, but heheee, there were no such things as autosaves in ’99. Nah, I should have saved the game and not mess with the gecko.

Okay, I realize that now.

Now, I might suck at Fallout but do I have to go through the damn trial again? I found a great strategy of fighting which consisted of “hit & run”. Hit once, run 4 squares away. Wait spider to follow and hit again. Repeat for a long time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Fallout 2. It was game I never played in my childhood and I want to correct that error.

But, I started thinking stuff from game designers point-of-view. I encountered a permanent death. All my progress was lost, and I have to restart.

I started thinking: “does this make game more fun?”

I doubt it.

Okay, if there would have been auto-save… then I could have wanted to continue from that point and try saving the dog bit differently. Or, since there was no in-built autosave I could have just saved the game every 15 minutes.

…but that sort of breaks immersion to me. I’m going on a mission and tribesmen there and I can have ask guidance and all, and then trout slap to my face: “HEY, I GOTTA SAVE NOW” my brain reminds me.

I think permanent death works great in games where rounds are short. For example, Rogue Spear multiplayer was great. One shot and you could have to wait for the round to end. It was pure genius and added to thrill.

(And to clarify: permanent death means all your progress is lost and hell no your next character can pick up your experience/items/stuff/anything and no loading either. It’s one shot thing: if you die, you must start game from zero. That’s permanent death. Period. Everything else isn’t.)

Fallout’s (okay, it’s decade old game, I know) lack of auto-save – in my humble opinion – does NOT add to the gaming experience. I’d rather have one slot that I cannot save/load whenever I want, but so that it would autosave like every 30 minutes or at critical points (like just before going to critical area or something).

I think that way no much immersion is lost since I don’t have to go to pause menu & save the game… and it would still offer me meaningful choices to make. I would know that I have to make good decisions, since I’d have just one slot where the game is saved. No fooling around, but thinking what to do next.

Don’t get me wrong: the game’s just great. I’m just thinking out loud about permanent death & auto-save.

What you think?

But if censorship is the alternative “solution”, then I welcome piracy. If I have to choose between “piracy is ok” and “censorship is ok”, then I choose “piracy is ok”. Besides, in this case, censorship has zero effect on actual piracy. Which means my tax payer money just got wasted in Finnish court, thank you very much.

Today, it was reported that Finnish court decided that ISP must block certain domain which parrot lovers use to search illegal stuff, and this is pretty shitty thing to do.

(sarcasm) I would link to the page but my site might get to the Finnish block list so I won’t (/sarcasm).

The fact that Finnish Court can order ISP to block domains, that’s bad. Really Bad. Don’t get me wrong. I’m quite against piracy, but censoring domains is not the way to fight piracy (if you are into that sort of thing).

Now, the court ruled that one of the Finnish Internet operators (we have few major ISP) must block it’s customers access to thepiratebay.org.

The people who use TPB can do the following though:

• They can use thepiratebay.ee
• They can use google.fi for illegal torrent search
• They can use million other similar search sites to find the stuff they want. Blocking 1 site has absolutely no difference to those who wanna pirate stuff
• They can use OpenDNS (thanks @taboobuilder) or whatnot to get to thepiratebay.org

What now happens is the following:

• TBP just got more fame.
• The copyright owners who started this court thing, don’t realize that they do more harm to themselves with this. Now TBP and other sites just get more publicity when different medias cover it, and more people might start to think “hey, I wanna pirate too!”
• We might be entering in censorship era here in Finland.

I talked with one pirate who never buys movies (he buys music instead) who said that he actually uses google for searching torrents. He says it’s much better search engine system than TPB.

So, the next logical conclusion is that Finnish Court also blocks Google. And who knows, some people might share links via Facebook or Twitter, so let’s block those as well.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not supporter of piracy.

But I hate this sort of stupidity.

Censoring site this way is wrong way to fight piracy.

And we really should not be “anti-piracy” but “pro-customers”.

We can try stop people who never buys our stuff from getting our stuff for free, but I think better idea is to concentrate on giving absolutely superb stuff for those who want to buy our stuff.

Just saying.

1. First, count how many bought Steam games you have in your library. (If you are not sure, just take a rough guess)
2. Then, count how many games have you played at least for 2 hours

Divide “games played” with “games count” to get percentage, and answer the poll here:

I have about 30 bought games in steam, and less than 10 that I’ve played more than 2 hours. That’s 10/30, aka roughly 33%.

And no, pirating doesn’t make you as cool as LeChuck. Image googled and used without permission. I hope I don’t get into deep shit thanks to this.

I read one chap claiming that “pirates cost us (movie industry) 1 billion dollars revenues yearly” (figure that I just invented since I cannot remember the exact sum, but let’s say it’s 1 billion).

Now, pirates come and say “that’s not true!”.

But, I feel that’s pretty bad response. It’s somewhat irrelevant too. Let’s see what happens if we agree with the entertainment industry chap. That’s not necessarily a shinier future for the whole industry, or for technological progress for that matter. Let’s say that piracy costs for example 1 billion of lost revenue yearly to software makers.

1 billion is lost… but who have it?
Here’s the thing that these chaps fail to see:

the lost revenue from software manufacturers goes somewhere else, like to perhaps to hardware manufacturers

This is important, and this is also how software makers benefit. I explain.

The more revenue harware manufacturers make, the better computers they can make. More memory, more speed, and everything costs less.

That’s hugely important. I repeat the sentence bit differently, it’s that important:

if makers of hardware get more revenue, they can use that money to boost the development of computers

If CPU manufacturer gets more money, they can spend that money on research, and get faster computers at cheaper price which benefits software makers since cost of computers is getting lower, which means software makers don’t need to spend that much money to computers.

Let’s do an another example.

Let’s think of example world, called NormalWorld. In normal world, there’s pirates, non-pirates and something between. Here’s the population:

• 50% of population are Parrot Lovers, they spend 1 billion dollars to hardware and illegally pirate all the software, and spend 1 billion to Ship industry.
• 50% of population are Good Citizens, who spend 1 billion dollars on hardware and 1 billion dollars to software. But no money to Ship industry.
• In NormalWorld, software industry makers are spending 0.5 billion to buy better computers from hardware industry.

In NormalWorld, hardware industry is doing fine (2.5 billion total = 1 billion from parrot folks, 1 billion from Good and 0.5 from software), ship industry too is going strong (1 billion from Parrot Lovers), and so is software (0.5 billion total = they get 1 billion from Good but lose 0.5 to hardware).

Everybody praises how Good Citizens are moral and respectable people, and everybody loves them (expect the parrots, who like more the other chaps).

But there are people who say that we should see what our neighbour, SopaWorld does. In SopaWorld, there’s no piracy.

This leads to the following situation:

• 50% of population are Parrot Lovers there as well, forced to spend 1 billion to software industry, spending 0 billion to hardware, and ship industry gets 1 billion.
• 50% of population are Good Citizens, who spend 1 billion dollars on hardware and 1 billion dollars to software. But no money to Ship industry.
• In SopaWorld, software industry makers are spending 1.5 billion to buy expensive computers from hardware industry.

The hardware makers have less money on research, so they sell computers at 3 times higher price since they have got no technological progress which makes components cheaper. It follows that:

In SopaWorld, hardware industry is still doing fine thanks to higher prices (2.5 billion, 0 billion from parrot folks, 1 billion from Good and 1.5 from software), ship industry too is going strong (1 billion), and so is software (only 0.5 billion total = they need to buy 3x more expensive computers).

As you can see, the overall result is exactly the same as in NormalWorld. In NormalWorld, pirates bought so much hardware that software makers didn’t need to spend that much money, but in SopaWorld, pirates aren’t supporting hardware industry, so software industry needs to spend more money, as prices of hardware are higher.

NOTICE: these are imaginary numbers of course, and I’m not saying this would happen if governments introduce laws or if piracy stops. Just trying to explain that we cannot just look at one factor and forget everything else. I will be slowly be reaching towards the conclusions of this article. Read further.

Stopping piracy, might mean loss to other industries…
Then there’s also the DamnItWorld.

In DamnItWorld, things are bit different. DamnItWorld was exactly like NormalWorld, but then a new way to punish piracy caused the following change in the population:

• Since Angry Parrot Lovers (they were like Parrot Lovers except they really had no intention of buying never any software) were no longer getting software free, and had no intention to get faster hardware (since they could no longer brag about how they saw in their goddamn expensive home cinema all the newest ripped full hd quality movies). These people had no absolutely any reason to continue purchasing better computers. They weren’t going to buy software anyway, so they stopped buying hardware too. Instead, they took their fishing gear and started buying ships. In DamnItWorld, the ship industry gets 2 billion
• Good Citizens still spend 1 billion to hardware and 1 billion to software, but they are using worse computers than their neighbours (since computer technology is not profitable here, so no much improvements are being made) and since computers are shitty, their games also have worse looking graphics than in the neighbour countries (that might be a good thing though).
• Software industry here uses 0.5 billion to buy from hardware, but gets crappy quality computers. Software industry is blaming hardware industry for high costs, hardware industry is blaming software industry for crappy quality products – and they both are whining that ship industry should be taxed so that some money would go into technological research which would help technological progress.

DamnItWorld has 1.5 billion hardware, 0.5 billion software and 2 billion ship industry. Tons of ex-software people nowadays manufacture ships.

Then there’s the LetsSavePaperWorld where people store 2 billion worth of paper under their pillows, hoping that after 30 years, somebody will be willing to buy that paper with some good price. Like, when for example all trees have been cut and there’s shortage of toilet paper. Then those might come handy.

The point
What I’m trying to show you here, that stating something like “movie industry is losing 1 billion or 10 000 jobs thanks to software piracy” also means that some other industries have those 10 000 jobs. (Since movie industry is losing, it means there’s buying power).

If movie industry arguments that stopping online piracy creates jobs, that indeed is true. It sure creates jobs to the software industry. What they fail to point out, that jobs are lost from some other industry.

It works globally too: sure, if random Finnish person (not that we honest citizens pirate, but for the argument, let’s say we do) pirates your US movies and shares it freely here, the US movie industry suffers (compared to situation where Finn would have spent 500 eur to buy stuff). But what the movie industry fails to notice is that the nasty imaginary Finnish pirate is buying your TV electronics that helps your TV industry. If our imaginary Finnish parrot lover is forced to “spend money to US movie industry” or “spend money to US tv industry” (as you see, we like your industries), then to US as a nation, it’s quite irrelevant. Finn is willing to spend 500 eur to your country, and you can choose which industry (tv or movies) gets that money. That Finn is too lazy to work more, so he won’t have more than the 500 eur to spend anyway. That’s all there is for you. And if you cut the piracy option, our imaginary pirate just might start go build ships instead – and then the US movie and tv industry is actually getting 0 eur.

And it works locally too, here’s an example:

If our Regular Joe american is spending 500 dollars yearly on hardware, 0 dollars yearly on software and 500 dollars yearly on shoes – and now is forced to buy software (since movie industry is losing), it means that Joe will spend 500 dollars yearly on hardware, 500 on software and 0 dollars on shoes. So yes, software industry wins, but shoe industry loses.

(Unless of course Joe takes another job, gets +500 dollars to spend on shoes too yearly, and then receives burnout at the age of 29 – then all other industries win, and Joe’s health suffers.)

So, shouldn’t we all become pirates! That way everybody wins, right?!
As said, this is a matter of balance. If everybody would be pirates and nobody would spend a dime in software industry, that industry would die.

If nobody would spend a dime in software industry, then it would mean that other industries win and software industry loses. If software industry dies totally, then it might lead to a scenario where hardware industry gets taxed to support software industry. Or, it might mean that after everybody stopped making software, nobody is buying any more hardware and we are all making ships.

The key point here is that, piracy is not just about “what is wrong and what is right”. This is a matter of allocation of resources.

What do we want to support?

• Hardware makers?
• Software makers?
• Ship industry?

… or health care, or parrot food, or wood leg industry or what. And of course we must remember that nowadays the different industries are so connected that it’s quite damn tough to say how things really affect. For example, if you like this article so much that you go and order my $1 ludum dare mini game thing from year 2010, the following happens:

• Transaction handler industry receives their share of that dollar
• I get my share of that dollar
• Indirectly, Finnish government benefits from that dollar too, as I pay taxes
• And as my taxes support public health care, there’s some finnish hospital worker who gets his share of this transaction (or the tax money can be used to support roads building or library, or whatever they might do with it)
• Website server bandwidth thingy receives their share indirectly (as I need to pay that too)

And that’s at the expense of your dollar, which you could use to buy for example sweet cold drink.

It’s your call.

The final point
Please notice that all these numbers are fictional. I think there’s no person living in this planet who can accurately draw the flow of money in gaming/movie industry – and all connected industries. This doesn’t mean it would be irrelevant either. This simply means that “cutting piracy” has effects that affect various industries and arguments about “lost jobs” are shaky at most. I find this sort of legislation quite dangerous to be honest.

If there’s pirates, then there’s more support for example to hardware industry (or any other non-software industry for that matter, since pirates have more money left to spend on hardware, rest of us spent it on software you know). If we stop pirates, then they might take their money to some other industry. Or, if they are forced to buy software, then it means all those *other* industries suffer (like the drink industry which didn’t get your dollar when you chose to buy my game).

I wouldn’t be suprised to see more taxing of “industries that do well” to “support those industries that do poorer”, which practically would mean that we got rid of pirates yes, but thanks to taxation, things are (in industry scale) exactly the way they were before.

And after all, we are talking about entertainment industry here. There are much more important jobs in the world than making games or movies. Firemen, police, mental care, teachers, doctors, nurses, child care… all these are important industries.

I’m not saying that it’s somehow acceptable that certain individuals (or groups) have taken the right to share some one else’s invention without owners permission. Telling “it’s good for all” is simply not true, since it forgets the creator.

I don’t have no more so strong opinion on piracy, whether it’s right or wrong. I do not like the idea of government introducing laws and regulations into this industry. I do think that old copyright ideas might not be suitable anymore, but I do also think inventors should not be forgotten when we praise how good sharing of culture is.

I’m not fan of piracy, but stopping piracy is bit like fighting against windmills – and there’s some indirect benefits from piracy.

