[Next meetup]

Next meetup: Wednesday 11th Sept, 7:00pm, at The Wellington in Birmingham.

The Wellington seemed good last time, so let's go there again this week.

(Changed the time to 7pm as I don't think anyone has actually been getting there earlier? - I'm working at the moment, so probably won't get there until 7:30ish)

Consoles are dying and with that, publishers, in a traditional sense, are increasingly irrelevant.

We're in a digital world, and the barriers to creating a game are lower than ever, and cost of distributing a game is lower than ever.

The new problem that we face is the rise of the all-powerful platform holder/curator, creating much more artificial, arbitrary, and unpredictable barriers to entry.

No. But then you may never find out if you're not Greenlit. Good luck with that too.

Simply putting your game on Greenlight now, long after the initial launch excitement, seems like an admission of failure, an acceptance that it isn't going to get on Steam.

If you game is 'Steam-worthy', whatever that means, then it's more likely to get directly onto Steam, bypassing Greenlight. But this seemingly takes, as well as a good game, a mix of marketing/publicity, networking, and a shitload of sheer luck...

I don't think I'd ever develop a PC-based indie game with the aim of making money from it whilst Valve has it's current policies and such a stranglehold on the market. You can't base a business model around praying that Valve will let you in.

Maybe Microsoft's Win8 store may become more significant in the future, though - a more open platform to put PC indie games on, that will come pre-installed on all new PCs?

I use Box2Ds terminology. "world coordinates" and "screen / pixel co-ordinates". World co-ordinates are never called pixels, they are meters or centimeters, even if historically they were derived from pixels. This avoids confusion.

For 2D games, I prefer to use world coordinates based on the pixel scale of the source art. If I had 32x32 tiles, then one tile would also be 32 world units wide and tall.

This makes it easy to 'measure' distances from source assets.

Another fairly nice scale is one unit per tile, which can simplify any logic dealing with the tilemap.

Meters rarely make sense in a 2D game, IMHO. But if you use Box2D you may be forced into a real-units scale (Chipmunk is quite happy with a pixel-based scale though).

Reminder: this is Wednesday next week.

I won't be there unfortunately, hope those of you who do go have a good time!

I'll be there, probably won't be until 7:30pm or so, though

It's about time, isn't it?...

The topic was brought up at Midlands Indies tonight, and it sounds like nothing is currently being organized by the regular TIGJam UK team? (correct me if I'm wrong?)

Is this just a short-term thing? will it be back as usual, with another great weekend of code, spicy chips, and beer by the summer?

Or do we need somebody else to step up and organize an event?

Will try to get to Coventry on Weds... missed the last couple due to being ill, haven't been to one since well before I released Skyriders... still not really recovered though, still coughing pretty badly

Shame the Ludum Dare is so close to xmas, I've already got other plans for that weekend... will have to make it a new years resolution to actually do at least one LD48 next year!

And it's (finally) out! - available today on the App Store and Google Play (added links to the first post)

Technically, this counts as a Ludum Dare October Challenge success, although it feels like  a big cheat there, as it's mostly coincidence that it went on sale and made it's first $1 in October

arcades have definitely lost the "spectacle" aspect that probably drew in a lot of the more casual players. even as late as the 90s walking into a good arcade felt like entering some kind of futuristic wonderland.

I dunno, if arcades magically reappeared now they could still impress at least console gamers...

How?... with high framerates, proper controllers, big screens, and lots of noise!

Back in the day, 'arcade quality' basically meant 60fps with very-low-latency controls. Which is something that has sadly been lost with the current generation of consoles.

Arcades died not just due to competition from PCs and consoles. They got greedy. In the early days, a skilled player could play for a decent amount of time for their 10p/20p. But it didn't take long to get to a point where games were £1 and mostly time-limited - you get one 3min race for your quid, or a 30sec ass-kicking on a fighting game, and that's it...

Anyway, back on topic - and 'pay per life' might work for games which already suit permadeath - thinking about ARPGs and roguelikes - where you're going to invest a fair bit of time into that 'life' (character)

But the game would have to be fair. No cheap tricks or overtuned bosses to keep killing off players...

Flying Arduinos are fun! - see www.multiwii.com



I've built a couple of small multicopters - the control board on this one is essentially an Arduino with gyros+accelerometers, running the MultiWii software

My primary language is C++ too, although I hadn't heard of Marmalade before. I had a good dig around their website but I'm curious what your impression was using it in a project - would you use it again?

This is my 2nd project with Marmalade, the first was Little Acorns

I use Marmalade just as a platform abstraction layer. It keeps me away from XCode and ObjC, but I write my code mostly-from-scratch in C++ and GL ES. Marmalade handles platform-specific bits such as initialization, input, audio, suspend/resume, and so on.

It generally works well - and being able to build+deploy from a Windows machine is, for me, a huge advantage (as I've been using Visual Studio for maybe 15 years or so)

I'm likely to carry on with it, but it's had a few problems that keep making me reconsider. The big one at the moment is iPhone 5 support - you can't submit iPhone 5 (1136x640) apps without using Apple's latest SDK, but we've got to wait for Marmalade to update to that and release a new version. That's taking a while (longer than Unity and Flash/AIR, which have to do the same thing)

But there's also been times that bugs have gone unfixed for quite long periods, and there's very little support on the forums (and the Marmalade forum software is terrible, no 'edit post' or way to subscribe to threads).

