MonkeyTime

Utah Indie Games Night - January 2012

2012-02-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

Okay this may be a rather quick post again. We had another awesome Indie Games Night last night, with about 60 people showing up. We had a new host this time, Neumont University, and it was an awesome venue to have it at. They brought in pizza and the room had some awesome big screens on which we could present our demos. That worked very well.

We started the evening off with a presentation by Les Pardew of Funium on the Digital Media and Entertainment Act which they are trying to get through the legislation process here in the state. The act would establish a fund which could help fledgling media companies to get off the ground. The fund won't be built from taxpayer money, and it will be mostly used to help build infrastructure to the film, music, and games industries, and thereby spawn more economic growth and in turn bring more tax revenue back to the state. At least that's the basic idea. He also brought along the creator of the bill, Jeremy Christensen of the Film Fund of Utah, and also Carl English of the Utah Technology Council, who is a backer of the bill. It seems like this could be a good thing overall for the games industry in Utah. I'm not sure how much it will help the average indie just yet, but it seems there are some possibilities for small teams that have proven themselves a little bit.

After the presentation we began the demos. Here's the ones that I saw, but I'm sure I missed some.

Sayeeds Three Day Pizza - Jarod
This game was a UVU student project and it looked pretty good. It was a 3D platformer using Unity. The idea is that you are delivering pizzas in the desert and you have to use dust devils to move up/down. Also there are crickets to watch out for too.

Lone Gnome & Infinite Ammo - Paul Milham
Paul showed me a couple of HTML 5 games that he's been working on. Lone Gnome is a puzzle game where you create a path through the level by clearing out gems and what not. You can only clear objects when you hit them in the right direction.

Halloween Panic & SOPA / PIPA - Mike Whitaker, Edgar Nielsen

The guys from Cerbercat were there showing Halloween Panic again and mentioning that they are making a mobile version of it. It's a fun game of trying to save trick-o-treaters from hoards of gouls, ghosts, etc. Also they showed me a funny political game called "SOPA / PIPA" where you fire your SOPA or PIPA weapon at pirates, and try to minimize the "collateral damage". It had a good message of you will always have more innocents affected by SOPA and PIPA than pirates.

Bullet Train Hell - Chris Tart
Chris brought the latest version of his game to show off. He's making an android port of the game now and he showed me some early screens of it on his android tablet.

LinkRealms - Herb and Dan Flower
I didn't get a chance to talk to Herb and Dan about their progress on LinkRealms, but I saw some screens from afar and they had a bit of a crowd around their game. The big addition seems to be in Player versus Player combat being added. Here's a taste of what's new.

Herb and Hamster - Josh Jones and Crew
Josh and some of his team showed off their game that they made at the Global Games Jam this past weekend. It's an interesting cooperative play game about a little guy named herb and his giant hamster

March to the Moon - Curtis Mirci
I didn't get a chance to see Curtis' latest version of this game, but it had quite a bit of a crowd there for a while, and I heard a lot of laughs coming from that area. It looks like it was a success.

Vector Out - Nuemont Students
I briefly saw on the big screen a game called Vector Out, which I'm assuming was a project done by some Nuemont students. It looked to be a shooter game in the style of geometry wars

Tank Commanders
Jay mentioned in his blog a game called Tank Commanders, which is one I missed. Perhaps this is the one that Chris Evans showed. I was hoping to see that one, but wasn't able to.

Also this past weekend was the Global Game Jam. I participated again and there were over 12 games made by 50 people at our local Salt Lake site. It was really awesome. I did something a bit different this time and ended up working on a board game with another smart guy (Daniel Hadlock). I think it turned out great. Several of us stayed afterwards and played a round, and there was a lot of laughing and we could tell that everyone was enjoying the game, which is a good sign. The game is called Escape from Infinity and is a Print and Play game. You can print it out and play it if you'd like.

It was a great evening.

Viva la Indie!

Utah Indie Games Night - November 2011

2011-12-02T03:19:00.005-07:00

Okay this might be a rather quick blog post as work and home duties have been keeping me pretty busy lately and it has delayed my write up.

We had another great Utah Indie Games Night this past Tuesday night. Ninjabee hosted it once again after a bit of a sabbatical. They are in new digs now and their new place worked well to hold the event. We had between 45-50 people there

Lee Baker from Sandman Studios started off the evening with a presentation on some of their experiences making visual effects and flash games. They got their start doing contract special effects work for TV and film. They did the effects for Pushing Daisies and a whole host of other TV shows and films. They've also done a whole host of flash games to promote products and larger games. He showed a bunch of demo reels for things they've done and it certainly was impressive. Lee also mentioned that it's pretty hard to find investors/publishers for your projects when you are first starting out, as you haven't really "proven yourself" yet. In my mind that underscores the reason for doing indie projects. You don't need people telling you what your project should be and what it should look like; you can do it yourself.

Afterwards we opened the time up to game demos that people brought. I'm sure I missed some, but here's the one's I know about.

D.R.O.D. 4 - Mike Rimer - Caravel Games

Mike has been hard at work on the next game in the DROD series. He's holding a contest for fans to guess the name, so we're calling it "DROD 4" for now. He did let me say that there is a letter "L" somewhere in the name. I got a small look at the game and it appears to be back to the traditional DROD game mechanics, however much of the game is above ground so there are some different level settings like water, forest and swamp. Mike mentioned that there are some puzzles that utilize the water by pushing things into it. There are also levels where you can call on soldiers to assist in battles. Apparently large battles is a big part of this new version of DROD. The game looks to be nearly complete, and he's done a great job on it. It think the fans will be pleased.