I think in the end, it’s an individual choice on how we respect each others effort, and how we balance everything. If we all support software industry, other industries suffer… which also makes software industry suffer (since there’s no good hardware). If we all support hardware industry, then software industry suffers (and then there’s no good software). If too many people join the pirate bandwagon, if too many think “I have the right to do this, as I support hardware industry – I let others support software”, then software industry will be facing bad times. It can mean poorer quality, or bigger lawsuits or other bad things.

I feel that as a person who supports both hardware and software industry – it would be equally nice if those pirates who do not support software industry, would re-consider if they too would like to have some direct support to software industry.

How do you vote?
Every citizen who spends their money to hardware and not on software is directly hoping of voting the following:

• Hardware quality must get better, therefore I support your industry!
• Software quality (and all other industries) can suffer!

And every citizen who spends their money on software and not hardware, is directly hoping of voting:

• Software quality must get better, therefore I support you!
• Hardware quality (and all other industries) can suffer!

By “hardware quality” I here mean “faster CPU, better gfx card, more memory, faster memory, better screens, etc”. By “software quality” I mean for example “better graphics, better gameplay, better innovations”.

To put other way around: those nasty pirates who don’t indirectly support software industry, gladly support hardware industry – which helps us makers of software industry too, indirectly (they help get cheaper computers, which means you and me pay less for CPUs).

I’m not saying this makes piracy legal or good in absolute sense. As noted earlier, if nobody supports software industry, software industry suffers.

Note to pirates who argue that “they pirate just because want better service”. There’s better way to get better service than boycott. It happens this way. (1) Buy stuff and (2) tell what you want. Sure, boycott might work too, but as a creator I know It’s easier to do better services when you have some money to fund the development of better service.

Naturally, this is only the direct support. As pointed out earlier, direct support to software industry might mean indirect support to various other industries. And of course directly hoping of voting here might not mean better quality products. For example, the maker of hardware might keep the profits and buy ships instead. That’s why you can only hope your money goes to making of better products. Long-term, I think it’s pretty safe to say that “industries that receive support tends to grow”, so your hopes might come true)

We need balance, and perhaps bit more respect towards each others work.

What is certain, that we hell sure should have much more respect for people who do some actual work (and not just watch movies or code magic numbers).

If you answered yes for both, then you might wanna read further. If you wanna hear know more about traitor mechanism and cooperative card game then read further.

Introduction
I’ve been working somewhat under the radar for well over a year now. I’ve been doing a card game, not a video game, but a card game. I have kept the possibility of offering also downloadable version, but my first priority has been to create a game that can be played on your kitchen table, with real friends.

Not on your computer, with virtual buddies.

And I now can say that the game is in such shape, that I’m willing to share some more information about it. After 3 very big revisions, I’ve now get all bits and pieces of the game together, and it plays good. I’m proud of the stuff I’ve done.

So, let’s get into the the (zombie) meat of the game: traitor mechanism

Crappy “hd quality” ipod touch camera pic – yes, I’m hunting a better device – but perhaps you’ll see something in that picture

The Infected card game is a game for 1-4 players, and in case there’s 2 or more players, a traitor mechanism is used. Traitor in this game is of course the infected. The chap who got bitten, brain melting, but who is not quite a zombie yet. Only slowly transforming into one, while sabotaging the human players.

And this happens secretly.

For example, in a 3 player game, each player receives a blood sample card which determines whether the player is carrying a nasty zombie virus or if he is clean. During the game, the humans try make a successful escape and figure out who the infected is. It’s not going to be easy.

And while the game is going, the infected tries to sabotage the game.

The meat of the game is to have healthy amount of suspicion, paranoia and backstabbing. All that good game can offer.

Here’ll be zombies

I hate my ipod touch camera. Don’t ever think it’s any good.

In the game, there will be zombie threats that players need to handle. Mechanicswise, it is relatively simple: draw new zombie cards until you draw a smaller valued card than the previous one. Between card drawing, players get to do actions.

It’s pretty simple, but there’s plenty of things to do, and good amount of decisions to be made. All action happens simultaneously, so game scales well whether there’s 1 or 4 players.

And then there’s the items

Apple should have sticker “VHS quality” near the “take HD pics” in their ads

The game has plenty of items. Chainsaws, molotov cocktails, crowbars, revolvers, shotguns… you name it. And plenty is getting used. During threats, player decide to play number of item cards and try to reach equal or greater sum than the zombie threat cards. Each item can be equipped, and then players have access to the item specialties. Different items work better in different situations. For example, Flashlight does not give much bonuses, but is good against several different threat cards. Chainsaw is powerful against threats, but can also be used to receive more item cards for the whole group.

Then there’s also few more things
There’s 7 different characters, with different specialties. There’s also “major threats” which will affect the difficulty. There’s some additional variants, such as “total co-op” mode where there’s no traitor at all. There’s advanced game variant which makes the game slightly more difficult to play (for humans), for groups that have beaten the basic game.

Design philosophy
I’ve strived to have as simple rules as possible (and turn summary – which is practically major part of the game – can fit to about one page of rules), and I’ve tried to keep the mechanism simple. The rules are easy to remember, and since cards provide different choises, there’s stuff to consider. For example, item cards can be played in a threat, they can be discarded to take other actions, they can be equipped, or used as a buffer against threats in case you need to discard them.

I’ve also tried to provide meaningful tactics for the traitor. Here’s some strategies:

• He can secretly lose a challenge (there’s no need to show cards) which prevents gaining more cards
• He can hog certain rare cards (such as “vest”) and prevent others from getting enough resources for successful escape
• When it’s his turn to lead, he can select nasty zombie encounter and secretly discard the easy encounter

And some more. There’s several different ways to sabotage… but of course if he sabotages too much others might get too suspicious and get rid of him.

When it’s available?
When it’s shiny and polished.

I’ve gone through 3 major revisions. The first version was way too luck based, where traitor could affect nothing. Second was not much better. It wasn’t until the third big revision that really nailed it all. The 3rd generation is the one that I’ve been working on for some time now, adding things here and there. Testing. Adding more things. And testing some more.

3rd version also got totally new graphics (from “realistic blood” to “cartoony”), which makes the game so much more fun to playtest.

The co-op version works great, and scales well. I need to get healthy amount of traitor mode testing done, and then we’ll see. The game is currently – as I see it – in “polish shiny” phase. I will playtest, playtest, playtest it, and make some minor tweaks here and there. Maybe I change number of item cards, or change some zombie encounter, or tweak character special abilities a bit. It’s mainly testing & balancing now.

I’m right now freezing features and “new items”, and those go into my “ideas for expansions” list.

So…. when it’s available?
When I consider game done, it’s my plan to do the following steps:

• Get the game to a publisher (I’m putting my full effort to get z-man games interested)
• Possibly do a small pre-order based self-print for those interested (since Z-Man way will take quite a bit before there’s even glimpse of hope seeing the game published)

This will take time for sure. My goal is to nail the game – finish it – “in the nearly future”^*, and then it totally depends on the publishing process. This is my first physical card game, so I’m almost complete n00b when it comes to that.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, check Infected card game website – there’s links to rulebook, and other stuff is going to appear there too at some point^*

^*valve time

Psst… if you are interested in ordering the game…
…I don’t mind if you mention that in a comment to this blog post.

It’s about this:

• First you must spot a nice keyword, like used here or here.
• Then you write a blog post, that has the nice keyword in the topic title. That would be: fhriesoxpcdsuhwwnjrdchjdisowiquhfrdcsa
• And then you must also link to some relevant existing thing, such as this blog post: Why The Hell Minecraft Is So Popular Even When It Does Everything “Wrong”

And then search engines find the stuff.

And then you get traffic.

This stuff works also other than words like “fhriesoxpcdsuhwwnjrdchjdisowiquhfrdcsa” you know…

• BAD GOAL: “no email on my main computer”. I still email on my main computer, it’s just convenient. It’s convenient for certain purposes. The good thing is I’ve used mobile devices to clean my email, so I consider this to be success. Goal itself was bit bad.
• SUCCESS: “no twitter on my main computer”. I have tweeted a few times, but 97% of the tweets are used mobile devices. That’s success for me and will keep it this way.
• SEMI-FAIL: “”no (too much) NHL11″ was my goal. What can I say. I bought NHL ’12… I think I didn’t waste too much time, and we had some good online gaming with my bro so it’s pretty ok. Less next year.
• SUCCESS: “ad sales hunting”.: I stopped this. I did accept some ad offers when people contacted me, which is fine. Will keep this way.
• SEMI-SUCCESS SEMI-BAD-GOAL: “no distraction”.. I think I managed to say “no” to many things, and recently started GTD stuff has been a blessing for especially all non gaming stuff.
• SUCCESS: “no clutter in email” Email has been zero. I mainly Inbox or Archive, or Trash stuff. I did have zero inbox for the whole year. That is a great feeling.
• FAIL: “no more new Insider members accepted” – I did change the whole gamerelease.net thing (added forums on that domain, added twitter and other stuff), and there’s new members too.
• SEMI-FAIL, SEMI-SUCCESS: “focus in making game, having fun, generating the green stuff”. To get green stuff, I have had to do other than gaming stuff. I have had fun making card game, which is now in Tweak state. I’m not focusing on green stuff no more. It’s funny, but somehow those software pirates have taught me that “greating fun games for people” (and to myself to enjoy) should be the goal. I think that indeed is the biggest thing one can aim for. That’s where I’m aiming as well.
• SUCCESS: “no wockas if being parent requires time”. It sure does. Bye bye free time, but welcome great time. This soft talk is what only parents can understand.
• DUNNO: “no too fast conclusions”. I think I draw too fast conclusions, but maybe drew less fast conclusions last year. (Hmm, or do I draw a too fast conclusion here? I dunno)

Since I have one young kid and second one coming, I had seriously need to re-think my resources. My main goal was to get rid of stuff this year, and ensure there’s room for game development. I think that was achieved pretty well, and I’m pretty satisfied how this year has been.

1. Stop buying (if it’s crap, why buy it?)
2. Stop consuming (if it’s crap, why share it in the first place?)
3. Stop sharing it (if it’s crap, why share it?)

And if it’s good, then why not buy it and show support for doing good stuff?

(And if it’s not “convenient to get”, then why not (a) first pirate it and (b) then buy a copy anyway?)

So, members of government, this is how you stop the dealers.

1. First, setup a huge torrent sharing site, operated by secret gov agency. Register PiratePartyBay domain or something like that. Tell that you support all pirate parties around the world. (Also, open some sort of “free proxy” system, but don’t tell it’s operated by you)
2. Second, make huge ad campaign: plaster ads everywhere: tv, radio, google, etc. All possible places to get visitors to your site.
3. Third: Make sure your visitors register at your site.
4. Four: make fake lawsuits against your own company, telling how “Big Media Corporation” is suing you. Gain publicity for 2 years.
5. Five: track which files people have shared, mark dates, IPs, etc. to you.
6. Six: Using available data to track down where the chaps are located. Half of the folks have figured out privacy stuff which makes it impossible to know where they are located, but half of the pirates don’t do that. Get court order for operators to help tracking.
7. Seven: Arrest half of your country’s population and put them in prison. Including some of the cops who do the arrest.

And, to get the rest of the country’s population in jail, do the following:

1. Setup a “rat the pirate” program, which gives $150 reward for each person who rats about their friend who is sharing illegal stuff. The remaining pirates will rat about their friends faster than you can say “parrot on my shoulder”.

P.S. Tomorrow morning I’m telling how pirates can stop evil media corporations

Merry xmas folks.

Pirate parties explainin their websites how “all benefit from sharing of culture”. I almost agree. Yes, when product is created, and if sharing costs are zero, that indeed means that the whole world can enjoy the existing culture for free. Everybody wins?

Almost. Except the chap who created the first copy. The original piece of culture.

If all games would cost zero and everybody would just use pirated copies, the situation is pretty good. There’s just one question. How do we support those who create new culture? (I’m not saying we necessarily should, but in case we wanna create new culture, who pays the price?)

Game developers blame that pirates are selfish, since pirates don’t give their money to game developers. Pirates blame game developers being selfish, since game developers want to take pirates money.

Both are correct.

And then pirates suggest alternative models, such as these:

Game developers should get money from selling mugs, t-shirts and other stuff. Like angry birds does

This is same as pirate would be saying:

“Let’s produce more plastic crap that somebody else than me should buy”. This means that we will need to start producing crap in order to make games. I find the idea of “in order for me to make games, the world must produce more t-shirts” pretty damn unmotivating. I don’t want more t-shirts and mugs. I want more money, so that I can produce more culture.

Game developers should get money from advertising

The situation is pretty same as with the previous example, but instead of developer getting the money (or mug industry), now the game advertising industry gets the money, and we want world to produce more advertising systems.

Aka, this is same as pirate would say:

“I don’t pay, but those makers of product X should pay so that I can get culture for free”

As a developer, I don’t necessarily want another middle man who would start finding advertising deals for me, taking cut from each sale. This means my funds are used to support producing advertisement systems in the world. Or, if I don’t want middlemen, I will need to spend time hunting down ad deals, which is time I could spend make games (been there, done that)

I too am selfish, like you pirates, but at least I have the guts to admit that. (I’m also pretty good at trolling sometimes).

Also, advertising model clearly isn’t what pirates want, since pirated versions often take those ads away. So, it’s slightly odd to suggest “advertising” when pirated versions lack ads in the first place, or are downloaded through sites that show ads yes – but revenues go to somebody else than the developer.

Game developers should make distribution more convenient, like pirate bay

Pirate bay gets support from ads. Google too. They are big distributors, which make it handy to get stuff for free. This is essentially as saying:

“I don’t wanna support the creators, I wanna support the distributors for showing adult, dating, casino ads, and possibly other industry ads too, which then support those industries – but I don’t wanna support the guy or company who created the first copy. As long as somebody else pays, I’m all good.”

“Game industry needs to develop better ways to distribute”

I think AppStore, Steam, Desura and others are much more convenient distribution channels already for those who are not technically advanced. I’ve tested torrent systems, but I tell you: AppStore for example is a very handy way to get stuff.

