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[Indiegama]

Hi folks,

I'm Tom Spencer-Smith, solo indie developer of Army 21 - http://www.army21.com which is now live in early alpha testing.

The download is here: http://update.army21.com/army21setup.exe (6MB)

I've had my head down working on this for a long time and am now turning my attention to getting the game live, building a community, figuring out how to market and sell it. It is alpha because it has had almost no testing other than myself, and I hope to have countless thousands of simultaneous players eventually, so it seems certain I'll have some work to do! I'm hosting the game servers in addition to the master server. It's all C++ custom code with directX. The game is almost entirely procedural, which is why the download is only 6MB.

I haven't announced the game anywhere yet, so there are basically no players in the servers. That needs to change soon!

Here's how I will be describing Army 21 is my press release:

Army 21 is an online action/strategy team combat game featuring base warfare with co-op and versus game modes. Up to 60 players in 6 teams compete to defeat the other teams by building and defending their own base, and by destroying the bases of the opposing teams. Each base consists of a number of buildings of different types, each serving a unique purpose. When your team is defeated (when your base is destroyed) it is assimilated by the surviving teams. This unique 6-team dynamic , and the focus on base warfare, is the core of what makes Army 21 very unique and enjoyable.


Anyway I want to share my journey from here (early alpha) to my future hopeful commercial success, learn from you folks and hopefully be useful in turn to other developers. Please feel free to ask anything along the way.

[Indiegama]

Recently I had a problem with fake facebook likes. My new page received around 200 likes in 1 day.
This turned out to be caused by a misguided fan who used some sort of like-trading scheme.
Fake likes are bad for your page because they prevent your messages from getting out to your genuine likes.
I persuaded the fan to stop it and then manually one-by-one removed most of the likes. However I couldn't and still can't remove them all - I can't find any way to remove the older likes.



Most people have to pay money in order to receive worse-than-useless fake likes.
I got the same garbage for free.

[Indiegama]

So, Tuesday (US time) is the date I'll be announcing Army 21 to the games press!

I've carefully crafted a press release and a press email. I'll post them here - after tomorrow 
I've built a press list - probably around 60 email addresses. I need to grow this list for future press releases.
I have a press kit on my website at press.army21.com.

I think all of my ducks are reasonably in a row.

[Indiegama]

I've just sent out the press release announcing the Alpha to about 70 email addresses, plus I filled out contact forms for about 10 gaming sites. I timed this to happen on Tuesday morning PST. Basically, hoping that my email is not buried deep in inboxes.

My primary resource for building my contact list was http://videogamejournaliser.com/ which has some useful site lists. Start with these and filter out sites that are not relevant to your game, along with sites that are dead or dormant. You need to visit each site and dig around.

Try to get an email address and name for the person most relevant to your game. For many sites you'll only find a generic contact address. Some sites only provide twitter contacts. Some sites only provide forms. I haven't contacted anyone by twitter at this stage.

I emailed my contact list recipients manually (one by one), using their first name where I had it. I sent a letter as plaintext and attached a .docx press release. I'll show the text of that later. My press release is a little more formal and traditional. My email is more personal/informal and is written in 1st person. I'm not sure if other developers do this?

I'll be able to judge the results in the next few days but was happy to receive some friendly replies almost immediately and see that Army 21 already mentioned on a few sites. I've also had some interview requests. So definitely I can say my press release hasn't dropped into an abyss  which I did actually fear.

[Indiegama]

Here's my press release. Any suggestions on improving it?



Indiegama creates the Army of the Future: Army 21

Singapore, January 27, 2015: Indiegama Pte Ltd has announced its debut title "Army 21" for Windows Desktop PC's. Army 21 is now live in Alpha testing - and is seeking recruits.

"In the future, war will be fought through computer interfaces.
A soldier will be anyone with a computer who chooses to fight.
Age, race, creed, gender, sexuality, physicality, nationality - none of these matter.
Skill, reputation, experience - only these matter.
Army 21 is designed to find and train these soldiers of the future."
                  - A21HQ

Army 21 is an online action/strategy team combat game featuring base warfare, with co-op and versus game modes. Up to 60 players in 6 teams compete to defeat the other teams by building and defending their own base, and by destroying the bases of the opposing teams. Each base consists of a number of buildings of different types, each serving a unique purpose. When your team is defeated (when your base is destroyed) it is assimilated by the surviving teams. This unique 6-team dynamic , and the focus on base warfare, is the core of what makes Army 21 very unique and enjoyable.