Me and My Zombies - Andrew Draper & Matt Radley

I spent a bit of time with these guys playing their Zombie game. This is a turn based stragegy game for the Android platform. The main object is to trap and destroy the Zombies before they get to you (a budding necromancer). You can put up fences to block them or fire at them if you're close enough. You can also have duels with another necromancer (perhaps a friend playing as player 2). The lite version of the app is available now on the android market.

Siphon Spirit - Peter Anderson (also Curtis Mirci and Dave Matney)

Peter was showing the latest version of Siphon Spirit on his new tablet PC and was using the stylus to move the mouse around (pretty cool!). He's added some new animations as well as some enhancements to levels to make them more balanced and interesting.

HTML5 Prototypes - Admiral Potato

I didn't catch his real name, but "Admiral Potato" showed my some small HTML 5 demos that he's worked on. He had one demo using an "Asteroids like" game mechanic and using a visual style similar to Geometry Wars. I haven't delved into HTML 5 much yet, but I was impressed with what can be done with it.

Flexitris - McKay Salisbury

McKay was showing Flexitris again. Not a lot has changed since I've seen it last, but he mentioned that he's been added tutorials to the game.

Bullet Train Hell - Chris Tart

I only saw Chris' game for a little bit. He's been adding an in game level editor to the game. That way he can tweak the different levels right on the device (instead of making changes on the laptop; recompiling; and then pushing it out to the built in

UVU Flight Simulator - Nathan Stoker

I didn't get to see this one, but I spoke to Nathan about it for a bit. This a flight simulator that UVU has been putting together. Nathan has been doing a lot of models for the project. Looking good so far. It's built in Unity, so you can click on the link above and play it.

Tank Raige Arena - Nick Terry

Nick showed Tank Raige Area again, but I was unable actually see it this time around.

Linetastic - Josh Jones

Josh showed his quick game he did at GEEX for the Game-In-A-Day event.

I noticed that Alan Atherton was there showing a game, but I didn't get to see it (so I don't know what it's name or what it was about).

As always there was some great conversations going on, including one about the game engine called Scratch. It's a project that M.I.T. put together and it's purpose is to help kids (and even adults) to learn how to program. It's similar to Game Maker or Construct in some ways, and it has a visual language that consists of putting blocks together. Apparently it's pretty powerful to use, and a couple of guys have had their kids write games with it. It appears to be a great learning tool. You should check it out.

Anyway things went really well. Our next one should be towards the end of January.

BTW - Rachel's write up on the evening can be found here.

Viva la Indie!

Utah Indie Games Night - September 2011

2011-09-30T20:16:00.013-06:00

Wow, last night was AWESOME! We had a really great turn out (over 50 people) and it was an enormous treat to hear from Tracy Hickman, a renowned game designer and best selling author. He had a lot of wisdom to impart to us, and I felt like a sponge just soaking it all in. I certainly learned a lot from his presentation on "Story and Meaning in Games".

Tracy started his presentation on how story gives meaning to events. He mentioned that the news is done in a story format these days because story can communicate meaning. A pure journalistic approach would be communicating just the facts and then letting the reader decide. However the media likes to give "the story" so they can help shape our thoughts and opinions about the events, and thus sway our thinking towards their agenda.

He described different kinds of story structure in games from a linear type to more of a branching type used in games, with both hard and soft boundaries to help guide the player and plot to flow in a general direction. He also went into differing types of characters, and how you can boil them all down into eight different types. Four of those types are "driving" characters that help move the plot along, and the other four are mere "passengers" that come along for the ride. It's interesting to note that in some stories the main character doesn't have to be a "driving" character, and he used "To Kill a Mocking Bird" as an example of this.

He also discussed the four different through lines within a story. He mentioned that games do a good job of presenting the "Objective" and "Main Character" through lines, however they don't yet do a great job at presenting the "Subjective" and "Impact Character" through lines within a story. Because of this, stories within games can fall a little "flat". There does seem to be some truth to this, as I haven't been impacted nearly as much by stories within games, as I have been by stories within film and prose. I'm not an avid fiction reader, but from my own experience I can say that stories within the written word have taken on more meaning to me than stories within film, and then to a lesser degree, stories within games. I think this is in large part because my own imagination fills in those gaps, and the visuals from movies or games just can compete with that. Perhaps it's just that storytelling within games hasn't had enough time to "catch up" to where storytelling is within film, as film has had a lot more time to advance as an art form than games.

Tracy ended with a thought on how his books have impacted others and likewise our games could effect and change the world as well. I know we probably don't think about that much, as we ascribe ourselves as being mere entertainers, but we have the potential in our art and craft to touch lives (hopefully for the better). When I look back on my life, I can remember stories within books, movies, and games (mostly adventure games for me), that have filled my life with more meaning and have a special place in my heart. Those "stories" have had a powerful impact on my life, and I think we sometimes underestimate the power of "story". I think we have a responsibility as game designers to imbue our games with more meaning, and touch the lives of others in a positive way.

Apparently Tracy also offers classes on storytelling, both online and in-person. So if you're looking to just improve your storytelling abilities or are looking to write own novel and publish it to the world, you can find some help from Tracy on his site at http://www.scribesforge.com/

Also you can catch Tracy's presentation here. (Note the video is flipped) Kudos to Ben Benson for making this available, and kudos to Brad Baker for helping to bring Tracy to our event.

After Tracy's presentation we moved to the U's Xbox lab for our demos. We had so many demos happening that I wasn't able to see them all, but I'll mention the one's I saw and those that I knew where there. I'm sure I missed some and I apologize that I wasn't able to get to them. Here's the eleven that I know about.