And if it’s the “distribution” or “convenience” that you are against, why don’t you do the following:

1. First get pirate copy of the software
2. Send money to the developer

This way you would cut all midmen, but developer would see his money.

I know why. Because: “I don’t have money”, said the pirate and took a sip from his ale filled with grog.

If you sip grog, instead of giving that money to a developer. Then you are supporting grog sipping, not culture creation.

Equally well I can say that if I’m spending money I get from game development to grog sipping, this means I’m sipping grog in the expense of the pirates. The difference is this:

1. I have the guts to say this.
2. Currently all my game dev money goes back into creating more game dev, and to support my family (and to buy Moomins toys at the expense of your – and mine – grog sipping).

You cannot have cake and eat it too
I’m not totally against piracy. I think it’s okay for example students without money or well, anyone without money to pirate games. As long as these guys then remember to support later when they are productive members of the society and can show support to the industry creators too.

The bottom line is this:

• Piracy means you don’t want to give your money to the creator (nor other parties involved)
• Suggesting that we should produce more grog drinking mugs means creators should not get money, but grog mug makers.
• Developers are selfish, yes – and we have guts to admit it: we want all the money we can so that we can keep on producing culture, and to sip some grog if money is left.
• Pirates are selfish, but they hide behind some “all for common good by sharing culture to all (let’s forget the chap who created the piece of culture)” clause, meaning they have more money to sip grog.

All this boils down to this:

• To whom we give our money, gets to decide where it goes (after governments take their cut and spend it to build roads and statues in cities). If pirates keep the money and keep pirating, they decide who gets it. They can give it to developers or to grog industry.
• We as developers of course want that we get the money (plus some leftover to sip grog).
• Pirates wanna of course keep the money, so that they have something to buy grog.

At some point developers claim that “hey, we help children by giving to charity” to which pirates respond “so do we, by not giving you the money in the first place”.

Game devs say that “if we have more money, then we have more time to make games” and pirates reply “if I have more money, then I don’t need to go to work so much so that I have more time to play games”. Whose free time is more precious?

I think ease of distribution is important, but totally forgetting the guys who created the stuff that is distributed is somewhat worrying.

I think we are all selfish, all wanna keep decision power at our hands. There are couple of pretty fair models. Kickstarter is one: there everybody gets to decide how much they spend money so that something gets produced. Of course there’s quite a long waiting time, and some stuff doesn’t get produced if there’s no money – but that’s life.

I’ve seen some honest pirates too. They say they pirate because they don’t wanna pay, period. I think there’s nothing we can do about those chaps. They’ve chosen that we creators should not get a penny, because they wanna buy bigger monitor and faster computer to play games. I think in a free society, this must be allowed. We can respond by stopping making games, so that pirate no longer has new games to play. If that’s what society wants, so be it.

But then I’ve seen these pirate parties, who claim that “all win if sharing is free”. That is simply not true. It’s the developer who is funding the development then. The first copy costs.

I’m not saying that it’s the “right way” that it’s the players responsibility to pay – I just feel it’s one of the most fair way. Those who create get money from those who consume the creation.

So, what you think.

Who should pay the first copy? Developer? Players? “Somebody else, as long as it’s not me”?

If he buy games, then he is voting that this industry (or let’s say certain game development company) should get money.

Introduction
I’ve been honing up my economics knowledge, and I must say that I’m starting to lean into accepting that piracy as is, is not necessarily hurting our gaming industry. In fact, I feel that it can be proven quite easily that a “pirating games” as an action alone does not hurt the industry.

Here’s example. If there’s a person who is not spending any money in games, then whether he pirates games is quite irrelevant. Whether he pirates or not, then our Trout Slap Studios example gaming studio is not getting any money from the pirate.

But Trout Slap Studios is not getting money from many other people, who don’t play games.

The direct effect of piracy as such, does not mean that we lose sales. The same way as my dad is not playing nor buying any games, the same way random pirate is not buying any games. If pirating games as such means sales are lost, then equally well can be said that thanks to my dad who buys no games, games industry is losing sales.

Think this for a moment.

The mere act of piracy is equivalent for not pirating and not buying the game
If we whine that piracy means lost sales, then we can equally say that the fact that some random guy at the streets is not buying our game means we are losing sales. And since piracy here is not relevant – only “not buying” is relevant factor, we can conclude that piracy can be removed from the equation and simply state that “not buying” is the important factor here.

Let’s say there’s some random student living in some poor country where he barely had money to buy the computer and eats only cheap tuna fish. He has no money to luxury products such as games, so he pirates. He was putting 0 dollars in the system, and now pirates, still putting 0 dollars. Whether he pirates or not, is irrelevant for the industry: since he has 0 dollars to give to the gaming industry, gaming industry cannot benefit from him.

There are cases where piracy might cause the situation where sales are affected. We will be getting there soon. For now, just let’s try get our minds around the fact that “pirating a game” is not automatically a lost sale.

This is when piracy is not hurting anyone:
Let’s look at the next example: let’s suppose there’s a person who has kept buying NHL games. He bought all games from ’94 to ’12… spending 50 dollars (just conveniently picked sum) each year. This means the following is happening:

• Gaming industry as a whole is getting 50 dollars in the system each year, and the makers of NHL game benefit the 50 dollars (I leave any other middleman and taxes and transactions and whatnot cost away to simplify the example).

He has no money left to other games, so here’s what can happen:

1. He pirates all other soccer games
2. He doesn’t pirate any other games

If he chooses first option, that means soccer games maker isn’t receiving any more money (since the chap spent his 50 dollar budget to NHL game).

If he chooses the second option, that means soccer game maker isn’t receiving any more money.

This suggests that act of piracy alone doesn’t necessarily hurt gaming industry, if we accept that there is certain budget that the pirate is using for gaming. His budget is 50 dollars, which he gives to certain games – and that’s it. Whether he pirates or not doesn’t have meaning to the profit of other gaming companies.

In this case, piracy might hurt the industry:
Only the following types of piracy can hurt gaming industry:

• The guy who was previously giving money to gaming industry stops giving any money to the gaming industry. He stops spending 50 dollars to gaming industry. Since everybody is pirating games, he concludes, he too can pirate everything. Now the guy doesn’t pay for the next years NHL game, but pirates it.
• A guy who was just about to click “order” heard his buddy saying that he can get the game free by pirating it, cancels the order. He was about to buy the new NHL game and bring 50 dollars to the industry now decides not to put any money in the industry. This means possibility of piracy has made this person to decide not to give money. If there wouldn’t have been possibility of piracy, then this chap would have purchased the game.

The direct consequence of this is the following:

• Makers of the NHL game will not receive 50 dollars from either chap – so they are getting hurt (when you compare to the situation where this chap was always spending 50 dollars, or to the chap who was about to click “order”)
• Soccer game devs don’t get that money either, same situation as the previous year.

So… does it hurt the industry or not?
Now, whether piracy hurts our industry (or at least the developers) boils down to this question:

• Did the possibility of getting the product free mean that the guy is decreasing his gaming budget?

There’s two potential answers to this:

• If the guy who was spending 50 dollars per year thinks he’ll just buys shoes instead, and that he will from now on get all games as a pirate… then yes, in this case 50 dollars is leaving the gaming industry. Thus, it’s the loss for the gaming industry. It means gaming industry will have less money.
• If on the other hand the guy who was spending 50 dollars per year thinks he keeps spending that 50 amount and pirates other games then no sales are lost.

I repeat this bit differently: we all have some limit on how much money we spend to games. For some people it might be 10 dollars per year. For others, it’s 400 dollars. Or 0 dollars.

If we keep spending that money – as much as we can (no excuses here) – then piracy is not hurting our buying habits. If we keep buying then it’s quite irrelevant whether we pirate some other games too or not. Since we have used our budget, we have put the money we can to gaming industry.

Act of piracy – aka downloading game for free – alone is not hurting anybody.

Of course there’s the “budget” that is tricky.

Some might use this reasoning to conclude that they “wouldn’t pay anything anyway” and keep on pirating, and I would suspect that people who say so don’t necessarily really mean this. They just use it as an excuse not to pay for games, so that they can get other stuff…. but if games would be impossible to pirate, would this force them to buy game? If the answer is “yes”, then piracy is hurting sales. If answer is really “no”, then piracy isn’t hurting sales.

Some pirates say that “they don’t buy because it’s not convenient to get the movie, so they pirate it to rebel”. In reality, these pirates could very well pirate the movie, and buy the movie too. This way they would support the makers of the movie AND would get the movie conveniently. I don’t know if this happens, but I do get the impression that usually pirates who claim the “they would support but…” don’t really do so.

The conclusion is this:

If piracy affects “where we put our money”, then it affects industry too
Only if piracy means that the person who consumes games is putting less money in to the gaming industry (and decides to do something else with the money) because he figures out that he can get all stuff free, in that case piracy hurts the industry…

…for short term.

I repeat: only if piracy means that our mr. pirate does not bring any money to gaming industry (money he would have otherwise put there), then industry gets hurt.

Short term impact is that developers of games software (and of course many other groups that are connected with the system) don’t get the money. If everybody is pirating games, and nobody is giving money to developers – this means that developers are in trouble.

Long term effects of piracy?
Long-term effect of piracy will be interesting to see. The raise of different pricing systems like free 2 play or gaming bundles are here to stay.

Gaming industry has about 2 choises here. One option is to stop making games. Let’s close shoppe and start all making something else if nobody is interested in paying for games. We can all start making shoes and hope that people buy them. That sure would stop gaming piracy, as there would be no games to pirate.

Or alternatively – if developers and publishers are willing to take the challenge – the industry must adjust. The industry must find ways to produce fun to people, and somehow get necessary money to survive, and to develop more and better game.

It’s similar when somebody has made an invention that benefits the mankind. If the founder is given money from all the people who are allowed to use the invention, then that will be bloody harsh for the world and the inventor benefits. But if the inventor let’s everybody else use his technology for free, we all (except the inventor who got no money) will be happier. The inventor might get pissed off and stop inventing (tough for mankind)… or he could try figure out if he could get money in some other ways, so that his masterbrain could be focussed on new inventions. (Of course economic cycle will be quite complex to draw, but at least the short term effect is pretty much as described – I’m not trying to be academically accurate here to make a point)

With digital delivery, it is possible to share games to wider audience than ever in the history of gaming. The possibility of being able to connect with billions of human beings who can enjoy fun games sounds great.

I think developers and publishers need to take piracy as a challenge, and focus on figuring out what people are willing to pay for. If that means more gaming bundles then so be it. In societies, I feel people must be given right to vote with their wallet.

I do think that those pirates who are reading this, read the text fully. If you pirates like some games, then purchasing those games means you are contributing to the industry and helping developers meanwhile the developers try figure out new ways to adjust.

I still like the idea of being able to show my influence by purchasing games. I don’t mind if people pirate games, but I would hope that these people would also consider buying some games. Since players have the ultimate power at their hands about the future – after all, we all can decide where we put our money (well, at least as long as government doesn’t mess the developing market by supporting the industry in different ways…) – this means we also have the responsibility.

Piracy doesn’t necessarily hurt sales, but it isn’t helping either
If we want more fun new gaming experiences, then we try show our support to those developers. One way or another, game developers must get their money if we want to see more games from them.

Whether you get pirate copies of games or not is somewhat irrelevant.

Whether you buy games is relevant. Not buying (whether you pirate games or not) means you are voting that this industry should not get money.

If you buy games, then you are voting that this industry (or certain developers) should get money.

If you enjoy games and want and can support the developers, then do so.

I… honestly don’t know if this is good or bad thing. And for whom.

The good news is that the volume increases: much more people can now enjoy many different games. At least that what happens short-term, and I think it’s pretty evident. If I can buy a gaming bundle with $5, then I can get 10 times more games compared to if I buy one $50 game.

This means that instead of one developer getting my $50, several different developers now get the sum. Or, that I simply can choose to spend just $5 in games and use my $45 to buy whatever stuff I might need. Like shoes. (Since it’s damn wet here in Finland. Where’s the damn snow?)

Anyway.

Short-term, it’s quite obvious that players win in this system. They want games, and if you look at the Humble Bundle games… those are quality. They are highly polished production values. They are good games.

What are the long term effects?

That depends on volume. If volume increases so much, that the end revenues are higher than what bigger prices would generate, then this would be win-win for all (except of course for other industries, like shoe industry who would not get the money) . If a developer sells 1000 games, $10 each and gains $10 000 – then it would require 10 000 games sold at price of $1 to reach the same revenue (I am simplifying and not taking into account cost per transactions). If developer can generate same amount of revenue with games that cost $1 rather than $10, then more people will be able to enjoy fun games. I’m not saying that this would happen, I’m just stating that if this would happen then all would be goo.

If on the other hand the developer doesn’t reach that amount, it means he must do something else. He could not buy shoes. He might need to do other stuff that pays and so on. It might mean that he simply cannot produce enough to survive and would end up leaving the industry.

If there are other developers who can survive with smaller amount of money, and can produce enough volume to survive – meaning people are willing to pay for his products – then those chaps would join the industry.

End result is… that this is basic rules of economy. It’s the survival of the fittest. It might mean that some stuff is never made again. It might mean some gaming studios disappear, and all that is left are Click the Cow facebook game.

I think this would be okay, if that’s what players want.

This might sound capitalistic talk, but I believe in the market system. If players are not willing to pay such amounts, and if developers cannot produce quality stuff… then it’s good that the unproductive (by productive I mean “those who develop quality & fun games”) developers are lost.

Alternative would be some sort of group tax paid by all, which would then be used to support various genres in the field. We all would pay N dollars, and these dollars would be directed by the government to produce games. That would be pretty communistic system.

Currently our capitalistic system ensures that players get most out of everything and that each player can decide what they support.

(I’m not saying that communism is bad and capitalism is good, just pointing out that if people can decide what they do with their money, then individuals decide. If money is paid from taxes, then group of people – democratically or not – somehow would decide which developer gets your tax dollar. There are certain places where I like communism style more than capitalism, but that’s not the topic of this blog post, so carry on.)