Another part of its appeal is the deep layering of gameplay objectives. You're competing to win each match as the undefeated team; competing to increase your own difficulty level (there are 50 levels); competing to beat the best time and best points recorded for each level; and above all you're competing over the long term to achieve a high Army Rank and placement in the Worldwide Leaderboard. Your Army Rank depends not only on Skill but also on Reputation and Experience, and gives you certain privileges and responsibilities within your team - and status within the game.

But also remember this: Army 21 is an army, with the objective of locating and training the most brilliant military leaders and commanders of tomorrow, from the full population of Earth. Think Ender's Game, but with the combat taking place in cyberspace.

Army 21 is the product of a sole indie developer - Tom Spencer-Smith, formerly of Westwood Studios and EA, who has worked as a programmer and consultant on a number of leading franchises (Command & Conquer, FIFA, Need For Speed, Crysis, etc) before founding his own Singapore-based studio Indiegama in 2014. Army 21 is a long-term passion project for Indiegama, the desire being to improve, expand and evolve the title over a number of years with the active participation of the player community.

Availability: Army 21 is now live in early Alpha testing, for Windows 7 / DirectX 9 and higher. Indiegama plans to launch on Greenlight and Kickstarter later in 2015 after building up an initial player community. Pricing: free in Alpha, subsequent pricing TBD.

The live download for Army 21 is available at www.army21.com.

Press materials, including a trailer, is available at http://press.army21.com. Please also feel free to email tom (at) indiegama (dot) com.

[Indiegama]

Why Army 21 uses a custom engine

People used to argue about whether to use OpenGL or DirectX.

The industry is in a much better position now; the argument is now about Unreal vs. Unity.

For most developers, certainly most indies, either of these engines is a great choice.

But not for Army 21. Army 21 features almost entirely procedural content generated at runtime. Those engines weren’t designed for this kind of scene. There may be ways to hack around it but they are likely to be cumbersome and restrictive. So for Army 21 we use a custom engine. Ideally that engine would support both DirectX and OpenGL – but that takes a lot more effort. So at present we’re just DirectX.

If you’re doing runtime procedural stuff with a 3rd-party engine – please share your experience.

[Indiegama]

Beginnings of shader work

One of the main expected focuses for future development work for Army 21 is the use of shaders. At present, Army 21 uses only fixed pipeline rendering (in DirectX 9). This approach is outdated. Shaders are part of the newer "programmable pipeline", and since Army 21 is completely procedural, the more aspects of the render that are programmable, the better. Shaders allow us to size and color individual verts and pixels programmatically on the GPU, providing more interesting results, as well as offloading work from the CPU.

Here's our first technology test with HLSL shaders using DirectX 11:

(this forum has no youtube embedding? weird)





Here the CPU is passing a flat grid of 100 x 100 uncolored verts to the GPU which is then doing the vertical deformations and coloring.

The part that really interests me about shaders is that it allows the scene to be more easily dynamic - changing over time and reacting to whatever is happening.  This potentially not only improves the visuals, but could tie into gameplay.

[Indiegama]

Improving my proceduralism

I've mentioned that part of my visuals upgrading plan is to migrate towards significant shader usage.

Another big part of it will be to use more sophisticated proceduralism. So far I've just used midpoint displacement for everything - geometry and textures both. This has been sufficient for prototyping the visuals and for gameplay purposes, but in terms of visual quality I can do better with a wider suite of techniques, including perlin, multifractal, and so on. How much of this will be done on the GPU I'm not yet sure.

Here's a quick example from today of trying a different procedural basis for my terrain (heightmap only).



Whereas my midpoint-displaced terrain typically looks more like this:



So a simple change to the proceduralism creates a rather different look.

[Indiegama]

Interview with develop-online

Develop interviewed me a few days ago. This came out of my initial press emailing for my alpha release. They did their homework and came up with really good questions. They called it "Ex-Westwood dev on going indie, procedural generation and the multiplayer risk":

http://www.develop-online.net/interview/ex-westwood-dev-on-going-indie-procedural-generation-and-the-multiplayer-risk/0202705

[Indiegama]

Today's Terrain WIP

As I've mentioned, I'm migrating from DX9 fixed-pipeline to DX11 programmable pipeline, and from midpoint-displacement proceduralism to more sophisticated procedural algorithms.

Here's today's progress (a first step) on a terrain rendering test:



Geometry verts and normals are calculated on the CPU. Coloring is done on the GPU based solely on elevation and a single light source. Perlin noise used for the heightmap. A simple Sobel filter used for terrain normals.