Frayed Knights - Jay Barnson

Jay was there showing off Frayed Knights for the last time, as he has finally reached that milestone that many of us want to achieve, and that is finishing and releasing your game. Congrats Jay; I'm jealous now (as I still haven't released anything yet). I also hear that there was a celebratory cake given to Jay in commemoration of this event. I was a bit late to the event and didn't see this happening, so I'm thinking at this point that the cake was a lie. ;) (You Portal players know what I'm referring to here.) Anyway Kudos to Jay for reaching this milestone.

NerdWord - Brett Unzaga

Brett had an interesting game that is sort of a hybrid of Scrabble, Boggle, and the falling tiles game mechanic. It's an online game where you try and beat the scores of other players. Everyone has the same game board for that day, so it's fair. The tiles are Scrabble like by having different point values, and the object is to construct words with the different tiles like you do in Boggle. Once you've constructed a valid word, those tiles are removed from the board and any tiles above those removed tiles will then slid down into play. The person who constructs the highest point value set of words at the end of the day is the winner.

Smote - Bryan Livingston

Bryan's game "Smote", has come a long way since I saw it last. I played it for a bit and there are some real graphics in there now; not just a bunch of white blocks as it used to be. It's sort of a hybrid between an RPG and a top down shooter. I love the art style he has going with the stubby little anime characters; it's very cute and endearing and fun too.

Multifarious - Devin & Dustin Jenson

I only got to see this iPad/Android game for a brief moment. It's being made by two brothers and they've done a great job so far. It's a physics puzzle game of sorts where you have to tilt the iPad to move blocks and/or balls to their final destination. It starts simple but then gradually adds more objects that you have to manipulate at the same time. It can be frustrating when have to tilt the iPad to slide a block to the left, but not so much that another ball will fall off a teeter-totter. They are using Adobe Air to power their game. I think it's a great game so far and I hope it does well for them once they get it to market.

Faerie Alchemy - Ben Benson

Ben works for Subsoap and has been working on an iPad/iPhone puzzle game that combines Tetris and Match3 game mechanics. It looks very near completion and he's done a great job on it. It took me a moment to figure out the controls on his mac laptop for the game, but I imagine that since its a game for a mobile device that the touch controls would be much more useful. The game is also written in Monkey and that piqued my interest as I've played a bit with that language a bit and I'd like to use it for a future mobile game project.

CarWood - Josh Jones

I wasn't able to get to Josh's latest experimental game at the event, but I was able to play it a bit later. The theme this time was "Story Game" and its a Ninja vs Robots type game, however you are half ninja half robot, so you don't really fit into either world. On his blog he mentions that "two AI agents determine the dynamic elements of the story", which seems like a unique approach to AI, instead of the usual one master AI controller.

March to the Moon - Curtis Mirci

I got a brief look at the progress Curtis has made on his hybrid RPG and vertical shooter. He's been making "crazy" progress on it and he's nearly complete with everything. He's added a bunch more weapons, abilities, and art since I saw it last. Kudos to him for making some rapid progress on this. (Again I'm jealous.) Also I noticed that both Bryan and Curtis are making RPG/Shooter hybrids. Are they working together on something? Hmmmm?

Linkrealms - Herb & Dan Flower

I noticed that Herb and Dan were showing LinkRealms again, however ran out of time before I could see their new changes. They are always improving their MMO, so I'm sure it's just getting better and better.

Bullet Train Hell - Chris Tart

Chris was showing his awesome Bullet Train Hell again. I only got a glimpse of it but it looks like it's coming along nicely.

Tile Factory 2 - Jonathon Duerig

Again time was short so I didn't get to talk to Jonathon about his sequel that he's making, but I think it's cool that he can leverage some existing code and art for his new game. You can find the original one here.

The Island of Cthulhu

I didn't get to see this student project which is apparently a Crysis mod, but judging from the video and screenshots on the modDB site, it appears that they are doing a great job with it.

UVU Flight Simulator - Nate Stoker
Nate showed off a flight simulator that he did some of the models for. I didn't get a chance to see this at the event, but was able to play it a bit later on. It's built in Unity and web enabled. It looks really good.

All in all it was a wonderful evening. We were truly fed some sage wisdom from Tracy and we saw some incredible games in development. I'm always amazed and humbled at the talent of the indies here in Utah. We definitely have an awesome group. I can't wait until next time.

Viva la Indie!

BTW, here are some other write-ups of the evening

http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=3369

http://thepretentiousgamer.blogspot.com/2011/09/utah-indie-game-night-september-2011.html (Part 1)
http://thepretentiousgamer.blogspot.com/2011/09/utah-indie-game-night-september-2011_30.html (Part 2)

Utah Indie Games Night - July 2011

2011-07-30T01:27:00.012-06:00

We had another awesome indie night this last Thursday night. Our numbers were a bit lower this time around but it was still a great event nonetheless.

Tim Fowers of Gabob kicked off our evening by giving an excellent presentation entitled "Turbulence Ahead: The Ups and Downs of Getting a Premium Flash Game to Success." It was a presentation that he originally gave at the first Flash Gaming Summit (which is part of the GDC) in 2010. He also gave some updated and additional information that wasn't in his original slides. The presentation mostly revolved around experiences with their successful premium flash game called Now Boarding. Though he also mentioned their next game Clockwords which wasn't nearly as successful.

