When HeavyBoat set sail a few months ago we had traced something of an established or desirable route. It took no more than a month to see that the course would be defined more by external events than by our preferences.  The landscape changes every few miles (we sail near the shore), climate suggests new routes constantly and the need to stop at different ports for supply makes the travel line drawn in the map look quite strange at this point. And we haven’t sailed 1% of what we hope to.

Environment changes and it will keep doing so, it’s our job to adapt and find a better route all the time. Since going somewhere we don’t know is tricky, I think it’s a good idea to make an exciting journey our goal instead of picking a set place to arrive.

Enjoy the process!

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I was wandering about the stupid apps phenomenon. There’s all kind of dumb small iPhone apps that sell by the kazillions lately and many wonder the same thing. Why is this? Why do great games get buried under these kind of things? Why are people so interested? And I’ve come to three possible answers. Here they are, pick your favourite and tell it to your friends like it is the truth.

1) People like new technology better than content.

It is like this since the beginning of time. Whenever a new technology arrives at our hands we buy it to show it to our friends and coworkers. That’s it, and that’s why the vast majority of us wants something small and quick that shows what our new gadget can do. And iPhones are good at many things, but if you need to show it to somebody in the watercooler, there’s nothing like saying “Look, I’ve got an iPhone, it can fart… Pfffff!, and do lightsaber sounds too.”

2) There are more “fart sound lovers” than “this particular game lovers” out there.

This is just first grade maths (the one I handle remarkably well). Let’s say that we have 100 people with an iPhone, 30 of whom likes farts sounds and 20 of those would like their iPhone to fart so they can laugh with their pals. So, from 100 people, 20 would like to get the iFart app.

Marketing is lovely

Very straightforward, there’s no gap between what the product does and what it says it does. Therefore, the client will only spend money on it, no time for processing information and no doubts about if he’s going to like it or not. There’s no gamble in that purchase.

But when the app is a slightly more complex item, like a match three game. The way to the consumer gets trickier.

Match Three Games once ruled the earth

With an “iFart app” there’s no wonder what it contains. It is “Farts sounds for 0.99″, you like it or you don’t.

(Note: all data gathered from a 7 people online poll)

3) People saying that this app or that app is stupid increases its visibility.

That’s it. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, they say.

(Note: “they” are random people who may or may not have said that)

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If you’re reading this it means it’s already too late. You’ve pressed enter and lost an important amount of useful data, or even a whole project you’ve been working tirelessly for the past weeks. Yep, it happened to me last Friday, so I know how you feel.
Here are some steps to aid you:

1. If you use an ide which saves your open files in memory or in buffers, you may want to check if you can restore some lost files. Save them in an external disk, removable drive or another partition.
2. Stop using your computer. Turn it off. Really. NOW! Copy this link and read it from other PC.
3. You can either boot from a Live CD or plug your hard disk to another computer.
4. You’ll need the ext3grep tool to start recovering what you can.
5. Do not ever use ext3grep in the same partition you’ve lost your files, this tool will start creating files and chances are that those new files will occupy the space your deleted files were.
6. Remember you can use fdisk -l to list the partition table.
7. To start recovering you’ll need another drive with enough space to hold your lost & found files.
8. Lets say you want to recover files from your /dev/sda2 drive. So mount a disk in where the files will be recovered and write ‘ext3grep /dev/sda2 –recover-all’.

After a few hours, and if you’re lucky enough, you’ll find all your lost files in a RECOVERED_FILES directory. If you’re not that lucky (just like me) you’ll just lose that very important class that took you more time than the rest to write.

If you deep into the ext3grep manual you may find a way to recover from a given date, but it didn’t work for me. You can use the –histogram parameter with an –after and –before dates to know where the incident happened. And you can use those parameters with the –recover-all. If you made it work, please tell me.

If you never destroyed important work or data, here are some tips to be prepared when the moment of stupidity arrives.

Have different partitions. At least one for / and another one for /home.
You know that when you remove a file the File System can’t find it anymore, but its content are somewhere in the partition. So, if you use only one partition and you erase something, the Operating System who is creating and editing files all the time, will likely destroy you precious data.

Backup earlier
It doesn’t matter if you only have 3 classes and no working code or documentation, back it up or use your favourite revision system, and if it’s a distributed one, please push it somewhere else.