If players don’t wanna pay anything for indie games, then indie games will die. Sure, that might be sad, but it’s also okay. If players don’t wanna pay for AAA games, that industry dies. If players don’t spend money on Facebook games, then that industry dies. (Again here, I’m taking for granted that we support games industry mainly by so that gamers decide what they buy).

Whatever happens, I like the idea that gamers have the ultimate decisive power in their hands.

It is up to you which industry you support. And it’s the industry’s responsibility to be flexible and introduce different systems that help generate revenue (to help produce more fun to the players, that’s what they are paying for anyway).

If you support stuff like Humble Bundles, then those bundles will appear more. If you support AAA games, then more of those will happen. If you like Facebook games and spend money on them, then more of those games will happen.

If bundles won’t get enough money long-term, then those will disappear. Humble Bundle has sold $1.5M. If devs get about 70% (the default split), and each game is equal, then 1M is shared between 7 games – that’s about $140 000 per game. If that $140k (minus taxes, transaction fees, bandwidth, salaries, pizzas, company expenses and whatnot) is enough for the devs to keep bringing more, then this humble bundle is good thing – and more will happen, bringing more quality games.

Group control (like for example: “let’s collect taxes to support adventure games”) to my opinion would not be a step in better direction. If we force money to certain group via taxes, then some group gains and some loses, and we lose our decisive vote on where our moeny goes. For example, if you would need to spend $50 yearly to support adventure games, then you would not be able to choose to spend those $50 to support indie bundles or shoe industry or whatever. Taxes mean we’d do collective decision on what to support. I believe that players must have the choice.

If players aren’t willing to pay anything, for example every player would become pirate 100%, then it is up to the industry to stop producing anything anymore – or figure out how to gain money. If players are willing to pay little amounts, then it’s up to the developers to figure out how to make it profitable, or stop producing.

Either way, the end result is that.

I think players must be in control, but also responsible. By pirating everything and giving 0 dollars to producers, the pirates are essentially stating “stop making more games” (or “stop making stupid DRM”).

And at that point the ball is in the developers’ court. It’s now up to us to:

• Simply stop making games. That would stop piratism. If people don’t wanna pay, then we can simply stop making games and all go into shoe industry.
• Or we can try stop making games more convenient (re-think DRM for example)
• Or we can think alternative price models (humble bundle, f2p, and so on)

I think it’s bit pointless to try argue if the current system is “good”. We are working in a gaming industry. We devs are providing fun (and other) stuff for players. And different market forces affect this, whether we want or not.

We can bitch about the system and try not to adjust and vanish.

Or we can be flexible and perhaps survive.

• I don’t care about your idea: I don’t mean to be harsh, but… I have plenty of ideas. Why would I care about your idea?
• If I’d wanna steal a proven game idea, I’d clone [insert random hit game here] and do something bit differently: There’s proven selling games out there already, so I really don’t care about your idea.
• I would have to change it anyway: One of the most fun things in game development is working on *my* idea. I wanna do *my* ideas. My my my. I don’t want *your* idea. I want mine.
• Your idea isn’t that new or unique: Let’s say you have killer idea. That’s cool and all, but it’s already been done. There is some game out there with same or similar idea. It’s been done in some ways. Your idea is not that new. Mine isn’t either, but it’s easier to lie to myself about this.
• It’s the implementation that counts: Minecraft’s idea is not new. There was plenty of games that had the similar idea. Minecraft was done somewhat differently, with different perspective. In the way developer wanted. It was his work on that idea that counted.
• We all have ideas already, and new coming: If we focus on getting ideas, it’s pretty simple. We can check out Kongregate, we can check out Steam, Big Fish Games, AppStore and many other places, filled with games to get ideas. We can check tv, outdoors and whatnot. They too are filled with ideas. Ideas are cheap to come up with. Making the idea into reality, that’s different story. Quiz for you. Which one of these takes more time: (A) come up with an idea about a mmorpg where hundred billion people shoot ninjas with lasers, or (B) make that idea happen.
• Even if I’d want to steal your idea, I cannot: no matter how much you explain to me the game idea – I don’t 100% get it. I miss at least 1% of what you meant and would do something differently. And then it wouldn’t be your idea anymore, as you wanted something else, I something else.
• But most importantly: I don’t want your idea. I have “my” own idea. I wanna do my ideas, not your ideas. Okay?

Indies are egoistic.

And that’s a good thing.

• Random Indie game: Let’s you play the single player even when their server is down
• AAA game Nasty AAA game NHL ’12, Diablo 3, Assassin’s Creed: Doesn’t allow you to play the game because their damn server cloud is down or something.

Saving game:

• Random Indie game: Allows you to save the game
• AAA game Nasty AAA game NHL ’12: Corrupts the save game file for some reason after you’ve played one round of ice hockey (*ahem*). I suspect some sort of special nasty DRM to prevent piratism. It’s bit annoying for those who actually bought the game.

Is it just me, or are certain AAA games trying to force us customers from playing the games thanks to their DRM?

By the way, I consider game mod behind Door 7 to be one of the best mods there is, if not best – based on time I’ve spent playing it.

Portal 2 co-op gets 100 out of the 100 points from me, based on the first hours. I was considering 99 points due loading times, but decided to go all the way. 100 points it is. I heard some people reduce points when games are “too short”, but “too short” game for me most likely means “time passed way too fast when playing this game”…

It has all the necessary qualities to make a fun gaming experience, here’s some highlights:

• Bought a 2 pack via Steam sale, so it cost like 9ish euros per copy. Which is like almost criminally cheap.
• It has short levels: easy to play in short bursts.
• Co-op. I luv co-op.
• It beats puzzle games: normally in single-player puzzle games if you get stuck, fun goes out of the window. In Portal 2, you have buddy to play the game with. That means you both can try give parts of the solution.
• Network works. That’s a pretty good for a multiplayer game.
• Simple menus: no fooling around, just click’n'play in no time.
• “One more turn” aka one more level. I just want to keep going.
• Clean and good graphics that fit the game

I try and come up with flaws or bad things in that game (of course I’m thinking from my subjective point-of-view)… but there isn’t really any. Maybe the loading times could be bit faster, but hey – I survived C64 cassette loading, waiting few seconds is just good for me.

Maybe I change the rating after playing the game all the way, but I must say that good job devs.

With that being said, check out zombie xmas calendar

(There’s still room for a few more indie zombie games, so email me a hint. Thanks)

(There’s still bit of room for games, although I got plenty of ideas* submissions. Please send a tip to me to include an indie zombie game to the calendar while there’s doors left)

(EDIT: *What a weird typo/mindhalt when writing that sentence..)

(send a tip to me to include an indie zombie game to the calendar)

If you have an indie zombie game, let me know and I’ll try fit it in the calendar.

Year later… I see there’s 40,330 pageviews on that page. That makes 13.54% of all the pageviews my site gets during this year. Heck, that blog post is more popular than my site front page this year. I’ve never encountered such.

So, I guess I should say thanks Minecraft! Didn’t see this (traffic) coming.

(No, I’m not giving credit for using word “hell”…)

Use either twitter (remember to use hash tag #zimbcharacters) or reply here on this blog.

If your suggestion ends up in the game (and nobody else has mentioned it earlier), you will get your name in the credits.

Thanks.

*There will be online computer possibility too, but it won’t look like your typical card game either. More on that at some point

The game consists of several different type of decks: mainly being zombie deck and hero deck, but with also some special cards (such as “leader” card and few more). Zombie deck contains event names, and these have been pretty much suggested by you guys last February. Zombie deck is the most unique deck since it has so much going on in there.

Now, I do want to include some characters in the game, as somehow I feel that the game almost requires to have them. For this I need help, and will do a blog post about this in a minute.

With that being said, I’m really pleased about how my existing art can be replaced with fresh style and this really makes the game feel more unique when each of my card doesn’t look like a duplicate.

And yes, Dynamite belongs to “self defence” category…

That’s quite a leap from serious style to more approachable (in my relatively humble opinion) cartoony style, and I really like how my card deck creator can handle everything to produce new cards.

Stay tuned…

P.S. Funny how it *looks* like progress when you get new visuals, even when in reality the biggest work has been happening – and is happening – in tweaking & testing the gameplay further.

The worst case scenario for laptop owners: you store all your paypal, all your email and all your other important passwords and urls in a file. Thief gets your laptop, all your info and you are in trouble.

Luckily, you can store your stuff heavily encrypted so at least it makes the job nastier.

Some days ago I looked into password systems and ened up with the following 2 products:

• KeePass
• LastPass

My end conclusion is that those who want to use local system, KeePass works wonders. For those who prefer bit more mobile option, LastPass should be fine. Although, this is after looking both products for like 15 minutes, so you might want to dig deeper. They both seem to be popular if you tweet about em.

I picked KeePass since I don’t really need/want those other things and I’m bit paranoid about using online systems for password stuff, although LastPass is hugely popular and seems to be pretty secure.

I’m testing KeePass and I let you decide what suits you.

Now, thanks to this system, I can store all my secret stuff behind a secure door where nobody can access (at least not very easily).

The only thing that really bother me is “where to store the master password”. I might write it in a note, store it in some secret place… but what if my daughter finds it and hides it somewhere else (if she doesn’t hide under the carpet like she usually does, I’d be in trouble). Or what if dogs eat my note. I’ve yet to figure out perfectly good place for storing master passwords, so any hints on this matter would be most appreciated.

Also, here’s a handy guide for creating passwords (and why your passwords really should be long sentences rather than “cryptic looking” short names).

P.S. Also thanks for you twitter folks who helped me decide, your help was most welcome. I’m not listing names now, you know who you are.

I don’t know exactly what got me into this, but since the methods seem quite tested, I thought to give this a go. I don’t know yet where this will lead me, but I am willing to try things as they are explained by the authors.

I’m applying the system in different areas in my life and was thinking of explaining how I do stuff and how I feel about GTD in general.

I’ve yet to finish reading the book, but so far I’ve found that there’s couple of things that I really feel already benefit me. Here’s summary of them:

• Shopping list 2.0 (name by me) GTD explains that you should be aware of the “context” or “location” where you can do something. For example, if you need to buy Diapers from shop, it makes sense to have a list for “shop location”. Instead of checking “what’s missing”, I’m now gathering stuff like “butter” or “diapers” or “xmas tree” in the shopping list. And when I’m at the proper location (supermarket), I’ll simply check the list. This is different from having a shopping list you try and create. I append this list whenever I think “I’d need to buy item X”, I keep appending the list and get stuff out of my mind. It’s brilliant.
• Inbox this is another pretty sweet thing: list for stuff that I need to do, uncategorized. Whenever I get a “task” I’ll add it to my list. Whether the task is “research thing X” or “do thing Z”, I have it written down. This is a good way to get things out of my mind (Later I process these, but I’ll explain more about that later)

I’ve also tested several different systems for capturing items, and ended up with a combination of iPod/iPad “Reminders” and “Notes” apps. Reminders is missing some stuff I’d like (foldering, arranging tasks, showing number of undone tasks on list title) but it is much more simpler & easier to use than other products I’ve reviewed or tested (such as Things, Evernote, Remember Milk and others). So, to me, Reminders is just great device for capturing items

Currently I have the following lists in the device:

- INBOX
- GAMEDEV: project name (8 different, such as “gamerelease.net, infected, blog posts” and “misc”)
- HOME: “project” name (7 different, such as “homework, own stuff, xmas preparations” etc)
- LOCATION: place name (I have 4 different: “computer, pharmacy, shop…”)
- WAITING
- SOMEDAY/MAYBE
- VISION

This list is very much subject to change but I’m listing it here so that I can later check back and see how the list looks (off-topic: I’m scheduling a task to my INBOX to reflect back on this matter…)

What is important that these lists should only contain things that I’m supposed to do, they don’t contain the actual work material. I’ve set up “library” folder on my harddrive to contain all my stuff there (and I too set up a backup too to better sync all the files into separate external hard drives). The items in my lists merely help me know where to look in the library folder if I need to do so.

So far I’ve found out that it’s essential to have a great way to write things down anytime. iPod Touch is a neat device for that for me. It’s also important to capture stuff so that they don’t haunt me when they shouldn’t… and I was first sceptical about the “location” based lists, but I now see that they are brilliant. I’ve managed to amaze my wife by telling her what we need to buy and she has been like “oh, good that you remembered!”

These were merely some thoughts on “capturing” items. What I do about these is a matter of another blog post.

The first impression is that I feel somewhat more organized, getting somewhat more “misc home stuff” done and me and my wife spend less time talking about “what we should do” since we know that we’ll mark stuff down and will review “what to do” on weekends (or so).

I’m experimenting this out for at least month or two, if not the whole next year, and reporting my findings and results.

While this sort of stuff always happens to other than me and you… here’s couple of simple tips for the lazy backup-creators:

#1 – How to set up system
About three years ago, I wrote a blog post on doing world’s simplest backup system in 5 minutes and I have to add that using “robocopy” will do wonders.

In very shortly put, launch your windows console (windows icon > search programs… type “cmd” and hit enter) and type “robocopy”. If you see “robust file copy” text then you are good to go. Basically, Robocopy can help create only changed backups stuff (very good for daily stuff). Quick “robocopy tutorial” googling finds plenty of articles on usage. It’s pretty simple. In theory, you can just replace “xcopy” with “robocopy” (and tweak params a bit) and you are good to go.

Since I covered .bat file creation in that older blog post, I won’t get into more details here.

#2 – Where to store data: online
Then many, many services for backing up data online. Here’s some I’m using/testing currently:

iDrive – I gave this a go and my gut feeling is that this isn’t so good. Feels bit slow. I don’t know if it’s my location or what, but syncing files seem to take quite long… and iDrive seems to hog resources in the back. I haven’t made up my mind about final decision on iDrive but at this point I’d recommend you to check more reviews about iDrive or check some other services.

DropBox – I’ve been using DropBox for some time and I really like it. There’s one folder where you can put stuff, and the stuff gets synced accross all devices. Really simple to use. Free 2 gigs of space (you can get more +250 MB additional space by referred person to join DropBox, just like I’m doing here – ahem). Fast, simple, good to use. Please notice that DropBox had security issues in June 2011, which they blogged about. Always good to know where your store your data.