He mentioned a bit about their demo strategy, which cut the game off right at a cliff hanger. Though it may seem a bit cruel to end the demo there, it does provide some motivation for people to pull out their wallets. It a useful strategy that I've heard mentioned before, and the psychology of it seems to make sense. He also mentioned an interesting guerrilla marketing technique that allowed a potential customer to get the game for free if they did some word of mouth advertising that resulted in a sale. It seemed like a very cheap way to get some free advertising and publicity going. Every bit helps.

He mentioned that they used an simple custom built online activation scheme with their game that allowed them to thwart some of the pirates. It sounded very similar to the DRM scheme that Cas from PuppyGames.net uses, and they also claim that their piracy rate is low or non-existent.

He also mentioned the local Board Game Designers Guild of Utah as being a great way to strengthen those game design abilities. Sort of a "gym for game designers". I was unaware of this group, but it seems like it would be a great resource to both video game designers as well as board game designers.

Some of the other take-aways from the presentation that I got were:

- Focus on creating value and not money (that will come once there is real value there)

- Be flexible in your business plan (feel free to change course some and/or experiment as needed)

- Make your game both distinct (stands out) and polished

- Find good partners and work hard (you usually can't do everything yourself)

- Focus on recurring (not one time) income, even if it's small initially (this pays off in the long run)

- Be "Ramen Profitable" (be frugal and bootstrap as much as possible)

- Having different prices for your game in different countries can be a good thing

After the presentation, we had quite a number of games that were shown (nine that I saw, though I could have missed one or more).

Catalyst - Brandon Nielsen

Brandon showed my his progress on his "escape the space station" type of game. It's in it's early stages, but he plans to make the game play about learning about the environment around you and finding a way out before the space station slowly disintegrates. It's a race for your life sort of game.

Tank Raige Arena - Nick Terry

Nick briefly showed me the progress he's made on his multi-player tank battle game. He's in the early stages of porting it to Unity. I'm assuming he's abandoning parts of his custom engine in favor of Unity because of some of the benefits that Unity will provide, like having a web enabled game, cross platform support (Windows & Mac), possibly having an iPhone version, etc.

March to the Moon - Curtis Mirci

Curtis showed me his top down action shooter (with some RPG elements in the mix). In the first level you are battling rats in the basement of a tavern. You currently have a choice of fire balls or arrows that you can shot at them. Even in its early stages the fun and humor come shining through. I believe he said that it's built in XNA and he hopes to get it on XBLIG (Xbox Live Indie Games) when it is complete.

Siphon Spirit - Peter Anderson, Curtis Mirci, Dave Matney

Peter showed off the progress on Siphon Spirit at the event. Admittedly I didn't get to see this one too much, but Peter has been hard at work adding more levels to the game as well as adding a bit more artwork polish to it as well.

Epic Puzzles - Ben Benson

This is a Kindle game that Ben has been working on for a while now. A Kindle game at our event is certainly a first. It's essentially a story that also has you solve puzzles along the way. It seems like it's a good fit for the Kindle market (story & puzzles), and I hope it does well for him. He already has a publisher lined up for the game as well.

Adventure - Chris Tart

Not much outwardly has changed on Chris' cool platformer, however he's been hard at work on the underlying engine. He's been converting it from C#/XNA to C++ so that he could use the engine on the iPhone/iPod Touch. He showed me a mac version of his game, using his new engine, and it was running just as smooth as the older XNA Windows version.

Bullet Train Hell - Chris Tart

Chris also showed me a quick prototype made with his revamped engine. The game is set on top of a moving bullet train and you have to jump over objects and hit switches to move. Similar to his "Adventure" game, but simplified. He even had the game running on his iPod Touch. Amazing.

Rick Invaders - Paul Milham

I got a quick look at this humorous game that Paul threw together for a friend. It's a side scrolling space invaders type of game, but with some humorous artwork. It was meant as a way his friend could take revenge on his former boss (virtually anyway), by shooting the enemies (which conveniently looked like his former boss)

Intergamerated - Josh Josh

This is another experimental game from Josh. The theme was disintegration, so Josh chose to make it about disappearing game mechanics. There are three game mechanics; shooting, typing, and timing, and these will go away one by one as you mess up using that mechanic, thus making it harder as you go. It's an interesting idea. I've seen some similar things done in racing and fight combat games where your control over your car or plane disintegrates as you take on more and more damage.

Also there was plenty of good conversations going on. I was involved in discussions about entrepreneurship, game engines, finding work in the game industry, Kindle development, and much more. There is always so much to talk about, but never enough time. I grateful to be around so many indies that are making their dreams happens. You guys are an inspiration to me and always get me pumped to work on my own project. I thank you for that.

Until next time,

Viva La Indie!

Utah Indie Games Night - April 2011

2011-04-29T20:00:00.010-06:00

Indie Night last night was awesome!. React Games was gracious enough to host the event and we had a super turnout of over 50 people there. There was so much going on and so much energy there, it was incredible! The event was definitely a success in my book.

We started the evening off with a presentation on Flash Development by Jonathon Deurig. In his presentation, he started with an overview of flash and talked about both ActionScript and haXe for a bit. He mentioned the different pieces needed in game (in addition to your game), such as the loader piece, which is very important (otherwise you end up with a blank white frame for a while and the user will likely assume your game is broken). He also mentioned that you don't want to do too much processing in any one function otherwise the display callback isn't going to get called often enough to refresh your canvas; thus giving you choppy video in your game.

The best part of the presentation for me was when he started talking about monetizing flash and shared his own personal experiences. It sounds like sponsorships are the best way to bring in money with flash games. For Jonathon, this brought in way more than standard ad revenue and contest winnings.

