The huge never ending project I did for National Geographic, "DogTown", has ended.

Development of our first bit of iPhone goodness is coming along nicely. The game is an actual working game now, and plays quite well. As you can see the look & feel has taken a major change in direction from the first screenshot the other week.


When it comes to changing my game structure for the iPhone, it's really not been too bad at all. I'm still developing it in Flex3 ( And thanks to Rich I've got auto-complete on the new API stuff too, which is really rather lovely ) and doing all the testing with a normal swf with keyboard input, and just publishing it for the device to test performance and new graphics ( They do look different on the ipod than onscreen ).
This means my workflow hasn't been hit by long publishing times, which would have stopped me working on this long ago.

The major change was to do with when to trigger my constructors. I normally don't create class instances until I need them ( Ususally in the startGame() method ) but this was causing a noticable pause when going from the title screen to the game, so I call them during the "preloader".
Basically when an app first runs a bitmap is displayed straight away, then once the app is loaded it cuts to the app itself. All I've done is made the first screen in the game match the initial bitmap ( A big GYW logo, naturally ) so when it cuts from the bitmap to the game there's no change. I can then call all the constructors there under cover, and they set up all their object pools etc. before fading that logo down to the title screen. Nice and simple and effective.

Next up is fleshing out the presentation and giving the game some love and we should be good to go.

Squize.

I see a lot of blogs where people tell us all how to make good games. It seems lots of people have something to say on this subject, even if they've only got one or two games under their belt, and then of dubious quality.
Some posts are truly inspiring, they show common gameplay / design issues in a new light that just clicks in your head, that "Shit yeah" moment when you connect with someone else's words in such a way that your own thoughts are solidified.
Other posts are like a tick list of game design. Responsive controls. Fair collisions. Give the player lots of power-ups. Shops, shops are always good. Sigh.

Rather than me force my view of game design down peoples throats ( I still only consider myself a so-so game designer, I've got better, but I'm far from good. If I was good I'd be confident to lay out my golden rules, but without me being able to say "You know that game I did, that you loved and played for hours ?" and all of you agree, I don't think I'm too well placed to hand out the testament according to GYW ), I thought I'd take the other tact of explaining why some games have faults.

Sometimes shit bits in games aren't due to the developer being shit. There, I've said it.

How many of us have posted a game to a forum and died a little inside when having to read "It's good, but if you did <whatever> it would be better" ? Or the classic "It'll be good when it's finished" after the person playing it has just played it on the client / sponsors website. What part of that obviously been finished haven't you noticed ? Don't get me wrong, no one's above feedback, and you can't post a game and expect everyone just to gather around you in a circle in awe. For the most part the feedback is spot on. When it's not though, it jars like nails down a chalk board.

We don't live in a utopia where every game is released when it's finished just how you want it. There are developers who release their magnum opus, and when asked how long it took you hear "Over 6 months", "Around 9 months" and so on. That's great, that's games as art in their purest form. That's not game development as a viable living though. That's game development as a hobby, a break from the day job. If you spent 6 months on a game, well fuck, it should be exactly how you wanted it, there's very little reason for it not to be aside from technical ability or the ability of collaborators.

In the temple of making a living wage with games, things are different. You have a budget to work to. If it's a client game then you have a deadline as well as a budget, not to mention the client themselves.

• If you're doing a project for a client you usually have a set amount for the project. That includes designing how the game will play, prototyping if need be, some times creating custom engines or getting your head around 3rd party libraries. It means getting an artist on board if you don't work with one full time, giving them direction, sorting out a sound guy too. It means showing builds to the client and waiting for sign off, and dealing with amends. Some where during this time you have to actually ensure the game is fun, it's not a God given right that it will be just 'cause you've done a game design doc. Also you've got bug fixes and testing.

The vast majority of your time is spent on getting the features in, getting the game to be what it should be and just working, that things like multiple iterations and tweaking the difficulty curve are just a luxury. You can go over the budget and swallow a loss to devote more time to the more neglected areas, but by over delivering you're doing more work for less money. Good developers do that, but there does become a point of ever decreasing returns, where the extra hours being thrown at a game aren't giving you enough back in terms of cost vs quality.

This isn't just a client based issue, even if you're doing a game for sponsorship you've got to have one eye on budget. You know roughly what your game will bring ( Whilst secretly hoping for more ), and you have to avoid slipping into making that magnum opus which will only ever at best earn a fraction of the development cost back. If it's a business then it's got to be about the money as well as the art.

This is sometimes why a game isn't as feature complete as you would like, this is why you're aware that "If you did <whatever> it would be better", but unless that avatar on the forum with all the wise words is going to pay you for that extra time, it's not going to happen. It's not a lack of love for the project, or ability, or vision, it's called paying the rent.

• Deadlines. There's never enough time to do what you want, so corners have to be cut as you need to hit that deadline ( Whether it's for an ad campaign or that Halloween themed game that has to be sold to a sponsor in a very tight time window ). That's not always skimping on levels, only doing 20 where 30 would be better, sometimes it's nasty kludge fixes to your code where you hope that the bug you get every now and again is so rare now that it's just magically gone away as you've put some heavy handed code around it to force it to work rather than re-coding the whole routine.

Again things like tweaking the difficulty and testing are hit. Yes, if you press the mute button over and over the title screen hangs, thanks for finding that and pointing it out, I just wish I had the time to test that myself rather than just doing everything else.

• Clients come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are great, some of them are not quite as great but still nice ( Yeah I can be faux professional ). No matter what though, they'll want some input. This varies from changing the colour of some text to sweeping changes that push you right up to the deadline, to gameplay changes which just break the game. The adver-game you see is never the developers pure image of what the game should be.