There's been signs that things are improving in that area - they held a free Developer Day at their offices a couple of months back, which was very useful, and they've talked about replacing the forums. But they do seem to be a fairly small team working on an increasingly large and complex product.

For me, still seems better than the alternative (dealing with XCode/ObjC, and Java/NDK on Android), and keeps almost all my development work on a single platform. But it's very frustrating at times when you're just waiting for a bugfix or support for the latest iDevice, and you can't do anything to speed up the process.

That looks really nice, I've given you a +1 on Greenlight 

How long did it take you to develop?

Too long, really...

It's been about 7 months semi-full-time (theoretically full-time, but with depression/procrastination issues, and a small amount of work on another project)

I like the smoothness with which it moves, as a suggestion I would have liked to be thematic tracks, such a planet like Mars, a city etc. ..

Unfortunately, I'm not much of an artist... I'm no good at actually drawing/modelling things. I'm aware of my limits, so I've made as much use as possible of tools to help create my assets (SpaceScape for skyboxes, Genetica for some of the textures, and a lot of Photoshop effects for the fonts and UI elements). And of course mostly-code-generated geometry for the tracks.

Now smoothness is something that I can do! - a fair bit of optimization work has gone into the game, to keep it running at (mostly) 60fps on an iPhone 4 (and 60fps with antialiasing on a 4S/iPad2 and above)

Edit (13/10/2012) - Game is now released! - Available on the App Store (iOS), and Google Play (Android)


Well, I never really got around to blogging my progress during development, but I did tweet screenshots fairly regularly that some of you may have seen, either on Twitter or via the ScreenshotSaturday site. Or you may have seen it at the last TIGJam UK.

It's an into-the-screen mix of platforming+racing, with a colour-switching collect-em-up element, inspired by classics from the past such as Trailblazer, Sky Roads, and STUN Runner. It's primarily aimed at iOS and Android, but I may also release it on PC later.

It's getting very close to release now, and I've just been through through my Dropbox public folder, and found a whole load of in-development screenshots, and written up a 'The making of Skyriders' blog post, showing how the game progressed over the 7 months or so that it's been in development.

The game is written in C++, using Marmalade. It's almost a one-man-project - except for the music (by Dustin Kulwicki - www.kwixmusic.com), and a little bit from an artist help to make the alien in the ship look better. Other than that, I've done all the design, code, art, and most of the tools+tech.

There's a trailer, too:



And the obligatory Greenlight page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92916662

And of course, a couple of screenshots:

FRAPS is great (www.fraps.com), if you've got a quick PC

I can record at 60fps at 960x640 (Win32 build of my iOS project). Then I use VirtualDub to compress the FRAPS output.

The limiting factor is YouTube, that doesn't support high frame rates

I like the Pickford Bros. idea of 'Games We Like':

http://www.zee-3.com/pickfordbros/gameswelike.php

Now it's been a web-based initiative so far, but I'm adding a Games We Like screen to my current project, with a little bit of info and direct links to the App Store.

There seems to be a fundamental flaw with Greenlight:

If you've got the required million or so upvotes... then why do you need Steam?

If you've got such a huge load of customers lined up already, why give a big percentage of revenue to Valve to be on Steam?  Do a Minecraft, and sell direct only.

Those that really want to be on Steam are the smaller guys, hoping for a bit more exposure via the Steam client and sales, but these are the ones that Valve doesn't want.

It's certainly going to be interesting to watch.

We generally don't hear much about Steam rejections, however plentiful they may be. But with Greenlight, the whole process is going to become a lot more public.

Not looking forward to the inevitable (and necessary) 'greenlight spam' we're going to see all over the interwebs though ('plz upvote my game!!' theads)

Missing textures... font-tastic!

make a good game
don't make a cash grab
make the best game that you can

If only this was true. In reality, it seems that 'cash grab' games, or at least games riding the wave of somebody else's massive success, are the easiest ones to get noticed.

A Minecraft/Terraria-like game will get tons of free attention. With a half-decent video, it'll be all over the gaming sites, reddit, etc fairly quickly.

The real challenge is to make it look like a 'good clone' (e.g. Minecraft after Infiniminer, Terraria after Minecraft, Castle Story after all those) not an 'evil clone' (as some of the XBLIG and iOS Minecraft-a-likes are seen)

I'm starting to regret spending time working on original, polished iOS projects when I could have chose to 'ride the Minecraft wave' and potentially make a fair chunk of money from it...

60 hz was expected of a console game 25 years ago. It would be awful if half that became standard now.

I'm not really arguing against motion blur, I'm arguing against low framerate (the lower it is, the more intrusive the blur is).

If you can't run at 60fps, you shouldn't even be considering motion smear shaders.

Real motion blur (from a camera) is temporal antialiasing - it's the average image seen between the two frames. Shader-based motion smear effects are bad approximations which rarely look good. And they never compensate for a lack of framerate.

(This is completely unrelated to artificial motion trails, as seen in hand-drawn animation, which do work very nicely if done well)

As an older developer, It's painful to watch this new generation of 30hz game developers - that simply haven't experienced 'arcade-quality' 60fps (vsynced) gaming, as they've grown up in a post-arcade world, where 30fps, bad touchscreen controls, and pay-to-win are the accepted norms...  Why did we allow gaming to become so crap?

Every one of you that says '30fps is just fine' (when it so clearly isn't) are in part responsible for the decline of gaming!