One disadvantage of Flash is that it is 2D only, so it won't work for 3D games. However it sounds like Newgrounds is now starting to allow Unity games on their portal, so we may start to see more Unity games out there.

We then broke out into our game demos. We had nine demos in all (although there was so much happening I may have missed some). Here's what I was able to see.

Music Prototype - Tim Fowers - Gabob
Tim of Gabob showed off his prototype of a game (or construction toy), that is something akin to these Kinetic Music Junk Sculptures you may have seen at art galleries. You start out with a set of objects that you try to get your ball to pass though. You then dynamically build the track while the ball is motion, all the while trying to hit each object. As the ball passes through the object is plays a sound. Once your track is built, you end up with an interesting contraption that you can watch and listen to for a while.

Protype FPS/Tower Defense Prototype - Brett Unzaga
Brett showed off his prototype game that was part First Person Shooter and part Tower Defense. Built in DXStudio, it is an interesting experiment in merging these two types of gameplay.

Skylantis - UVU Students
Preston Powell brought a few of his students to the event to show Skylantis, which is a Unity game that 13 students have been working of for around 4 months. I was quite impressed with what they had accomplished in that time. The game is about a robot that is trying rescue his friends from an evil baron that has captured them. It's set in a steam punk type world with floating islands that you have to traverse. You can use vents to float you around or you can use your grapling hook. There are also bombs that you can pick up and throw at robot crabs. The main robot character (complete with idle animations) is nicely done and looks like something you'd find right out of the movie Robots by Dreamworks. Nicely done guys!

Halloween Panic - Mike Whitaker, Edgar Nielsen, Paul Milham - Cerbercat
This is a cute and addictive flash game where you try and protect some trick-or-treaters from hoards of zombies, ghosts, swamp creatures, and other ghouls. You basically shoot as many monsters as you can before the monsters consume the kids. A very fun fast paced game.

Grow The Grass - Mike Whitaker, Edgar Nielsen - Cerbercat
This is a simple iPhone game coming soon to the app store (it's just been submitted for approval from Apple). BTW, it's Built with Corona SDK, a nice cross platform engine that builds iOS and Android apps from the same code base. The game-play is super easy. You merely press a button over and over to grow the grass, to protect the humans from the bees (who'll try and beat the grass back). The faster you hit the button the faster the grass will grow. There's also a two player mode where one player tries to grow the grass and the other uses the bees to beat the grass back.

Adventure - Chris Tart
Chris was showing off some additions that he made to his XNA based game. He added a restriction that doing two builds in a row can kill you. Also added some disappearing floors, and a boss that can trap you in a shrinking force field. He mentioned that he started porting from C# to C++ so that he can port it to other platforms eventually. It looks like its coming along nicely.

The next three games I didn't really get a chance to see, although I have seen earlier versions of them.

Siphon Spirit -Curtis Mirci, Peter Anderson, Dave Matney - Califer Games
Curtis showed Siphon Spirit again, and this game is nearing completion. I don't thing any of the gameplay has changed, they've just squashed more bugs and added some more polish to it.

Tank Raige Arena - Nick Terry
Nick showed his Tank game for a while. In talking to him is sounds like he's improved the Tunngle (a P2P VPN solution) within the game a bit, which should help the multiplayer aspect of the game a lot.

LinkRealms - Herb & Dan Flower, Paul Witte - Mythyn Interactive
In talking to Herb & Dan it sounds like they've been busy working on LinkRealms as usual. They've added a Quest engine and newbie mode (which is under going some changes). It sounds like this is coming

As usual, there were lots of great conversations going on a well. Many of them I missed of course, being only one person. It's was a great evening. It helped get me pumped and motivated to work on my own projects again. I'm both inspired and humbled by all of the many things our indie group has done. Keep up the great labors of love guys!

Viva la Indie!

Utah Indie Games Night - January 2011

2011-01-31T23:46:00.003-07:00

We held another Utah Indie Games Night this past Thursday Night. I was involved with the Global Games Jam this past weekend, so I'm a bit late getting my report out about the evening. Sorry for my tardiness.

We had around 25 people there at the event, which is a bit low on the attendance side, but still a decent turn out. We started the evening off with a presentation from Mark Schmelzenbach on "The Fine Art of Conversation (Systems): Talk on Talk". It was a discussion of various conversations that have been employed in video games. Such types include Linear Conversation (no choice), Branching Conversation (probably the most common one used), Topic Conversation (starting a dialog based on a set of topics), Simulation conversation (the hardest to implement), and Blended Conversation (a bend of these techniques).

He also discussed various input and output of these systems. Typical input would be keyboard or controller, but we may be close to using a microphone with actual human speech. Output is usually text and sometimes with voice acting. Sometimes "mumble voices" are used along with text. And lastly text-to-speech is another, but isn't used much as your actors sound like robots.

He also talked about the innovative "pie menu" input system found in Mass Effect 2. It incorporated two axises of control; one to select standard or special topics and the other to select between charming (soft) and intimidating (harsh) responses. Also he mentioned Alpha Protocol which had a timer to force you to choose dialog responses, and a secondary conversation system (implemented as an email system within the game). It was a very interesting presentation.

Then we opened things up for our game demos. Unfortunately I didn't get to all the games. In fact, I only got to see one and that was "Adventure" (working title) by Chris Tart. It was an interesting platformer with puzzle elements. On some levels you could preform actions to add to the level in order to be able to get to the exit. One of the actions created a moving platform which you could then use to either place other static platforms or run on the platfom to get to another part of the level. The combination of these two created a bunch of levels that were very challenging, and were hard to find solutions for. The game was built on XNA and used the platform starter kit. He has a good start on this game and it looks like it could turn into something really fun.