SugarSync – I recently heard about this and installed it. In simplicity, this feel a lot like dropbox. The biggest difference is that instead of having one folder where you drag other stuff (like in Dropbox) you can choose which folders are going to get synced accross devices. This is really nice and makes me like SugarSync more than dropbox to be honest. 5 gigs of free space and decent speed in syncing stuff. Since I have used this for merely days, I cannot tell if this is good or bad… but perhaps it’s good enough for you to give it a go. My first impression is positive.

#3 – Storing data offline
USB harddrives are getting cheaper and cheaper. You can get 1TB or 2TB with 50…100 euros or so. Investing in some decent backup drive is good, and then doing frequent backups is even better.

Also, if you have secondary harddrive, it doesn’t hurt to do backups also for that drive.

#4 – backup strategy
It’s good to have a backup strategy. Mine is as follows:

• Emails: in google/other server (currently no other backup, would be nice to backup emails though)
• Active projects: I do daily backups for secondary harddrive, not so daily to external drive and sync all important projects to SugarSync + DropBox immediately when changes occur.
• Pictures: Dad needs his pictures, currently I do some backups to external harddrive. Need to set up better with robocopy (so that I can add only modified/new pics…. doing 20+GB pictures full backup takes time)
• Blog: Occasionally (ahem: should do more)

And then one very important:

• Store your backup system usernames & passwords for somewhere else than in your computer. Like, what good does it do to have for example SugarSync backups if you lose your computer & passwords in the computer. Store passwords to somewhere safe place, outside your computer

Now I know.

Doing another (backups blog post) soonish.

All these game share common thing, which I call a bug and some business men claim to be “a feature”.

I’m suspecting that the same reason why not all books are made digital is the fact that publishers are afraid of piracy. I’d actually re-buy several of my books if only they were available for Kindle. I’d gladly pay even bit more (although I think fair’n'square option would be to have same price for both physical and digital books) if they would be available.

Back to dreaming.

A few days ago, I asked my daughter (1 year 6 months) a question. I pointed my finger at something and asked “what’s that?”. She said “brrrmrrrm”, which totally delighted me positively. I was pointing my finger at a picture of a car.

Why was I positively surprised? Answer: emergent behavior.

Some days earlier, we had taught our daughter that “car says vrmmmm”. To her it was “brrrmrrrm”. When we asked “what car says”, she would delightedly reply “brrrmrrrm”. Now, when asked “what is that”, she saw a picture of a car and said “brrrmrrrm”. It was surprising, since usually she mentions the name of the objects (like “kukka!” – flower that is).

I must point out that if that didn’t sound fun… then please just take my word for it. It was fun moment for me!

So, by combining two different things (action: “car says vrrrrm” and object:”that’s a car”), a new behavior emerged “that’s vrrrrm”), which caught me off guard.

Similar things happen in games all the time. And when you put effort in thinking about the smallest building blocks and actions player can do with them, a new odd and fun combinations might arise.

And that’s fun.

My own views about Isometric
Please notice that my experience about isometric worlds is limited to about 2 hour time I spent during this weekend checking stuff and coding. I’m total newbie on this subject, but since I have some background on programming I feel have a thing or two to say that might help.

So, use these with a caution – and feel free to correct what I say.

Isometric game development principle #1: it’s just a VIEW
I have one principle which greatly helped me to understand isometric view. And here it is: isometric view is just that, a VIEW (in a way). Let’s take a simple example: think of chess board. Chess board has grid size of 8×8. We could say that there’s X-axis and Y-axis. If you say that Queen is in location X=1 and Y=5, then she sits there.

Here’s the point: Whether our game is basic square 2D, 3D or Isometric doesn’t change a thing in terms of gameplay: Queen is still located in X=1, Y=5. Isometric view only means that we look the board bit differently.

The bottom line is: your game can very well run “normal” 2D grids and whatnot in the background, it’s only the VIEW – the REPRESENTATION – that we change when we have isometric view. First code your chess game code – without thinking isometric view – and only after you’ve finished all the game logic, you could add View methods and functions that ensure things look fine.

Isometric game development principle #2: use “levels” (or “layers”) to help think
In this following I assume that all objects in the game reserve “one block” (you may think of Minecraft if it helps: (almost) all blocks have width, height, depth that all reserve 1x1x1 space).

In some isometric articles, you are recommended to create multidimensional arrays that contain 3 parameters (grid[x][y][z]), and then you are given (somewhat) complex systems for drawing the stuff on screen. I think this is somewhat okay, although it might be also bit complex. Therefore, some games can benefit from this other type of thinking:

With this in mind… let’s get back to our Chess board example.

Let’s say you’d want not to have 2 dimensional board, but also 3rd. Instead of using multidimensional arrays, I would just pile one board on top of another.

So, instead of having “board[x][y][z]“, I would have this:
- class Board, containing “grid[x][y]”
- then I would simply add more boards on top of each (board1, board2, board3… boardN). And when I need to draw something, I’d keep track on boards, and draw them from bottom to up, by saying “loop boards > board.draw”

For example, I’ve written code to draw one layer to see something like this:

And by just adding new boards, I can get this (without need to mess with additional dimension pretty much at all)

This way I can keep calculations bit simpler in one level, without need to worry about upper levels. I say again why this is important: it’s because the drawing order becomes very simple since I just need first draw bottom layer, then layer above that, then the next and so on.

I know this method is closely the slowest possible way to draw each tile always, but if you want to get started, I think it’s okay starting point and helps understand. Also, I do realize that this works when all block sizes are the same. If for example you’d have a Dragon that is 3 blocks tall, then something else would be needed (I leave that for you to ponder).

Bear in mind, this is my very first piece of isometric code, so I don’t claim it to be the best/fastest/most optimized (quite the contrary), but I do get some credit for having somewhat easy to understand code.

Isometric game development principle #3: Sun should shine from some angle…
Isometric is fun that it can produce visual oddness that nobody’s perception cannot properly resolve, sometimes at all. That’s why it’s good if some side’s of the blocks are highlighted (bit like if Sun would be shining from certain side)

Here’s example image:

I’ve highlighted some sections using white, and look at those sections… it’s quite hard to say which block is next to which block.

The solution is to change the block style a bit, as done here:

With this tiny change, we’ll get results something like here:

It’s not perfect yet, but this small change alone solved some problems (especially for the topmost layer as in some cases “holes” were difficult to spot). It’s not complete yet, so see the next principle.

Isometric game development principle #4: In Isometric view, consider changing brightness of the tiles
If you need to pile several levels in one screen, you might want to consider using brightness

The previous picture still gives us headache on some locations, and one way to handle the issue is to change brightness of the tiles, depending on which level they are.

Now, this is much better. There are still some blocks that create visual oddness (see blocks in the very left corner, highest layer: one of them looks bit odd), but much of the problems were solved merely introducing change in darkness.

Code example:
I wrote a small isometric drawing “engine”, which is not perfect, but here you have it: (comes with .bmx file including code, 3 different cubes to test things, and .exe to run in case you are curious to see how it looks)

ZIP file including art etc.
isometric.zip (678kB)

TXT file, with just the code syntax:
isometriccode.txt (2kB)

Basically, this example produces image as you saw a few paragraphs earlier.

If you want more commented examples (although my variable naming is pretty ok), then check some of the resources I’m going to list right about now.

Here’s some resources:

Introduction to Isometric Engines (1999). While “bit” old, I found this article informative stepping stone into isometric worlds. In fact, I used mainly this article to do brief sample code on my own.

Isometric pixel art tutorial – This tutorial shows you how to draw a box. Yes, that’s correct. Isometric box. While this might sound bit silly, I found this article definitely a must-read for newbies (such as me) to understand how isometric worlds work.

Isometric view – This tutorial is part of several other tutorials (see menu in the left for some “Iso” topics). Similarly to previous pixel art article, this tutorial helps get idea on how isometric view works. Illustrated images helped me.

The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art (2004) – I received this article after reading any other articles (or before wrote any code) and I must say this article alone very well covers the aspects of isometric view. Most recommended.

Designing Isometric Game Environments (1996) – This article was pretty good, although I disliked chapter long links. If you can get through the visual “clutter” this article gives some fine points about isometric worlds.

Then two other resources:

GameDev forums: Isometric land – several topics about isometric stuff. Dig deeper if you want.

Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript (book, 2011) – I didn’t read this and have no idea how good this book is. Nevertheless, it seems to be almost the only book on isometric worlds and costs $15-20 so not too pricey to give it a test drive. If you do, feel free to tell how you liked it.

That’s it folks.

One last word: please notice that I’m like the newbies newbie when it comes to isometric handling. Use with caution.

Also, if you have some ideas/comments on obvious things I’ve missed, please feel free to share.

Thanks to @icosahedron, @apgamesdev, @triptych and @Borundin for helpful iso links

#1 – the art style
Just think about how genius it is. Just blocks! How difficult it is to model bunch of blocks, yet animate them. Super easy. And even if you don’t know how to animate, you can go to a site like FPS creator site, spend a few bucks to a model pack AND (this is important) export only model BONES and ANIMATIONS. Then in your own programming SDK, you can create cubes and attach the cubes to the animated bones.

And voila, you’ve just got animated box man to appear on your screen.

Don’t necessarily steal the idea of “world is made of blocks”, since you can have other shapes too, such as a terrain. Just ensure using blocky style in all the art, and it’ll be consistent.

It doesn’t matter whether you are doing an RPG, FPS, RTS or whatnot – the main idea is that you can steal this simple style and save humongous amount of gold in art assets.

#2 – Actually, that’s it
I see quite zero sense in trying to clone Minecraft. Terraria isn’t Minecraft clone, Terraria just happens to have digging and blocks, but it’s hugely different gaming experience. Cloning Minecraft would mean spending some years building a game where you have blocks that you can use to build anything. But who would buy it? Everybody and their mom already has Minecraft so it’s pretty pointless (unless you target different platforms, then it might have some sense) as there would be zero reason to buy your clone.

I feel that stealing the art style would make tons of sense for lots of indie developers. By using block style to build whatever game they are building, they would make a huge leap in terms of getting game ready faster.

You already doing this?

While possibly one certain element of roguelike games is fighting, leveling up and all that… one important part is also exploration. I’m wondering if there are roguelike games (dungeon crawlers or others) where the game is not so much focussed on combat?

It’s bit on the small side, so I can zoom a bit: (2x and 4x zoom)

Still not clear enuf? Here’s the 8x zoom:
(click to open in new window)

We’ll expect to have more detailed information around the end of January 2012.

This also means my card game is most definitely being released during the last quarter of 2011.

#1 – Scope
Indie game devs need to think about the scope of the project. I know all game projects start small, and they then have the danger of growing into huge gigantic several year taking projects. Watching the scope is important. Splitting the game into episodes, using procedural content, user generated content, not getting too attached to creating huge asset piles (artwise, graphicwise) all need to be considered. Scope is important. Too small, and game is too simple. Too much and it’ll becomes too big mess to handle.

#2 – Money
Money can fix many things. I wasn’t too thrilled about having budgets, but at later age I think it might be good idea to have some sense about what range you are willing to take. Is it 10 bucks, 100 bucks, 10 000 bucks or 100 000 bucks gives some rough idea what will be possible and what won’t be possible, saving you precious time when you need to consider different features.

Money can also be used to cover areas you are not good at, which in return might save you a lot of time.

As a sidenote: it’s perfectly okay to go with zero budget too. The worse the graphics, the greater the story when your game becomes the next hit…

#3 – Time
Very important. If you don’t have time to make games, then your chances of making games drop to zero. Here’s a post about 100 ways to be more productive. It’s from year 2008 and still pretty valid if I may say so.

#4 – Skill
You need to be skilled in something. I’ve always thought that being a skilled in programming is the most important part, as I believe programming is most work. With new and easier to use tools, I see that graphically talented folks have more opportunities to create fine games.

Besides these, a solid understanding of game design is a pretty good idea in case you plan to make the game any fun. Understanding some fundamentals just simply makes decision simpler, when you have some more understanding on why something is or isn’t fun. (Book of Lenses is a good starting point by the way).

#5 – Motivation
If you are not motivated to create your game, it shows. Motivation is hard thing to have. One simply gotta be willing to spend countless hours doing something, working in the dark. It’s persistance.

If the work you do is fun, no matter what is the final result, then you probably are in the right track on this.

#6 – Momentum
I’ve noticed that if I don’t work on my game for some time (let’s say 2 weeks, for example when having bit of summer holiday), it’s always harder to come back. When I eventually come back and continue, things are fine again. It’s just that keeping up the momentum is important. You don’t finish a marathon by sitting down every few hundred meters. You gotta keep pushing, keep going and keep the momentum going.

#7 – Twist
I like to believe that fine indie games also need something unique, something different. Some sort of twist that makes them different from what we’ve seen earlier. I don’t know what that might be, but if there’s something special in the game, it makes a good story. And who knows, maybe even a fun experience too.

#8 – Release
Second most important part of the puzzle (#9 being perhaps most important). By releasing your game, you’ve reached something truly important. Continuing from here gets easier. If you plan to do multiple releases, that’s fine (and recommended too).

By doing release (or releases) you make your dream come more true.

#9 – Polish
Perhaps the most important part of a successful indie game: polishing. It’s the hardest part: fixing nasty bugs, adding features, honing features, changing things, getting rid of some of the bad stuff, getting better art, getting better sounds, spending tons of hours into very many things…

… and then you really have something great in your hands. And perhaps others see it too.

If you have some items to add to this list, please feel free to comment the blog post.

His new game Avadon is now appearing at Steam store (priced close to 10 bucks) and he also sells the game through his own site (price close to 20 bucks).

This is quite shocking.

While Cliff has any time left from kicking some pirate sorry arse, he is advocating selling games through your own site (although he too sells his game through Steam).

Jeff and Cliff are like the god fathers of indie scene, and they’ve been doing this stuff for long time (and are successful, moneywise). If these chaps get their games to Steam, that is a pretty sure indication about where the industry is going.

