(Update on that):


So that's finally done. My own personal "get away from my beloved 3ds max and start with c4d" tour.

Basically I was a Max user since v1, so it's quite hard to forget about all the nice things it offers, though the deal for c4d was just that tiny amount better (price/what has the software to offer) so we switched instead of upgrading Max to work with Vista.

Now at first c4d was a shock. Nothing worked like it "should" a lot of things where at a different place or worked just plain different due to the very different background/history of the software.

As always it was so utterly depressing to not be able to do the easiest scenes, what should have taken just a few minutes to set up, now took a whole day.
When coding I and getting into a new language, I basically recode a very simple app, this helps to see the differences but I still can compare the code with other languages ... when I first started with AS3 I wrote this (you may have seen it).

Now there is something similar for me with 3d ... and this is the story (and it has pictures, too) ...


Lets start with the inspirational image:

It's one of my all time favs. An image from Magnetic Scrolls' "Jinxter" (if you have never heard of either the company or the game ... have a look here or here).

Lets start with creating the "guard"

The low poly mirrored mesh.


The smoothed (final) model.

Next to do on the list was the arc ...

The arc with some additional stones, so far it wasn't all that hard ...


OpenGL Display.

Now modelling seems to work quite well, on to scene composing (more images are comming).


Final scene layout.


Preview rendering, way to bright.


Added some trees behind the camera, better now ...


Final mode rendering, earliest scene layout, just some basic textures applied. The trees behind the arc need redoing, the cliff in the background is a joke and the plants in the foreground, well, I don't like them. Sky needs work.


Final mode rendering, sometime inbetween the image above and the final layout. Some ferns update, added some ivy to the walls, remodeled the cliff and added the two statues, still some work needed on the nature part. The sky seems ok now.


The final image after a good week worth of work. Most of the plants have been replaced, redone. Done.
Get a larger version here.

Scene stats:
- 29.045.199 polygons
- 1 light (sun)
- 91 objects, 231 plant instances
- rendertime 1600x900 px: 2h26m.
- postwork: none.

And while I'm at it ... we have new shiny pong clock :).

nGFX

That's one of my least imaginative titles ever, nice work.

Regular readers will know we've jumped onto the twitter bandwagon. Twitter, it's an odd thing. Totally pointless and quite self indulgent but very addictive for some reason I can't figure.

One major side effect I've noticed though is that it's given more weight to the blog. Twitter is like our side project, our experimental band with some friends, trite and simple and throwaway, whilst the lumbering beast that is the blog keeps floundering on, that things posted here now have to be justified a little more than before.

I wanted to write about how freelance forums bug me, more specifically freelance forums as part of more generic Flash boards ( Rather than things like elancers and all those nasty nasty ones ). I'm not going to single any out, as they're all pretty much the same level of dire.

I'm not sure what bugs me the most, posts like

"Hi, I'm really interested by your project, I've got 5 years experience in as1,as2,as3,php, ajax,ruby on rails,asp, dhtml ..."

That just rings alarm bells. Unless their Nan is really ill and needs an operation, so they're trying to raise money any way they can ( K, the Xbox is on eBay, I guess I should try and bring in as much extra work as possible inbetween shifts at McDonalds ), or they're shit. Or lying.
My personal preference is that they're shit. 5 years experience at anything ( Even McDonalds ) and you should be aiming higher than $100 jobs on a board.

or...

"Hi, pm me"

That to me reads as "Hi, I'm interested in your job, but not actually enough to contact you, as you specifically requested, but I'm so confident that you want to work with me, you can chase me up".
If you can't get the first part correct, ie contact the potential client, that's not really a flying start is it ? It doesn't bode too well for the rest of the project.
There's a little sub-system of this that burns me too,

"Hi, check out my portfolio ( But it needs updating, that's old stuff there, not my latest work )"

Quick translation, "Hi, I can't be fucked to pm you, you check me out. Oh, but when you do you'll find my work is pretty piss poor, but it's 'cause it's old, the new stuff is really good, it's just that I don't care enough to upload it anywhere. I don't care enough about my own public image to potential clients like yourself to spend an hour of my life to upload this new and fantastic latest work ( Which to be honest is as poor as the old stuff, I just learned how to use a new filter for the latest stuff ), but I'll do a first rate job for you."