Shit happens, and it will happen. The only thing to do is to be prepared for it.

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After two months of full time work invested on a game for Cartoon Network (we’ll talk about that later), we are resuming the development of our first HeavyBoat game.

Play “The Moops Physix”!

The build that we are linking today is exactly where we left the project two months ago. Starting next Monday we will be fixing some bugs, adding a lot of features, changing the “shots left” system, adding plenty of visual feedback, particles, music and proper FX and integrating to Facebook too (yeah, all the cool kids are doing it!). We estimate 1 month of work before it’s completed, and during that period of time your comments on the game will be very important to us.

So, please play it and send us feedback of any kind. We will be forever grateful! And you can get your name in the Thanks section of the credits! Amazing isn’t it?

Tell us anything that comes to mind when playing. Anything!

More on The Moops Physix on a post from some time ago.

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What happens when you have an idea that makes you laugh? When you tell others and they laugh too? You write it down, polish it, make some sketches, tweak it and try to get some balance. Then you have a game concept… but something is missing. What happens when that idea is lacking of that thing that can not be named? That thing that lies between pure inspiration and a project that can turn into something fun. What then?

Well, in my opinion, you should put that idea in the corner and let it breath. Right after that you start brainstorming, revisiting old concepts, whatever, you are facing something new and exiting and that provides a ton of energy to the team.

But it’s important to always have in mind that this source of energy is a very dangerous one. A new idea will empower the team, but too many new ideas can, and will, take it all away. As in everything, balance is the key. Some ideas must be developed and completed before you can toss away a new concept to start another.

We had a game where some pimps smacked some hoes around. Well… as promising as that idea sounds I couldn’t manage to turn it into a game that we really wanted to make. So we did our brainstorming, bring some ideas from the past, thought about what tick us in the present moment. And we got to this:

A game about god and philosophy, and what it is, what it means. I’ll be posting about the original idea, and how it’s growing and changing, later.

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Okay, so there’s a whole bunch of pixel art that I find amazing and well worth checking out.

Nonetheless, there’s one thing I am quite fed up with, and that’s the perceived intrinsic association between “indie games” and “pixel art” (include “art games”, if you will and do find that iffy category valid). For some reason, the growing tendency has been for such experimental projects to be resolved in this form.

While some people use it well, all too often I feel the choice of pixel art is haphazard at best, and usually it’s just pretentious. I cannot escape the thought that many developers fancy pixel art because of the nostalgia effect it may induce on the player, rather than use it because it’s technically and aesthetically preferable to do so.

The Spirit Engine 2, by Mark Pay. Good pixel art.

I understand it is, in many cases, a knee-jerk reaction from those who fastidiously lash at the AAA industry, and try to run in the exact opposite direction (in terms of both visuals and gameplay) to separate themselves as much as possible from it. So, if EA and UbiSoft are hatching up new state-of-the-art rendering tools, they go back to the most basic and elementary resources available to them.

I don’t think that’s wise, though.  It seems unreasonable for me to decide what my options are based on what I don’t like, instead of trying to figure out what my game needs and can be, and then deciding what kind of visuals can make it stand out.

I know many programmers find pixel art much easier to manage. Personal limitations aren’t much excuse, however, when it comes to producing a game. If you can’t draw, find someone who does. There are indie artist that will probably side with your project.

I also know it’s fundamental to prototype something quickly and test the core mechanic before producing “final art” for the game, so pixel art can be more economic in that aspect. Still, I find it odd that once a prototype proves functional and playable, many people don’t seem to try and find a unique voice and identity through its graphics. For example, I would love to see something appealing done with Nidhogg, to match and exacerbate its promising gameplay.

So, unless your game benefits and stands out by being illustrated through pixel art, don’t do it. In the end, it’s all about finding a voices, and some voices just don’t match some bodies.

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We should question almost everything if we want to arrive at something new. Why did others do that? Why did it work that time? Why am I doing this right now? What do we want? What do we want to do tomorrow?

Discussing with David some days ago, we arrived to the conclusion that questioning everything is the best way of finding new ways of action, because you will also find new problems. Every project is different from one another, and if it’s not, it’s your job to make it so (it will make you happier, that’s for sure). We must look at problems and try to find creative solutions to them, it doesn’t matter if there’s one already out there, you must find your own.