Sure, there’s exceptions about indies who sell (millions) only through their own site while battling against evil corporations that try to steal all their money if you use certain words in your game (hint: words like “scrolls”, “elder”, “isles”, “hunted”, “arena”, “rogue”, “warrior” are danger area to use in your games… sigh), but the point is (getting bit sidetracked here) that portals (or at least one) are getting bigger. Small indie sites are getting even smaller.

And let’s admit it. When you can choose to buy a game through (1) some random indie gaming site or (2) through Steam, which one you choose?

Yeh, same here. I too buy pretty much all my games through Steam as well. It’s so handy.

What are you thinking about my thoughts here? Two indie oldtimers who have always sold mainly through their sites are now in Steam as well. Should we get worried?

Share your thoughts.

app game kit – from the makers of fps creator and other “build games easily” tools. If you’ve never done any games programming, this might very well be a nice option to check out.

impact js – html5 based system, which can be wrapped inside an iphone app (my buddy Tim will come here, comment this blog post and tell about his cool example app video, just watch this place), or you can easily play games directly through browser. If you know Javascript, this might be good way to go.

monkeycoder – from the makers of blitzbasic, blitz3d, bmax. Mark has created a slick thing that can do not only mobile games, but can cross-compile to almost any platform (when somebody codes more targets). If you know blitz basic stuff, this is good option. Monkey is pretty new, but evolving fast. Keep eye on it.

cocos2d – another pretty cool system to build mobile games. There’s quite plenty of material (including books) about using cocos2d and to me it feels it’s getting bigger.

iphone game kit – tool aimed for beginners. Even if you don’t want to start with iphone game kit, you might want to check out this system. It comes with a huge number of art assets to use in your products. (interestingly, uses cocos2d by the way)

unity – from beginners to more advanced users, Unity offers plenty of options for creating mobile (and other) games.

shiva – bit different to Unity and not so popular, but plenty of useful things that you possibly don’t want to miss, so go check it out as well.

By the way, here’s one blog post written over a year ago regarding mobile games thoughts. It’s a pretty good post to read (comments too).

What you think? Please vote.
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In case you haven’t heard, Mojang folks are trying to deal with possible lawsuit regarding their upcoming “Scrolls” game (Bethesda thinks that’s too similar name to their game: “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”), so Mojang challenged them to Quake 3 match instead of taking court action.

What “everybody else” is doing, doesn’t really matter for me.

But when I see something like this from the godfather of indie devs, then I might reconsider.

If Cliff does something, it’s good to take notes, and consider if you can lend some of his knowledge & experience.

I’m sure he won’t mind.

In case you don’t know who Cliff is, well, his GSB game has got over 100000 people playing it. The game costs about $20 to buy, so do the math.

I’ve been testing some Zynga games which take completely different path: in the game, I get informed that remind me about “pick up the daily reward, check them each day”.

I mentioned this same to my friend, not sure if he is considering implementing it.

Anyway, the point is that there’s these 2 totally different approaches:

• Punish if you don’t do what your are supposed to do (play or else we won’t let you play)
• Reward you if you play, and they reward you more for playing more

I don’t know which way you prefer, but I definitely like the latter option more.

I’ve been testing some Zynga games which take completely different path: in the game, I get informed that remind me about “pick up the daily reward, check them each day”.

I mentioned this same to my friend, not sure if he is considering implementing it.

Anyway, the point is that there’s these 2 totally different approaches:

• Punish if you don’t do what your are supposed to do (play or else we won’t let you play)
• Reward you if you play, and they reward you more for playing more

I don’t know which way you prefer, but I definitely like the latter option more.

Pack of coffee beans (and stuff) costs twice that. That makes home made coffee to cost like twenty times less or something. Depending how thick coffee you happen to drink.

Now, we could go lengthy way on arguing the taste of coffee in home and in coffee houses. I’ve tasted coffee in both places and I actually prefer home made ones. But some say otherwise.

Anycase.

Would a rational person go and buy a cup of coffee when he can have 20 cups at home for the same price?

Soon you’ll see plenty of comments rationalizing why it makes sense. We’ll get to see comments about quality, freshness, atmosphere, right blends et cetera.

And after you’ve seen those comments, stop for a moment and really think if those make it any more rational to purchase cup of coffee.

Then, use this information the next time you figure out pricing for your game (or in-game purchases, or anything).

The point is: no matter what you sell, there’s somebody who is ready to purchase it.

If somebody sells virtual coffee, somebody will buy it.

Was thinking of selling virtual coffee here to prove my point but then decided it might not be such a good idea, and not sure if it would be legal for Finnish folks, so not selling any virtual coffee here. Move along people.

Money is in the pocket of a customer
It doesn’t matter what you and I think is rational (or normal for that matter). What matters is what the potential customer thinks.

Let’s look things closely between free-to-play (F2P) and shareware* trials:

*by shareware here I mean games that provide you a demo to check out, and then you can buy full version.

Price to get started:
F2P: free!
Shareware: free! (yes, the full game costs, but you can start to play free)

Cost of full gaming experience:
F2P: 0 to 50+ and more bucks (as long as you keep buying virtual items and stuff, there’s endless amount to pay)

Shareware: 1 to 50 and more bucks (many indie games fall in the 5-20 range, but on the other hand, very many games offer add-ons and stuff like that which in a way is quite similar to “virtual items” that allow you to “explore more stuff”)

Time or feature limitations:
(Does the game have limitation like 60 minutes or something that you can play)

F2P: yes (for example, WoW is said to be “free” to play, and it has level cap which effectively gives you certain time limit… at least you cannot progress after playing the game so much (10 hours or so) that there’s nothing more to gain)

Shareware: yes (Big Fish Games have “try 60 minutes for free and buy after” on all their games, many other games have limited features)

So far, these models actually are somewhat similar. I guess it’s much more typical for F2P games to let people buy “virtual goods” (in F2P), but in my opinion “buying new levels” (expansion pack of a shareware game) is quite close to the same idea. After all the point is that player gets more stuff to use and try.

Size of transaction
Virtual goods can cost like 99 cents or $5 or even $500 or whatever in F2P worlds. Indie games can have full game for like $10 and then $5 add-on contents. In F2P games, players make several more smaller purchases in longer period of time.

In shareware model you see few (possibly) bigger purchases.

So… now what?
From my own experience, there’s certain games that I buy no matter what they cost. There’s indie games that I buy for ten bucks. And I’ve even spent some money on in-game purchases (not that many really).

What is interesting that buying something in game (that costs like a buck or two) doesn’t require much thinking. Essentially, spending 2 bucks on some nice thing feels pretty close to “free” in my mind. Spending $50 for a game is something I stop to think for a second.

In a way, F2P model sounds like a “easy tiny payments scattered over a period of time” (bit like how credit cards work).

I don’t know how far F2P model will go, but I feel that if me and you aren’t prepared and designed our games totally ignoring F2P then we have a serious problem. It’s simply something we gotta take into consideration when figuring out how to price our games.

Then I thought I’d copy the link to my browser and assumed there was “h” missing (“ttp://” instead of “http://”) and tried to copy that link to my browser.

Alas, there was some mysterious characters in the URL that I ended up seeing this:

It was odd that it was 400 error, not 404 error. Since 404 is usually “not found”. But anyway.

I actually don’t mind this, but if somebody can help me a bit on getting this invite thing to work… hmm. Actually. Maybe I just login to google mail and see if there’s something about this. Hang on a minute.

(minute passes)

…okay, nothing there either.

I wonder if Google is playing Apple style “we’ve sold out” game here trying limiting my access (wonder how works for viral network systems though) or if my techy skills just suck. Anyways, I’d like to check this thing out. Folks, please help me out!

Tip for web folks: instead of ranting, it might be worth asking yourself “what kind of first impression my product gives?”

I don’t want government to control games, but I do like that there’s laws & regulations that require games sellers to give parents information about the game. This way parents have something to base their decisions.

(Of course kids will still get their hands on unsuitable games, no matter what governments and parents try. Kids are fun that way.)

I’m quite pleased how I’ve managed to reduce the impact of luck in this new version. I call it Big Revision 2, since the gameplay has gone through series of iterations. The Big Revision number uno was too self-playing where you couldn’t affect the outcome enough. In the new version, you have more options on managing resource at your disposal. Also, I’ve tried to deepen the part that was good in the version 1: the events. Now you need to consider current resources and the big picture when making decision on how to proceed.

The juicy part of the game is secret teams. For example, in a 3 player game, there’s one player who is “infected” – carrying a deadly virus, without others knowing it. The non-infected humans need to figure out who the “traitor” is and eliminate him.

The new version should give: more choices, more possibilities to take risks, and more resource management. All which tie into the one goal: finding out who the traitor is (since traitor player also now has more chances to bluff and play bad event cards and such).

My current plan looks like this:
1) Get Big Ver 2 home and playtest, playtest, playtest
2) Update the game rules to polish & make the game really fun for 1 to 4 players. Prepare the final Big Ver 3.
3) After offline testing, bring polished Big Ver 3 online and approach card game publisher.

Reporting more when I get Big Ver 2 bit shinier decks to test.

It’s quite interesting how mind works on estimating things. I was certain that 5th revision would be final, but then I made some corrections (like changed text “event” to “EVENT”, or changed card values) and went through cards again… more changes needed. Now I have about 8th revision available, and now I feel that it’s ready. Since I did “one more change”, I will check the assets once more and see if there’s something to fix.

“90% done” or “almost finished”… might as well say “under construction”.

Planning to release something “tomorrow”?

Might be tricky.

I could go on more about how I “sealed” the ground, killed weeds, got soil and stuff but since everybody else than me, myself and I would find that terribly boring I shall approach the main reason why I’m writing about this blog post.

The point is the reward. Casual games design (very simplistically put) tells you to reward the player constantly, often and all the time. That’s probably fine, but all gaming experiences are not made equal. There was challenges in my strawberry planting operation (which strawberry brand to use? Does it matter which way is up on root mat? How much water those plants need? Is strawberry plant even the right word to use in blog posting?).

I couldn’t just click stuff to gain more things to click (I’m exaggerating here, waiting for comments to arrive how “in game X you need to do a lot more”). It’s not only casual games, also hardcore games have – possibly boring – grinding stuff in them. Many games do.

Anyway, back to my strawberry land.

I managed to overcome all those challenges, and was rewarded (the “finish each sub-mission” was the reward in itself). I took healthy looking brand (I had read earlier that “there must be at least 3 healthy leaves” which I used as the guideline when picking it), flipped coin to decide on root mat, watered so that the soil would be wet, and just decided to go with the words “strawberry plant” realizing that for making a point, that word is irrelevant. And who knows, maybe I guessed right.

But these rewards didn’t happen with one mouse click. No, I actually had to schedule things (we have a 1+ year old girl in the house, and she is in charge as every parent would know), I had to actually use a shovel (and you don’t combine it by clicking wood + rock, m’kay?) and actually dig some ground (it requires bit more work than mouse clicks) and more.

Now, this might sound like I’ve ever done anything real work ever in my life. I have no comments on that, but the main reason why I find this very interesting is that this is the first time I own a piece of land that’s mine to take care of, and I own the stuff I’m planting.

When I compare 2 “farming” operations:
1) Growing strawberries in Farmville
2) Growing strawberries in our backyard

Number 2 is like infinitely more rewarding to me. There’s challenges, but that makes rewards much more sweet.

When huge number of games are going to the “everything is rewarded” direction, that gives room for totally different gaming experiences & niches. There’s people who enjoy Meat Boy – insanely difficult, insanely fun (for some).

Click + reward works for some audience, and we gotta pick our own audience.

It’s okay to do games differently.

I compiled bunch of card texts and arts together (using my Duckduck program, which is a program for creating deck art), and here’s few card samples:

Blood sample card
This card determines if there’s infected blood running through your veins… You keep this card secret, so nobody else knows in which of the 2 teams you belong. Each player will receive a card stating either “clean” or “infected”.

Items
Items have gone through a big change. Essentially, I combined items and action cards into one deck (which is now called “Items”). Items are used to overcome challenges, counter nasty events and to progress on winning the game.

Event
Event cards give players challenges which they need to overcome. A number in the top left part of the card tells something about the difficulty of the event, and then there’s always a special power on events which might trigger when they are played.

Each card won’t have unique art (at least not in this point of project), only each deck will have unique art.

All these card art are from the Big Revision II (which consists of huge amount of smaller revisions). I will go through (at least) once more all the cards and then pretty soon get things shipped to my door (which will take 2-3 weeks or so).

The current version is much simpler to play, less random, and new version aims to offer several interesting decisions (events for example are very different from earlier version, and now the item have value number which need to be considered too when playing cards). Rules are very simple to learn and the game is fast to play.

I enter sleep mode now and get back to this tomorrow.

I was about to watch a trailer of a game. Trailer, that’s an ad.

But before they show me the ad (trailer), they are showing me ad of some movie (and the ad is very trailer like).

That’s somewhat strange.

Then many people said “why I didn’t think of that” or “I could have done that!” (I know I did, although I did try focus on “what was it in this project that made it successful? What can I learn” rather than just focus on “how gameplay works”).

Then some months passes. Developers of Terraria took Minecraft ideas, added their own ones (aka polished to create a different gameplay experience) and now the game has generated over 2 million sales already.

And again people are saying “how they got lucky because of Steam” and “I could have done that!”, or saying “why they didn’t think that” (or some people: “I was thinking that, but was too busy” – this time this phrase came closest to my mind. Again I try to explore this phenomenon and see what I can learn).

Now somebody will most likely take Terraria ideas (Notch, Minecraft creator, is already taking notes on what to steal), use some different gameplay mechanism, and becomes a millionaire.

And then again people are saying “I could have done that!”

What were you thinking when you heard about Minecraft success, and then later about Terraria success?

What are you thinking now?

My thoughts are: “These games are amazing indie development project. I now focus on my card game & polish it so that it becomes the game I dreamt about few years ago. Only by creating fun games I get experience to create fun games. Donuts are the fruits of labor. What can I learn from these?”