...and finally...

"pm sent"

Yeah ? Really ? I'm glad you posted that, because email is prone to being lost isn't it. I'll double check my email every minute now I know I'm expecting something from you, thanks for the heads up, phew.
Is this some sort of pr thing ? Just another reason to post a post with a signuture with your link in ? Is it to ward off others ?
"Shit, I see DeathSlayer49 has gone for that job, I don't have a chance. If he hadn't posted about it I would have gone for it, but not now, now there's no point. His location says 'under your mom', he's bound to get the job, any client will find that a sign of professionalism"

But now of course we've got twitter, we can just go there and post these petty / I'd rather be doing anything than working right now observations and keep the blog free for the high brow things.

Squize.

Since I started on X+++++ I've always had it in my head doing it as a d/load game too ( That's why it's 800x600 ), using Zinc to wrap it up in.

So ... thanks tothe blessings of web 2.0 (and the machinery of stupid terms) we're able to give you even more insight into the hard work that we call game development.

No, not only can you see what we're doing on your beloved develpment blog, but now have even more updates aorund our daily work (that is, if we can remember to do so) on twitter (http://twitter.com/GamingYourWay/) - so come on, be a follower.

And tomorrow we may be able to take over the world .... Hahaharharhehehehihihohoarghlphzgmph.

nGFX

The 4K comp is gathering pace which is great ( Actually finished my game last night / this morning. I had some ideas the other night on how to improve it and it was quite nasty going from being "well" under the limit at around 4070 bytes and then going over with the new code. I was on 4099 bytes for quite a while last night until I cracked it. 4093 bytes and done, which is cool. I was going to be a clever sod and round that up to 4096 exactly, then realised that someone will do something in 2.5k that'll crap on my game and I'll just look silly for having used the max available and making something which isn't as good )

Rich over at photonStorm has posted some great tips for those of you giving the comp a bash in as3.

I opted for F8 / as2, although it's written like as1 with datatyping ( No Delegate or classes here ). Publishing as F7 would have saved a few bytes, but I wanted some of the filter effects.
I'm not sure what I can pass on that may be some use, but here goes ( Remember it applies to F8 / as2, the rules could be totally different for say F5 / as1, the size report is your friend with this comp ).

Chaining vars is actually longer, eg

score=level=d=cnt=0;

is a bit bigger than

score=0;
level=0;
d=0;
cnt=0;

Loops seem shorter this way,

while(--i)

Although to be honest I didn't try for loops ( I always use while, just habit )

It's common knowledge that pre-as3 var names have an effect on  size and speed in terms of their length ( i is "better" then myTempLoopCounterVar ) but linkage names have an impact too, so "bb" is smaller than "baddieBullet". Common sense I know, but if you're not used to thinking it terms of making code as tight as possible it's easy to miss ( It was for me anyway ).

More general things I did was to re-use values as much as I could, for example when the player dies I have to move it out of the way so the collision checks don't get triggered again, so I set player._x=2000; because I use a setInterval afterwards to wait for the gameOver ( id=setInterval(gameOver,player._x); )

Another thing, which is so dirty, was to drop an enterFrame on to everything. Originally I did the usual looping through an array calling the objects mainloop, but by adding the code to the sprite itself you remove all the loop overhead and make each sprite self sufficient.

It's weird tearing up the rule book for this comp, it's like going back to as1 and doing all those nasty things we used to do just to get things working.
If you've not done anything yet I can really recommend giving it a bash. The deadline is ages away yet, it should only take you a couple of hours for a couple of evenings and it's really good fun, it gets you back in touch with coding again rather than just dropping huge bitmaps into your fla and using a tweening package.

Squize.

We couldn't let a Friday the 13th pass without some sort of post.

If you've got any interest in the process of making an adver-game, the always lovely gamepoetry ( Check out the 4K comp there, there's a link under our logo above, see it ? Yeah, give that a little clickity click click ) have an exclusive post mortem from us ( As pay back for their great one for Zombieland we presented here just before Christmas ) about our recent Invaders Must Die game.