So if you're not a game developer, next time you're looking at a game, and you're thinking "How the hell could they release it with that bug / missing feature ?" hopefully some of the above will explain why. Yes, some games are just plain crap, but sometimes every once in a while a good game under achieves. It doesn't mean the developer doesn't give a shit, or isn't insightful enough to realise that it would be better if it did x,y and z, it means they've got rent to pay and that some times that gets in the way of making a truly great game.

Squize.

After a week of playing I had to abort "Andrew", my first crack at an iPhone game.

It's no great loss in the grand scheme of things, I hadn't committed to it a 100% and was more a tech test hoping to evolve into a game, and as is the nature of these things, it failed.

Onwards and upwards, with a title screen grab of the current WIP, which has got what I think is the worst name I've ever come up with for a game.


That's it for now, I'm not sure what I can and can't say under the NDA, so I don't know if I'll be able to touch on performance ( Much better than I thought, it's very impressive and they're still working on it ) or other API related things ( Other sites may be running more in-depth details about CS5, but lets be honest, I must piss more than enough people off already without adding Adobe to the list ).

Squize.

It seems the NFL Rush site has opened up the game section, which is cool as I can actually show you some work now.

My favourite of the bunch was the first one I worked on, Gameball Maize Maze.

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So that's being 3 years of GYW ... me and Squize working together for 3 years as GYW - that's worth a little celebration, isn't it?

Oh, and if you discover the secret message you can keep the cake :)

nGFX

With Ionic in bidding hell ( Really, it couldn't be going any worse at the moment. I think a game about rape would be an easier sell ) it's time to start on the next game.

I've got a vague idea of what I want, and what platform it's going to run on, and the background colour is set ( #B5C7AD ) and that's about it. Acorns and Oaks and all that.

Oh, and it's going to be called "Andrew".

More as and when.

Squize.

It's that time of year again, and for the first time in 3 years of doing it I'm actually getting it done on New Years eve rather than the 1st. I'd like to say it's a sign of our new found pro-activeness, but in reality I'm out on the beer tomorrow so it's best to get it done today.

Ready ? K, let's go.

Jan:

Our second birthday and tons of work. Some of the games we did in 2008 actually came out in this month, and it's a bit of a muddled mess as the projects we were working on are behind a registration, so we didn't actually know when they went live, so a bit of guess work here.


Racing to School. Another Brandissimo game for the NFLRush site ( Hence the lack of links ). A simplistic Pole Position-esque style racer. The movement and the collisions were really nice, I'm more than happy with them. The hardest part of the project was the rubber banding, it's a really really tricky thing to do well. Quite a nice end result though, fun little job.

Aside from this, cronusX was still called X and under development. And that was the first month of the year.

Feb:

Another busy busy month. I think until the end of March I was working on 3 projects at once constantly, which is so nasty.


After the highs of Feb, comes the lows of March.


On a better note, the 4k comp was finished up, with our entry, Bovis Abyssus released to the world ( And to be honest I'm really proud of that little 4k shooter ). An excellently run comp and one we were really proud to have sponsored.

X was code complete this month and Olli showed off some screens from a certain game, which like Dumb Planet, will never see the light of day.

And just to finish the month off in style I split up with my girl...

April:

...spent the month mainly licking my wounds.

This month didn't see anything new come out. I did ( With hindsight ) a quite hate filled post about putting ads on adver-games, and how it sickens me so much. Olli was a productive bunny this month and had a lot of time with Unity3D, the highlight being a very helpful post about all things GUI.

May:

A funny kind of limbo where we were just doing things with nothing to really show or write about. It turns out one game finally went live,


Blitz Bots Alley. Another game for Brandissimo. This one just seemed to go wrong, it was meant to be a reskin of Sarge bowling, but due to the changes in the gameplay, which was fairly flawed and something we didn't notice until well into development, it was pretty much a total re-write. A low budget and a complete lack of motivation from me lead this to being drawn out and although we salvaged something ok at the end of it, it missed the mark and was just painful to work on. I burnt some bridges with this project, which I regret.

June:

A month that saw me get another year older, and where we spoke more about other peoples things rather than our own, including a great interview with our mate Chris about iPhone development.

Olli got all random level generation on our asses.

We also posted our first article about mtx. Was it only really June that we started hearing about coins and the like ? It seems like they've been around for ages due to the sheer amount of words which have been  devoted to them.

This month also saw GameJacket close ( There's got to be some lame pun involving zips and closing, but nothings coming to me. Just make your own up ).

July:

This is more like it, back on track again.


cronusX. My baby. I'm so proud of this game, it's everything a GYW game should be. It was really nice to be able to work with Olli directly on a game, and I really enjoyed posting every build as we went, that's something I'll def. do again ( I can't link to the WIP builds, as our dog shit cheap host that was used just for games got hacked, and the hosting company just gave up after that. I guess they didn't bother with the backups they said they did, and it was just easier to fold and keep everyones money. Cheers for that ).
In terms of traffic it's proved to be a disappointment, but let's save covering that for the post mortem.

Aug:

A quiet month really. First pics of Ionic were posted, cronusX went viral and I got all moody about things ( Which I'm not even going to bother linking to ).

We were busy, just sometimes there's nothing to say about it.

Sept:


I'd just like to take the chance to thank you all for sticking with us, without you all out there we'd just be writing this for ourselves, and that's just a mental thing to do.

Happy New Yeah my beauties.

Squize.