Here’s why:

• PS3 is a blu-ray player: I don’t want additional bluray player and Xbox. I want to have as few devices in my living room as possible.
• There was one day when I had no 3D player, but it changed in one night. For free. Last year, Sony decided that they want to give me a 3D player and made software update which made my PS3 to magically allow playing of 3D stuff. That is like awesome customer service, me likes very much.
• My bro has PS3: we can share our games & play online too. That wouldn’t happen if one of us got Xbox or something else.
• My PS3 has bluetooth: headset, controllers. This is amazingly great feature since I don’t want any hassle. Heck, I can go to kitchen and keep talking or controlling my precious thingy.
• Xbox services got hacked last time about month ago and apparently in year 2007 there was a hack which kept service doors closed.

The point is, that I like my PS3 device and I’m not letting other people decide my actions on this.

If one day I’d want to switch console, here’s some reasons why I might consider getting Xbox 360:

• Kinect & possible Kinect indie game development (just think about the possibilities of creating a game where you must move like a zombie… slowly and unsteadily…)
• Xbox development possibilities: Microsoft has a solid foundation for making games for Xbox console, Playstation has close to zero opportunities for Joe Indie to try do PS development.

When making decisions, sometimes I like to think where I’m heading rather than what I’m running away from.

Well, first I must say that I don’t really care if 100 million or 7 billion or whatever amount was stolen, what I care about whether my stuff was stolen (pirates could argue that it wasn’t stealing, since data was copied and now exists in several places).

Anyway.

Let’s be honest, you too care only about your stuff and I care about my stuff. Otherwise we’d not be blogging and ranting here but planting seeds in poorer countries helping kids to get food.

Now, I do care about my account. I did renew my credit card, but other than that it’s not so important to me if 100 million users lost their stuff. Of course it feels bad, but you and me don’t really care. What we do care on the other hand is ranting about Sony.

And there’s one thing that I dislike in their actions. Blatant lying.

For example, earlier they said that “now your stuff is safe” and “hey, we are back online now!” And few hours pass and some dude finds out that there’s an URL exploit that you can use to change anyone’s password if you just know their email and birthdate (which were stolen in the first attack).

I don’t know what security company they hired, but if it takes them 1 month to “secure things” and few hours for hackers to exploit the system, then something tells me that rather than blaming “criminal activity” Sony should like hire some of these folks who hacked them. After all, those hackers seem to be in pretty good figuring out how Sony’s network systems are working.

But nah, instead they say that “all is fine, here have a cookie (2 games – choose from list of about 5 games from this decade – for free)”.

This situation is bit different, but attitude is bit same when Steve Jobs said that there’s “no antennagate” and “here, have a cookie (this free cover fixes the antennagate, which doesn’t exist)”. It just makes my programmer mind to get division by zero error.

That’s why I have mixed feelings. First of all: I think Sony PS3 is a superior gaming machine, and me and my bro just love it. The Apple products iPod touch and iPad are great devices.

What I don’t like is that if leaders don’t admit that they did shitty things, but rather that they try to praise their systems and stuff. I know your systems are great already – hey, that’s why I keep buying them – but I would want to see bit more respectful attitude.

Back to Sony case.

I got email or read press release by Sony where it was stated “we thank you for your patience and understand how much you want to continue using Sony products” and continuing “it took a long time, but we were quicker to fix things than anyone else would have”.

To be honest, I don’t like you sending me email saying what I want to do.

I also don’t care if you handled this thing faster than anyone would have been, especially since earlier I read some rumours that you were warned about this hack and did nothing to prevent it.

Invisible rings worked pretty fine when there was just one Sauron’s eye watching us, but now we have Twitter and Facebook and everything. News travel faster than ever in the history of mankind. Trying to hide the truth just doesn’t work.

If some indie would find out that anything like this is happening in their system, they would probably run naked – figuratively speaking – around the issue, being 100% transparent about the issue.

If Sony folks would have just said “Sorry folks. We made error. Here’s how we try make things right”, then I’d have much higher respect on the people behind the products.

Oh well, the good news are that there’s chances that I get Dead Nation for free. (At least it was in the cookie list in US region). When do I get my cookie?

I always test keyboards before purchase, but not this time. I tried to find the same exact model, but it wasn’t available so I checked another Logitech keyboard model. I looked at the box and thought that “this looks pretty similar, I just take this one” alas it wasn’t. The keys were closer to each other and positioned “wrong”. And by wrong I mean: not 100% same way as in my earlier keyboard. Typing was way too different and made me curse my purchase.

After 27 seconds of serious testing I concluded that I switch back to old keyboard, and here I am, typing happily.

Next time, I’ll test the keyboard.

When I was hosting Hero Quest sessions, it was my goal to “kill the heroes” (something like that said in the rulebook I think) but actually, I think I never played according to meet that goal. My goal was different.

My goal was to [i]provide a challenging (where players felt they could get killed), but something that players can barely beat[/i]. When I could provide such gaming experience, I knew I did a great job.

Dungeon master (or storyteller) is there to kill the chaps if they do really stupid stuff, but biggest factor was in noticing every player’s playing style (some folks preferred combat, some wanted puzzles/exploring, some liked to negotiate) and meet those challenges.

Funny that when computer “balances the game”, it’s sometimes considered cheating or stupid (and players start exploiting the AI – such as playing worse to get past really difficult zones)… but when human person (the dungeon master) does balancing, it’s perfectly okay.

Or do you really think that your own dungeon master never secretly helped your heroes, thinking: “oh shit, heroes are badly wounded already and there’s that ogre behind the corner… maybe I make it a dead ogre instead and let them get the treasure now.

Close to 40% of this year is finished.

I think this quite accurately reflects what happened last year (became a daddy meant I needed to re-think everything and especially how I spend my time). It also reflects that list of my goals for year 2010 was pretty short.

I rate these:
- Dead Wake: 3 out of 5 stars (decent).
- Daddy project: 6 out of 5 stars (memory overflow error aka greatness!)

Dead Wake was my biggest financial investment in gaming (in a decade I’ve been involved in this stuff) and it didn’t turn out so good as I planned, although there’s elements in the game I’m truly happy about (building barricades, one-liners, bi-monthly releases, PC Gamer coverage, time I managed to arrange in development, gathering mailing list, earlier community, plans for Dead Wake 2).

Daddy project (I now have wonderful 1 year old girl) on the other hand has been amazing. It has been by far the most time & energy consuming project I’ve ever been involved, but seeing how the path finding, rewards system, casual play, controls and everything come together… easily makes it feel that the more effort I give, the more I get.

Last year and kid also changed my attitude on new year resolutions. Instead of coming up things that “I will do”, I made a big list of what “I won’t do”. So far that list is been working pretty well and in a way while I have had less time to do gaming project, I’ve been more productive with the time I have been able to use.

This years goal: get Infected card game out (both physical and digital versions).

And many, many more.

What would you add on this list?

Anyways.

It works on several platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, and Mobile)

And it works when offline.

And it’s free: 2GB free space right away.

And one gets more free space when you invite other folks, so… get Dropbox (and help get me precious +250 MB more free space if you join through this link and install it on your machine, which would be greatly appreciated thanks you very much)

P.S. In fact, if you join through my link, you might get extra +250MB space as well. (At least one guy just reported receiving this). Pretty sweet!

User information got to the hands of hackers. Well, that’s life 2.0. If you want have luxury gadgets that offer online services and you provide your data, then chances are at some point somebody gets them. It’s not that big deal, in Finland everybody’s street address can be asked anyway. Things happen. Calm down.

Credit card info potentially in the hands of hackers? Well, first of all… why you gave credit card info (or didn’t remove it after purchase)? Nobody forced you to do that. When shoppes store your credit card info, and when shoppes have data online, then there’s a danger that your CC info goes on the hands of hackers. I’m very aware of the fact that it’s convenient to let stores have my credit card data. I let them have the info. Yes, not the safest plan, but then I’m ready to buy few bucks in case I need to renew the card in case something bad happens.

In this case, I ordered myself a new credit card (just in case) and it arrives soon and things will be fine again in the Jussoland. And, even if somebody got my old CC info and bought something before bank closed my card, it’s the credit card company that will handle any fraud purchases. Not me. I’m saved. And now I’m double saved when new card arrives.

So… yes, PSN network has been down for a week or whatever. And yes, they probably could have informed earlier (although it should ring a bell when “service where you gave your credit card info got hacked”, even if nobody tells you anything) but… come on. Nothing really serious really happened here.

Sit down. Enjoy a pint (of alcohol free beer if you must) and enjoy sunshine.

Or like Douglas Adams would put it: Don’t Panic.

• Player must be able to win (or end) the game

But now I’m getting bit into a trouble with this definition.

I’m not trying define game as is, I’m just trying to find the difference between “games” and “sandbox games/toys”. That’s why I’m leaving away things like “being in control”, and “set of rules” et cetera, and not bringing movies or other stuff here to compare. I’m now comparing two games: Minecraft and NHL ’11.

Minecraft is said to be a sandbox game since you get to do funky stuff in it, can die, and there’s tons of dirt to dig… and so on. Sandbox game would fit pretty well into that definition.

NHL ’11, now, that’s not a sandbox game, right? Playing an ice hockey game, that must be a “real game”. Wrong. There’s no ending in NHL ’11 if you think about it a bit. For example, there’s a career mode where you can level up your character for quite a long time. There’s Stanley Cup and whatnot to win. You can win matches, and can win tons of trophies and while you cannot dig your own tunnel, you can play online matches and adjust your character quite a lot.

In fact, you can win one battle (a match), but you cannot win the game. There’s no ending.

So… we could agree that one match in NHL ’11 that certainly is a game. Rules, time period and definite ending. But then what? You get another game. And another. And another. And another. All these matches can earns you points which you can spend to get better to earn better shovels I mean, players in your team.

In a very broad way of thinking (not talking about game mechanisms), NHL ’11 isn’t so different to minecraft. I’m pretty sure that you cannot win NHL ’11 (if you can, then they certainly aren’t making good effort in showing my progress). There’s no ending. You just keep on playing more and more.

This reminds me about Zombie Panic mod for half life 2. Excellent game, except of course it’s not a game since you cannot “win” the game. Sure, you can win one round but then what? You just keep going.

So, one could say that Minecraft is not a game and NHL ’11 is… but on what basis?

I guess end result is: who cares? If it’s fun, does it even matter?

I’m looking at a press service …

GamesPress makes it available to even more news outlets but for free and it is up to them to pick up on it or not,

GamesPress is fine. It’s also one (very important though) where gamerelease sends its message.

why choose your service where I myself have not even heard of half the sites it gets sent to?

You might be referring to the email list. The listed sites are picked from subscriber domains, which are sometimes blurry. For example, there are journalists who use gmail account as their main account. So, the news won’t reach gmail department, but guys who have those emails.

Also, there’s now the twitter “followers” list for @gamerelease which lists some more subscribers.

The more active subscribers there are the better.

Is there a guarantee they will pick it up? Cause as an indie the budget for this stuff is very small and you want max exposure for every cent

No.

How good stories you can create is up to you, and that is also the key factor determining whether your news is going to be picked up. Alongside with timing and other factors. For example, I sent press release about my Dead Wake game which got its way to PC Gamer since these folks had just been preparing a special “zombie coverage” in their magazine. Timing was right, news was worthy of covering and it got in.

Had I sent it a month later (or if I had not have newsworthy zombie story to tell), I think chances of coverage would have been slimmer.

All email subscribers have working email address (receivers with bounced emails are deleted from the list). RSS subscribers I don’t have control over, and now there’s more new subscribers through the game release twitter account.

does it make sense as an iOS developer to press release to your sites?

My personal opinion is that platform is irrelevant, the story is what counts.

If you feel that putting couple of hundred (or something) to promote game feels much, then I really think you shouldn’t subscribe. If on the other hand you feel that investing the money can save some of your time from hunting down press members then it might be worth considering to join.

But like I said, I feel that the story is more important than the technology.

And then some links:

• gamerelease.net
• twitter / @gamerelease
• Buy ($150 one time)
• Buy ($180 total, paid $15 monthly)

TERMS & CONDITIONS: Please notice that gamerelease PR system is meant for indies promoting their own games.

If you have any other questions, throw ‘em here.

And to have something to compare, here’s the earlier poll:

And at some point I noticed something cool. I noticed a language file! There it was. Staring right at me under the game folder.

It didn’t take me long to ignite my game developer mode and off to modding I headed. I started localizing the game to Finnish. Sometimes it was slightly difficult, since the language file supported only ascii characters, and Finnish has few extra characters (Ääää and Ööö), but I did manage to avoid the blows pretty well. I Didn’t use “A” instead of “Ä”, but rather tried to use other Finnish words instead and got language file translated.

When I launched the game, and saw my version appear there… it was a great feeling.

Instead of translating your game, maybe provide players tools to make their own translations?

What sort of strange magic are you doing, in order to get critical hits or something? Ever stopped wondering why?

I then got rid of one card, ending with just 3 different:

In my playtesting, I first had players to hold 5 cards per player, and encounters were handled the following way:

• Draw 2 cards
• Show encounter
• Each player now places 0-5 action cards (facedown) to a result pile
• 2 random action cards are added from the deck to the result pile.
• After each player has placed cards, shuffle the result pile and show one card: that determines success or failure.

This lead to the fact that there was no point ever using failure or problems cards, since you could use only success cards and then wait for more success cards to come.

It hit to me that by changing this mechanism, there would be more interesting decision to be made. I changed the system so that each player gains 6 cards, and must use exactly 2 per turn.

This way, 1st encounter can be somewhat easy (since you have 6 cards to choose from), second encounter bit more difficult (now you have only 4 cards to choose) and 3rd one nastiest – since you must use the 2 cards that remained in your hands.

But now you could see what the encounter has to offer, and then plan your move: will you use your success cards right away to gain resources, or perhaps use failure cards instead since the failing condition on current card isn’t that bad?

Action cards
The action cards are the most used cards. They are played to overcome encounters and gain resources. Each action card might have a special condition that will give another dimension on thinking when to use the card.

Characters
Currently, there’s 6 different characters in the game. Each with their own special abilities and leadership skills.