And hopefully that's the last time we mention Invaders here, as it seems to be all we've spoken about in the past couple of weeks, and we're bored of it too now.

Squize.

An awful lot of our blog posts are questions recently, we need to change that.

Anyway, where exactly is the Cash for Flash ? There's a very in-depth article on the always excellent gamasutra about Flash gaming and the money it can make ( Where's The Cash For Flash ) to which I see quite a few blogs have linked to already.

As a developer you're constantly aware that Flash games are seen as a very disposable medium. They're free and there are thousands of them, a lot of portals have no concept at all about copyright because swfs are just so ubiquitous now, they're moving jpgs aren't they.
If you're a fellow dev. reading this, I'm sure more than once in your life you've had to actually try and explain the value of a Flash game to a client, that good work takes time and money, that just because there is already a lot of content out there it doesn't mean it's all of the same quality. Basically, that Flash isn't actually disposable, that very cool things can be done with it.
If that's the case, if there's this near constant battle to validate Flash and Flash games worth ( To the point that if someone from EA quotes Flash as a valid gaming platform our hearts go all a flutter ), why the fuck do so many developers shout from the rooftops what they earn ?
I don't want the tax man knowing what I earn, never mind a 100,000 strangers. What's that all about ? If it's a full time job, a living, keep it to yourself. If it's a hobby with benefits, then it's just re-enforcing the whole Flash games are just a disposable something to do on the weekend and earn "$20k" from it view.

By now I'm guessing you've figured I'm not a 100% pro this article.

I suppose I should caveat things now to avoid a ton of hatred coming my way. I'm a big fan of what Adam and Chris have done at FGL ( I remember chatting to Adam only last year I guess and him saying "I've got this crazy idea that I want to try out" ), and all the game authors quoted in the article, in terms of their work, excellent.

If that's the case, what's the point of me writing this ? Am I just writing venom for the sake of writing it ? Am I bitter 'cause I'm not had my $40k indy hit yet ? Or is it because every article about Flash and it's commercialisation paints an even rosier and skewed picture than the one before it ?

Figures, let's stick with them, as everyone is so keen on them ( Me too if the truth be known ).

In the article there's mention that 25% of all games on FGL are sold. That still leaves 1,500 games unsold. That's a lot. I imagine not all of those are real stinkers.
Also the average deal brokered is quoted at $1000, but I'm guessing any >$10k deals skew that figure a hell of a lot.
( Again, this isn't a criticism of FGL, just note that spin is put on figures, everyone does it. I'm trying to highlight that when it comes to Flash and money you really need to read between the lines, I'm not digging anyone out for putting a favourable spin on their own business ).

"At a minimum, developers selling their first game ever -- if it falls into the 'good-to-great' category -- make about $500-and-up"

$500 is piss all really, unless you're 14, then you'd kill people for that sort of money. $500 really just makes it a disposable something to do on the weekend. But we all start somewhere, my first game was sold to miniclip for £350 ( There, now I'm spewing my guts on how much I earn, it's an addictive trap ).

Next up in the article is the Dino Run guys. $40k for that game, plus still more coming in. Great, really well deserved, Dino Run is one of the best games in Flash and deserves everything it gets.
Although that is 7 months development, between two people, so that's $20k per person. Still nice, $20k for 7 months, that's just under $3k a month. But... Dino Run is one of the best games in Flash right now. Have you got 7 months to develop a game as good ? I know I haven't and I wouldn't presume I'd even have the ability to make a game as good.

See these well done stories in the article are the pinnicale of where the indy market is, not the average, not the norm.

The article then goes on to say on the strength of Dino Run the PixelJam guys have got a couple of adver-game gigs that nearly earned as much as Dino Run in a much shorter space of time.
That's key. That the indy market is so far behind the industry as a whole in terms of finance that the best outcome is that you get some client based work out of it with the money that brings in. That's where the living wage with Flash is, not with mochi-ads I'm afraid.