Other games that were there, but I didn't get to see were Siphon Spirit, Cannon Ball Ruins, and a game about catching flies.

There was lots of good conversations happening too. Don and I talked a lot about the iPhone and Android markets. As usual, there was lots happening and I missed some of it (as usual). It was a great evening!

Viva la Indie!

PS Jay's writeup can be found here

Utah Indie Games Night – October 2010

2010-10-29T16:11:00.011-06:00

We had another awesome Indie Games Night last night. I counted 37 people attending, so it was a good turn out (certainly far from our record but still a good turnout). We started off the evening with a short and sweet presentation on Easter Eggs by Nick Terry. He gave us a quick run down on their history mostly. The first Easter egg known is the one that is in the classic video game "Adventure" by Atari. It was the developers way of still getting some credit for writing the game (even though he had to hide it some). Later they became just something fun for the user to find. Still later hackers realized the could take advantage of "undocumented code" (Easter eggs) and sometimes use it maliciously. By 2002 Microsoft introduced their Trusted Computing Platform and banned all undocumented code. Nick also mentioned the "Hot Coffee" incident and how it tainted people's feelings about Easter eggs. He said if we do include Easter eggs in our games, we should be responsible and only do something that is just pure fun and not malicious.

After Nick's presentation we broke out into showing demos. We had quite a lot of demos shown this time; 12 games shown in all. I wasn't able to see them all, but the ones I missed have been shown previously at our past events.

Recursion - Tim Fowers, Tom Mason - Gabob
Tim's friend Daniel came and showed us Gabob's latest game Recursion, which is their IGF entry for this next year. It is a unique and innovate game. I don't think I've seen anything like it. It's basically "Pacman meets Paper Rock Scissors". It's a flash game for two players on the same keyboard. Each round you pick one of paper, rock, or scissors and then try to move around the maze and try to destroy your opponent. On the next round you pick another object, but your previous choice still is still there and it follows the same path you did before. The same with your opponent. So there's a time element you have to be aware of as you play with all the "ghost plays" of previous rounds. Each round just builds on the last, until finally one player looses all three of his objects (paper, rock, scissors). I hope this does well for them in the IGF.

Catapult for Hire - Tyrone Henrie
Tyrone showed us his cute game made in Unity. He mentioned it started out as game for the IndiePub competition, where it won "Staff Pick" and then has just grown from there. Essentially you are a knight gone freelance catpult operator and you do jobs for people to help them solve a problem. You can then use the money earned to upgrade your catapult. There are different types payloads, such as bunnies, steel balls, bouncy balls, bombs, antigravity balls, etc. You'd pick the appropriate payload for the task you need to do. Also, there are different modifications to the payload that you can add, like a parachute or glider, that can help guide your payload to the target. There are also different ways to solve each level (job), so there are a bunch of puzzle elements to the game. Here's some YouTube videos that
show off the gameplay.
trailer video
gameplay video

Galatic Defendor & Sphoids - Brett Unzaga
Brett showed us two small games that he made in DX Studio. The first was "Galatic Defendor", and it is a basic 2D shooter game that he created to learn DX Studio. It uses a follow the mouse move mechanic and you have to shoot at the attacking enemies. Once you kill 3 of them then more come in greater and greater waves until finally the big boss arrives. The second game "Sphoids" is sort of a combination of Tetris and Bejeweled. You have these groups of spheres that arraigned like Tetris shapes that you can rotate and drop like (just like Tetris). However once they are dropped the spheres of the same color will combine into longer chains. You have to have at least 3 of a kind to be able to remove them from the bottom. On the left is a goal that you are trying to achieve, like a chain of seven blues. Once you reach that goal that level is over.

Shattered Colony - Jon Duerig
Jon showed his completed flash game, Shattered Colony. Armor Games has picked up the game and is sponsoring it on their site. Basically it takes place during the Zombie Apocalypse, and you and your band of survivors are trying to defend your portion of the city and grow it to include more territory. It's a hybrid RTS/Tower Defense type game. You can build sniper towers, baracades, workshops (which are used to gather/scavenge resources), and depots (which you need to build your supply line). It a very interesting game and quite more in depth than most flash games.

Facebook Game - Les Pardew - Alpine Studios
Les came an showed their upcoming Facebook game. I can't say more about it other than its about to go Beta and it looks really cool.

Siphon Spirit - Curtis Mirci, Dave Matney, Peter Anderson - Califer Games
Curtis was showing some new additions to Siphon Spirit. They now added cutsenes, which look really nice and give it a lot more polish. Also, they've added in Mirana, the character whom you are playing. She's the priestess who is casting the spells and guiding the orb. They also added some new spells, such as the conversion spell which can convert enemy orbs around you into friendly orbs. Also the addition of a shield, which if used allows you to absorb orbs bigger than you.

He also showed a Sprite Generator tool that he's been working on. It create sprites via layers. You can use prebuilt sprite sheets and create a custom character from that. So you pick the body layer, then the clothing layer, then the hair layer, and accessories layer, and colors for each of these and viola! you have a new sprite. Pretty cool.

LinkRealms - Herb & Dan - Mythyn Interactive
Dan and Herb were showing some latest additions to their MMORPG. The big thing they've added is giant bugs and some intricate bug AI. (intricate robot like AI). There's a hierarchy of bugs from King bug, Dungeon Boss, General, down to soldier bug, and the leader bugs can even talk. If there's more than five bugs together then can elect one be their leader then they may take on the dungeon boss or king and maybe take over (so their roles can change). Dan was explaining to me some of the intricacies of the AI system. It's a very elegent system they have in there to make the AI data driven instead of code driven. Very flexible and much easier to tweak.