Encounters
Then we have the encounters, pretty much written/inspired by you. There’s about 40 different encounters, with various conditions on each card.

Resources
Currently 4 different: survivors need to gather enough resources to make a successful escape. Resources can also be used to help survivors in the game.

Special cards: day/night, leader
Day/night varies in the game and encounters are harder to beat during nights. Leader card determines who is currently taking lead and making major decision on how the group proceeds forward.

Last we have the team cards (the blood samples)
There might be one character who is carrying a deadly infection which attracts other infected creatures. The players secretly know their team. Those with clean blood samples must figure out who is the infected and the infected must try remain hidden and secretly sabotage the group.

Pardon me for the crappy picture quality, I just took some hi-res shots when my photo camera and battery died before I managed to import the pictures to my machine – now need to recharge. This picture was taken with my iTakeCrappyShotsOtherwisePerfectDevicePod Touch.

On the left (barely visible, brown cards: reading “resource, petrol”) are the resource cards. The purpose of the game is to gather enough resources to make an escape. Resources can also be used to overcome tough challenges (but then resource is lost).

Next to resource cards are the Encounter cards (bit of red blood on these cards, yaiks). Players need to overcome these to gain resources. In case of failure, Encounter cards are discarded from the encounter deck. Players will lose if encounter pile is exhausted (and new encounter would need to be drawn), so the encounter has many purposes.

Then there’s the Action cards, which come in 3 different types: success, failure, problems. These are used in order to beat Encounters and are most used cards in the game. Most of the action cards have special conditions on them, which give little bit of pondering on when to use them.

On the right are the character cards. Currently there’s bunch of characters, each with their own special skills and abilities.

Outside the picture there’s also few special cards: day/night card, leader card (acts also as the turn marker) and team cards (which determine your side)

Last night I played solo (simulated 2 player co-op version) and I was bit afraid how the playing feels when I actually have the “real” (not just cards taken from other games or post-it notes scribblings) physical version with actual card texts and for the first “real” version, I must say that I have positive feelings about this game.

If you want to keep in touch with indie news, you might want to start following this service. Also, if you want to directly contact some (mainly indie) game news sites, check the gamerelease’s “following” list. It’s my intention to (occasionally) add there gaming news sites that you can go through on your own.

Also, if you have a gaming site that reviews games (especially indie games) comment here or tweet @gamerelease via twitter or make a comment here and I can consider adding you to that service’s follow list.

Next easy step for you: consider following @gamerelease and if possible, tweet your followers too.

(Not exact quote though)

That’s what buddy of mine told me many many years ago. And this is just great piece of advice that helps in making everyday decisions in coding. I was thinking of adding something to “init” function today and was bothering if I make it “quickly”, but then instead of making it quickly I cleaned the codebase a bit. Already feeling great about this small thing.

You can replace first “thing*” with “method”, “function”, “class”, “module” depending on what you are currently doing.

I went to shoppe and got GeForce 450 GTS (1 gig) which cost 129 euros. Some minutes ago I plugged it in & installed new drivers.

Now vertical stripes on the screen are gone, and just received info that my cards are shipped. So, all is good in the kingdom once again.

The platform for the game is 2 folded: physical version (about 2-3 decks of cards) and online version (through my protohut system where the game can be played in browser). So no, this isn’t your typical PC game. The online version has no rules… since I only provide cards and table. It’s up to the players to check the rules and play the game nicely. Just like having a real board gaming session (I’ve tested playing Battle Lines, Lotr: Confrontation and both worked excellently through the online system).

I have written a brief rulebook for the game. Just 7 pages at the time of writing this blog post, although more will come when I get some pictures there… and when I mention credits for all you guys who helped me to get encounters in the game. I planned doing some videos to show how the game is played, but naturally this won’t happen until I get some serious feedback after tests.

Here’s few bits and pieces from the about 100 different card there is in the game. First we have Alan the captain. Each character (currently 6) has different unique skills and also different leadership skills which they can use when they are leading the group.

And here we have one example of a resource that survivors try to gather during the game in order to make a successful escape.

For art, I’ve used Dreamstime, my own mind and Gimps “old photo decor + change of darkness” filter to provide (hopefully) consistent look for cards.

Even though I know that most likely every single card out of 100 I ordered will get changes, I wanted to get my hands on those cards and physical version is so real that it’s great to make it happen.

Last couple of months have been heavy design work for me, and it’s good to get into this level. Next in the todo list: testing and heavy balancing.

Mike and Matt talk about anti-social games (some inspiration came from this blog post I presume).

Even though the sums I’ve given have been small, together with other backers they make decent sums. It gives me a pretty good feeling knowing that I’m contributing to the scene in this way too.

Here’s some of my tips for getting funding:

• Person/story behind the project is more important than the project: We all have cool game ideas and everybody knows *their* game idea is the best one. Trying to convince others to support your cool game idea is tough… unless you find a good angle. Check the projects I’ve backed. Mojang’s story is amazing and they want to share their success story. Saving Game Tunnel (“the old famous indie site wants to raise from the grave”) makes a catchy story. If you are interesting person, or have interesting story to tell… then share it. The product in itself is not that interesting.
• Provide enough of options to choose from: You can have $10 and $100 and even $10 000 options (and everything between… and beyond) and this gives possibility for people to choose how much they want to donate. On each level, give something more. Make the offers better and better on each level.
• Give physical stuff: if your game can offer something physical then consider arranging giving it. It can be a physical copy of a magazine or creeper toy… whatever it is, consider giving one to people who select higher levels of funding.
• Give credit & thanks: consider giving credits or putting people’s names in the finished product. My name will be on that Mojang story movie (yippee!) and it’s just great.
• Give advertising: If you have a website, consider giving advertising for people who support. Advertising can be anything from “thank you blog post for all people” to “banner ads” or “reviews about your product” and so on. In the indie scene, indies look opportunities to get more publicity and if you can help them, they just might take the bait.

Bonus tip: “consider the payment method”
There are several places that offer funding system for your products and consider the different options before choosing one to go with. Here’s two funding places:

• Kickstarter (accepts Amazon only, they take 5% of the funds raised – if 100% funded)
• 8 bit funding (accepts Paypal, they take 5% of the funds received after paypal charge, if at least 50% funded)

Please notice that I have used Kickstarter just twice and haven’t yet received my stuff (since projects aren’t completed yet), so I don’t know how trustworthy or reliable these systems are. People seem to use them, so I’ve taken the chance. When it comes to money, it’s up to you to check this.

Also, notice that since 8 bit funding accepts Paypal, for some people (such as me) it might be more likely to donate money from my Paypal account rather than my credit card (maybe that’s just me).

Here’s a very simplified chart about multiplayer games (not about social games):

NHL ’93, which me and my bro played same time, in the same room (place). It is an offline simultaneously played multiplayer game.

NHL ’11 can be an online multiplayer game, played same time (among many other things). My bro is sitting in his home, me on my home and we both play the match (and I win of course). Different location (or “place”) and “same time”. If he goes away, playing stops.

Farmville player are located in different places, and play on different times. I’m simplifying this a “bit” I know. I cannot play NHL ’11 with my bro unless we play it same time. But I could play* Farmville with my bro, even though we’d play it in different times. This gives Farmville the aspect of being an online multiplayer game, played in different time

*maybe in some parallel universe where gravity has been turned upside down and people born 92 years old, getting younger from there on.

World of Warcraft can be played online with my bro simultaneously, but we can also choose to play it on different times and there are things that we can do to interact (I think we can collect resources on our own time and then later exchange them with each other or something like that I think). WoW can be viewed as online multiplayer game that can be played both same and different time.

There’s also the black spot, which I don’t know if it’s harvested, but at least to me this is one way to look at multiplayer games and also get some thoughts about what social games can be.

And I know, I wouldn’t pass academic argument, but for the sake of not going too deep into things… just let’s say that’s a pretty okay way to view differences.

But that’s not enough…
But social aspects in games are more than just “time” and “place”. I think there is huge amounts of things to learn from social games. I could imagine very many single player (resource gathering) games that could all benefit from many mechanics social games have to offer.

Platform is irrelevant.

Let’s say there’s a deer hunting game that you play solo (offline, single-player experience). It might be fun to be able to trade weapons with buddies, check their rankings against your own ranking, perhaps even assign them “jobs” where you say that “I’d need deer horns, can you get me some”. And number of other things. All these could help make the single player experience more social.

I know I made huge simplifications in this blog post, and if you want some good stuff, check out Raph Koster’s blog: see GDCOnline: Social Mechanics talk (2010) and GDC11: slides for Social Mechanics talk. These one go much deeper into multiplayer mechanisms… and what multiplayer even is.

Anti-social games
This is where I started thinking why “social games” definition is so blurry. Sometimes a way to define things is to look from opposite direction. For example, the opposite of “online” multiplayer could be “non-online” aka “offline” multiplayer. And opposite side of “multiplayer” could be “non-multiplayer” aka “single player”.

After all, if your game isn’t social, is it then “non-social” or “anti-social”? I doubt it. Humans are social animals (or beasts) and share their findings. There are social elements in games and different games take advantage of them differently.

It’s quite useless to classify “social games” as evil, rather I think we all could take a good look at what they really are and how they work… and see if there’s some good stuff to be used *cough* in real games.

Please notice: you might not want to take so seriously the last words in that previous line.

That’s what I think about social games.

Next blog post coming soon: definition of anti-social games.

Monkey is a brand spanking new programming language that allows you to create apps on multiple platforms with the greatest of ease.

Monkey works by translating Monkey code to one of a different number of languages at compile time – including C++, C#, Java, Javascript and Actionscript.

Monkey games can then be run on potentially hundreds of different devices – including mobile phones, tablets, desktop computers and even videogame consoles.

I coded my dwarf zombies something 1-week game using Bmax and I’m testing the Monkey demo and porting my code to monkey code (just for the sake of testing how it goes)… which then helps me port the game to HTML5… and at least in theory to XNA and to iPod (now I can justify the need to buy Xbox 360 and a Mac, *cough*)

Anyways. If you want 2D development (I suppose at some point in the distant future somebody might do 3D too, but for now… it’s 2D). If you want it to be super cross-platform… then check it out. I’m checking it out this week or so.

I’m addicted to sports games, like you (NHL11), and wanted to know what goes on behind the scenes to create such realistic graphics.

Do you know how the developers go about actually creating these games? Do they hook up individual athletes to a system that creates the code? What about non-marquee named athletes; how do they get the movements just right?

If you can direct me to a website or blog or anything that could help me, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Even though I’ve said that “everything except NHL series is just hype/trends that die away” and even though I’ve been playing those games since ’93 (*cough*) I hardly consider myself addicted. (After all, I didn’t play those 2001-2009, since ’95 emulation version was much better)

Now with that being sorted out, I’d like to say that:

• Graphicswise I could imagine indie devs being able to simply do different skating, shooting, passing (etc.) animations. There’s talented artists who can handle them, so it doesn’t get any more difficult.
• Similarly there’s physics libs and engines (Shiva, Unity, Leadwerks come to my mind at first) can help create stunning systems.

Technically, I believe it is possible for indies to create a such hockey game that it could somehow compete with the big studios. How much money there is to be used of course affects how minecrafty players you’ll see.

The bigger issue – in my opinion – is getting licenses. It’s quite far fetched to get real NHL player names & faces in the game. And that’s where indies need to be creative.

Creative as in what one small Finnish studio has done. They created a floorball league game. To get idea about the quality, check this demo video:

These guys managed to snatch the licenses for player names both in Finland and – I think – also in Sweden. The reason is that floorball isn’t not a such big sports as for example football (compare number of hockey games: 100+ and floorball games: about 1) and from what I heard (from a gaming magazine – might be wrong) is that the league guys wanted to support that these kind of games gets done which might help make the sports also more popular.

If you have any other opinions, please feel free to share.

I guess there’s all sort of needs that wait to be filled.

I mean… maybe it’s good to actually try the game.

And no, I don’t intend to play the game. Just create a chap and kill some rats and get a bit of idea what’s there. Seeing things on my very own orc eyes.

I think develop interview with Markus has some seeds closer to the truth.

Here’s some reasons that – in my opinion – didn’t make Minecraft so successful:

• Game features
• Technology
• Mechanics
• Being alpha version (see also above – it was the “telling that it’s alpha…”)

Sure. Games need features, accessible technology and good use of game mechanics, but I think those aren’t the things that really caused success (alone).

I didn’t buy Minecraft for the reason that I heard that it was good. I bought it because I was interested to know what is this indie game that had sold worth half a million euros (or whatever the number was back then). Sure, I liked to dig few days but then it became bit boring and everybody else was building space crafts and Sauron’s eyes while I had a floating wooden bridge (pretty nice though).

Here’s some reasons that – in my humble opinion – do matter:

• Stories, stories, stories: everything around Minecraft is about “telling stories”. I never heard anyone giving hype to the “features” but talking about “the stuff somebody did/recorded” or “how Markus is genius when he does this and that”
• “Paypal froze my funds” story
• The “people are buying the game so fast our servers are jammed” stories
• Proven track record of sales (even before the “Paypal froze my funds story”)
• Showing (successful) sales numbers: “Here’s how many have bought the game, and more people are buying it”
• Perception in one’s mind: “What is this game everybody is talking about? Since all those people love it, I must buy it too.”
• Telling story about “just alpha, and sells gazillions”
• Success that creates more success.

And even more important:

• Markus left his day job. He sort of “gambled with his life”. Took a risk.
• Markus worked hard and was dedicated to make things happen. He had enough experience about games (Minecraft isn’t his first game) and spirit to visualize what might happen. In his words “I always knew I could make a living from games” (Well, he couldn’t visualize the 12-15 million EUR sales)

I think it’s bit false to say why “Minecraft” is so successful. I think eventually it boils down to the person behind the game. I have no trouble believing that if Markus had chose to do different game, he’d eventually would have been successful – not sure if it’s Minecraft Great Big Success, but at least Somegame Big Success.

Minecraft is the product of hard work and dedication. Sure, you can try argue and talk about mechanics about slot machines and whatnot (that’s of course important too!), but when looking reasons for success, I believe it’s important to look also the person behind the product.