Finally in the article they speak with Sean T. Cooper who coded the excellent Box Head series. He is very honest, and explains that you have to build up a fan base for your IP, that to get the really good money you need that fan base there, people who are just panting for the next installment. Sponsors know that, they have a very good idea of what a sequel as part of a popular franchise will bring in in terms of traffic, and will pay for that.
Keep in mind that Sean said he sold the first one for $1500. 4 games later and he's getting good money, he's in a great position, but that's at least a couple of games first that you have to sell for not a great amount of money ( If you're making games to the standard of the Box Head ones you're looking at a min. of 4 weeks, and this is if you do all the art and sound yourself. 4 weeks at 40 hours per week, that's 160 hours, which at $1500 is $9.38 per hour [ Thanks to Bryson for point out my really poor maths first time around, corrected now ]. That's best case scenerio. It really is a big investment of your own time to make it successful, don't expect to be paid well for that time. In effect your gambling on the strength of your vision if you're doing this for the money. If you're doing it for the love of the art, well, you can do whatever the hell you want and just enjoy it ).

"Which means that one person can -- with a lot of hard work, meaning every day of the year -- expect to bring in close to $400,000 a year, I think."

This is the core of why I've written this article. I don't want to pick a quote apart from one person, but come on mate, $400k ? I'll be happy doing half then, 5 games for $200,000.
It's things like that, the come on everyone, get Flash, it's like getting paid for having a laugh, then just rubs me up the wrong way ( Obviously ). It doesn't do anyone any favours.
Ask yourself this, if that sort of money is possible, is Sean or anyone else, earning it via indy games ? If I said to you, work hard for a year, and you'll earn nearly half a million dollars, you'd bite my arm off to do it, like I would yours.

Be realistic in what you think you'll earn, don't get your head turned by the Bloons or DTDs. They're great games, but there are other great games which have fallen by the wayside. Do it for the sheer joy of making something cool out of that untitled.fla, and if you make a couple of quid, then sweet, better in your pocket than anyone elses, but please don't fall into the Flash trap of timelines paved with gold.
With a lot of effort and maybe a bit of luck you'll get the $40k game, and then by all means post in the comments and let me know you wear a crown when you code now and I'll be gladly put in my place, and keep that as an objective ( The money, maybe the crown wearing, not the rubbing my nose in it ) but take all the quotes with a slight pinch of salt.

Squize.

...Melody Maker and NME were essential reading ( Along with Viz ).

I thought the only time I'd get to see a news story on nme.co.uk involving something I'd done would be if I attacked a celebrity ( Stephen Hawkins would be my first choice as I'd fancy my chances, I mean that nurse had a good go, but not quite indie pop enough to make the pages of nme ), but thanks to the miracle of paid for placement advertising, the Invaders Must Die game is being pimped on there. Sweet.

Have a look here and see us move up in the world, in between stories about the Strokes and Babyshambles. Could we be any more rock 'n roll ?

Squize.

PS. We're on the nuts front-page right now too, but you're really not going to play my game there are you. Be honest. No, I didn't think so.

So I have rencently finished a bigger update on a client's website, dealing with all the nasty and ugly shit one would rather like to avoid (to name just one: css - what was wrong with the good old table layout? OK, I know what was wrong, but dealing with all the browser's shitty problems to make it look nearly the same is just ... well, shit)

Meanwhile Squize was hammering out post after post so I didn't felt too bad being quiet.

Now today I actually have something to post, so here we go ...



This is a single frame from the X menu/background animation I've been doing. It'll take a while to render so I have to set up the network renderer on Monday to get the 30 seconds movie out to an flv file (which then will be played in the X menu) ...

If you're a fan of that game already, why not use that image as wallpaper? You can grab the 1024x768 version here.
Bigger Versions are rendered tonight and will be posted later this week - and maybe (if rendertimes for hi-res vids aren't that high there might (really just might) be a screensaver ... we'll have to see).

nGFX

It seems like we're sleeping with Pany over at gamepoetry recently, what with having the exclusive first glimpse of the Zombieland post mortem here, and me currently writing up the Invaders Must Die post mortem as an exclusive(-ish) article for his blog, but we're not. No, honestly.

But... in saying that we are supporting the new comp they're running,

Our new game, "Invaders Must Die", is live today.

Our highest profile to date release is coming along and due for launch this coming week.