Tank Raige Arena - Nick Terry - Pheenix Studios
Nick was showing his multiplayer tank game, but I was unable to see this one.

Frayed Knights - Jay Barnson - Rampant Games
Jay was demoing Frayed Knights. I didn't get a chance to see this one at the event, but he told me it's essentially everything that he had demoed before, but now wrapped into one big package. You can read his blog for more details on this.

Flexitris - McKay Salisbury
McKay was showing his tetris type game again. I didn't get a chance to see this one so I'm not sure what improvements he's made.

A World of Kelflings - Steve Taylor - Ninjabee
As things were dying down, Steve showed us some things with their soon to be released "A World of Kelflings". It is coming along nicely and it looks awesome! Words don't do it justice, so watch the trailer here.

There were also some great discussions going on as well. All in all it was a great evening!

Viva La Inde!

P.S.
Jay's writeup of the evening is here.
Josh's writeup can be found here.

Utah Indie Games Night – July 2010

2010-07-30T17:53:00.016-06:00

We were a bit smaller in numbers this time around; about 25 people were in attendance. It’s still a fair number, but down quite a bit from last time. I’m not completely sure why we were down so much. Perhaps it was because we didn’t have pizza this time around (though I hope that not the only reason people were coming). I know July is a busy month for people too, so maybe it was just scheduling. Not sure.

Anyway we still had some awesome speaker and some awesome games shown. Mike Rubin of Orange River Studio gave a presentation on “Game Design Innovations in Interactive Fiction”. They were many in the crowd that haven’t grown up with the likes of Zork and other text adventures (now called Interactive Fiction), so the whole idea of Interactive Fiction (IF) was a bit new to them. I grew up with Zork and the Scott Adams adventures, so I was fascinated by Mike’s remarks. Mike mentioned that the parser was one of IF’s greatest strengths and also its greatest weakness too. It gives the impression of openness and unlimited verbs within a game, but it can also give the player a lot of frustration if the player constantly has to “guess the correct verb” to do something. IF has evolved a lot over the last 30 years, and have made some innovations to help bring more meaning and depth into the games. These innovations were the core of his talk.

The main innovations that I gleaned from his talk were:

-Better conversation and help systems
The game Blighted Isle included suggestions on what the player could type and also gave hyperlinks and numbered topics to help the player move the conversation along. The game Blue Lacuna and helped the player by responded to phrases like “I don’t know how to get the sword” with useful help (unlike a lot of IF that would respond with a default “I don’t understand that” phrase). It also included different colored text that highlighted recognized nouns, exits, and topics to help the player avoid the “guess the noun/verb/topic” frustration. (BTW, Blue Lacuna was written by Aaron Reed who used to come to our Indie Game Nights before he moved to California.)

-Use of emotional modifiers
The disturbing game Varicella allowed the player to use modifiers like Cordial, Hostile, and Servial to change to tone of your voice, which would in turn change how the Non-Player Characters reacted to you.

-Better conversation flow
Games like Galatea and Alabaster use a multi-liner plot with hundreds of quips that provide a more engaging conversation. The state of the conversation is also stored so that certain topics aren’t available at various time (such as if you are ignoring the NPC or not offering any info on you). In most adventure games the NPCs are often just “info vending machines”, but these two games provide something much more rich.

-Better implementations to offer more meaningful choice (freedom) in the game
The disturbing game De Baron is a piece of IF that offers more choices to the player, often forcing the player to make some moral choices along the way.

Mike did an awesome job with his presentation. We then opened the rest of the time for some game demos. We had six demos being shown (many were shown previously)

Tile Factory – Johnathon Deurig
This was a flash game about constructing contraptions to get ceramic title in piles ready to ship. It’s sort of a manufacturing puzzle game. You have to set up conveyor belts, bumpers, sensors, and painting machines to both paint and get the tiles from point A to B. It also had a nice tutorial at the beginning that helps the players get into the game. It looks to be a very fun game.

Zombie Defense –Darius Ouderdirk
Darius had me play his tower defense game again. I noticed he’s added a bit more polish now. There was even final art in a few places that looked really nice. Technically “Zombie Defense” is a working title since there are no longer zombies in the game. I believe they will be some sort of monster now though. It now had a tutorial section in it that helped explain the game for new players. It’s certainly coming along.

Flexitris – McKay Salisbury
McKay showed his highly configurable tetris clone built with XNA. There were a few graphical improvements since I saw it last. It now has a background to add some interest and the tiles look much better. On the main screen there are over thirty parameters that can be changed that affect the gameplay. For example, you can adjust the width and height of the play area and the speed at which the shapes will fall.

Gost - Josh Jones
Gost is a small flash game made for the Experimental Gameplay project. The theme this time was Repetition. You have to click on some moving ghosts in the correct order to send them to the afterlife.

Tank Raige Arena – Nick Terry
Nick showed me a little bit of his tank MMO game, however he didn’t bring in the newest build so he wasn’t able to show me some of the new features. He talked about it using some middleware called Tunngle, which is a peer-to-peer VPN solution that makes it easier to play multiplayer games over the internet. It will also handle the match making for you as well. It sounded pretty cool.

Vespers 3D – Mike Rubin
After his presentation Mike got a few questions about his game Vespers 3D, so he showed it to them. I didn’t get a chance to see what progress he’s made on the game, but I know it’s an interesting game that you should check out if you haven’t already.