It’s also true that learning from others is what drove human evolution, and therein lies the most difficult aspect of creativity. To know what questions to ask and when. Knowing when we can find something new and when we must use preexisting solutions in order to move on is a fine balance that’s very hard to achieve. As everything in life, balance is essential.

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The indie scene in Argentina is small, but those few are making beautiful things. Here are two trailers for upcoming games from our friends and colleagues that code, think and pet kitties just a few blocks away from us.

RADiancE from Miguel

Dependant from Fernando Ramallo

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Gareth Keenan knows best

If you are a celebrated game designer that played a mayor role in the production of one or more of the immortal titles of the gaming history you are not reading this. But, if you are just another game designer trying to make some binary toys while not starving, the following lines might be helpful.

There are some periods in the development of a game in which you will find yourself aside from the rest of the team. The game is well balanced and almost every piece is in place, now the artist is filling in the gaps and the coder is fixing the bugs that he created in the first place (you know coders). But what about you? All alone in your corner, sad and lonely when nobody needs you or wants your companionship anymore. The game has left your hands after many days of toying around with configuration tweaking, level adjustments, asking for features and then not using it, crying because the team doesn’t obey without hesitating every random guess you make, and so on. You are of no more use to the game.

But fear not my friend for I am here to help you! With my quick list of 5 things to do when you become the sucker of the moment! Read carefully:

1 – Nothing. Just stare at the empty screen, or the wall, or even your teammates. Let time pass you by smoothly and watch it walk away from your life.
2 – Play games. Play every game out there. From absurdly violent platformers on newgrounds to pretentious arty fartsy platformers on kongregate. You will not get any inspiration from it, but who cares. You are desperate.
3 – Write a new concept. Well… this involves getting back to some old ideas, or trying to come up with new ones (which will never happen if you are trying). It also requires to start a document, or make some sketches. I don’t know, there’s a game being almost finished by the team and you are better off waiting for it to get published before thinking in other ones. Let’s not rush things ok?
4 – Make a list!
5 – Keep playing the game. Test it with people that never played it. Update the GDD with all the small things that changed during production. Update images. Write about it’s development. Play it from start to finish. Try to stress it and find bugs. Try every combination possible and find more bugs. Check the spelling. Get more people to play it and take every bit of feedback they give you very seriously (this includes discriminating valuable feedback from useless ones).

Kind regards
Now back to staring.

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When I started coding our second flash game I found myself writing the same code I had done for the first project. At that moment I realized the need to build a library.

That’s what Cabin Boy is: a little library that helps me not to code things twice among different games. I’m not aiming to create a game framework, but a helper library.

In the meantime I’ve found yet another good reason to code our own library. I feel that every team has their own way of doing things. That they are very keen to do stuff the way they know and love. And a library should support that way and not impose a new one.

Features Cabin Boy has so far:

Smart MC.
Stolen shamelessly from a former colleague (and current friend). This class lets you program what action to trigger after a certain condition has been fulfilled in a Movie Clip. E.g.:

mc.play("closeAnimation");
var smc:SmartMC = new SmartMC(mc);
smc.trigger(new EndAnimation(), new RemoveFromParent());

That snippet plays an animation from a movie clip and then configures the smartMC to remove it from its parent when the animation reaches its end.
Cabin boy is packed with more conditions and triggered actions.

Text Loader and localization support
You can load any text file, and also load a special one separated by colons to use it for localized text.

Sound Support
Load, playback and mute capabilities (I’m currently working on adding more useful features)

Improvised FAQ

Why is it called Cabin Boy?
You know we’re sailors, right? Every sailor needs a little boy who can take care of small business, but he can’t yet sail the ship. I feel this library is going to take care of those little details that I do not wan’t to code over and over again.

When the library gets bigger, would you change its name?
Probably not.

I Want it! Is it free?
It’ s better than that: it’s open source and you can grab it here.

Will it have feature X or Y?
I don’t know yet what feature to add, my rule of thumb is this: Whatever I need in my new game that I’ve already coded will be immediately added to Cabin Boy.

I’ll be posting more about Cabin Boy in the next days, so stay tuned!

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