As usual there were some cool discussions going on a well. At one point the topic of Apple’s hatred of Flash on the iPhone came up. Apple sure seems to be “loosing face” on many things lately, like this one and the whole iPhone 4 antenna fiasco. If they keep this up they are going to start losing even the die-hard Apple fans. Anyway, despite the numbers we had an awesome time.

Viva la Indie!

P.S. - Jay's write up can be found here.
Josh has some comments about the evening here.
Mike Rubin's presentation slides can be found here (on our Google Groups site).
Also, here's some import IF links that Mike provided.

Interactive Fiction Database: http://ifdb.tads.org/
IFWiki: http://www.ifwiki.org/

Parchment (online IF player): http://parchment.toolness.com/

Interpreter applications:
Zoom (Mac and Unix): http://logicalshift.co.uk/software/index.html
Gargoyle (Windows): http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/
Frotz (iPhone): iTunes App Store

IF Games mentioned in the presentation (all available at IFDB):
Blighted Isle: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=9s66qxkt22kq5wv9
Varicella: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ywwlr3tpxnktjasd
Blue Lacuna: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ez2mcyx4zi98qlkh
Galatea: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=urxrv27t7qtu52lb
Alabaster: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=b2g8je1xxtqzei4u
De Baron: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=weac28l51hiqfzxz

Other recommended games:
Vespers: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=6dj2vguyiagrhvc2
Anchorhead: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7

Utah Indie Games Night - April 2010

2010-04-25T02:04:00.014-06:00

After last Thursday night all I can say is WHOA! It was an amazing evening. We had around 60 people there, which is definitely a record for attendance at the Ninjabee site (and possibly overall). It’s incredible how this little event has grown. We also set a record on the number of games being shown at the event; 18 games in all. I wasn’t able to see some of them though; too many games, so little time. Also for the first time ever, we had demos being shown on both floors of Ninjabee. There just wouldn’t have been room otherwise.

We did a postmortem on the Global Games Jam (GGJ). My objective was a bit different then most of the teams. I had the objective to learn the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine, and I think I accomplished that goal by finishing a small two room adventure. A number of others from each of the teams got up and shared some of their thoughts on the event as well. Some of the points that I picked up on are:
-Sound can drive the creative process, and can really add a lot to a game.
- Happy accidents (things that weren’t planned but improved the game) can happen along the way.
-A lot of people talked how scoping helped them finish the goal.
-Everyone had a blast and everyone’s creativity was at a peak due to the environment.

Also, EA sponsored that event and handed out t-shirts after the postmortem to those that participated in the GGJ. Thanks again EA! If you want to play the games that were made at the GGJ, you can find them here.

Part of the reason for the record numbers was thanks to Brad Moss, who teaches the game design class at UVU (and is the lead developer at React Games), as he brought his crew of students to the event to show off their projects. They brought seven projects in all, though I was only able to see five of them. They were all built with the Unity engine and I was amazed at how much could be done in so little time. I will make an attempt to share some of what I saw. Please forgive me if I’ve gotten some details wrong, there was just so much happening. Feel free to comment or email me if you’d like to correct the record. Anyhow here it goes.

Ostrich 911 – Kevin Roberts & Jason
This was the first student Unity project that I looked at. It’s an interesting game where purpose is to find your fellow ostrich, by sneaking through a barn and evade getting caught. You have a miner’s flashlight and pogo stick to help you along the way.

Element – Abe Raigne & Kurt Spears
This was an interesting two player board game that is similar to Othello, though you have magic spells that you can cast at the other player. One player plays as Fire and the other as Ice. The art was superb and the game play looked fairly intuitive.

Broken Sky – Nick Murano
I was really impressed by art in this student project. You played as this metallic fish skeleton (sort of like a junk sculpture) that flies through the air and engages in a dogfight with another fish enemy. There were lots of little floating islands that added to the whole ambiance.

Jack – Preston Powell & Sam Richmond
In this student project you play as Jack pumpkin head that needs to find a number of pumpkins to regain his soul. There are several puzzles you have to figure out to eventually win the game.

Beefy Greeks – Aaron King & Brittney Peterson
This was the last student project that I saw. This one was similar to bulldogs. The object was to attack your opponent’s castle. You would set up your units and traps (all while the other player was not watching) and then once you both set them up you’d launch your greek soldiers at each other in the hopes that some would make it to opposite side and do damage to your opponent. After a number of rounds one of the two players will emerge victorious.

Flextris – McKay Salisbury
This is a variation of Tetris written in XNA. In fact you can define your own rules, so that you can play a number of variants on the Tetris theme. It was fun. I saw a number of people playing it that couldn’t seem to stop.

Siphon Spirit – Peter Anderson (also Curtis Mirci & Dave Matney)
Peter showed me some additions to Siphon Spirit that they have been working on. They added free energy that don’t hurt you like the other orbs do. Also they have shields and time bombs now that add some variety to the different levels. He showed a boss level where a demon heart (orb) is attached to larger boss and moves around in circles. It’s coming along nicely.

Udder Chaos – Victor Chelaru
Vic has been porting this iPhone game to the Xbox and has been using his Flat Red Ball engine to do so. It’s a simple game where you, or a group of players, can help protect your cows from some cute cartoony aliens. You have to shoot the aliens multiple times, before they take your cows away in their tractor beams. It’s very fast paced and fun game.

Linkrealms – Herb & Dan Flower (also Paul Witte)
Herb and Dan showed me some changes they’ve made to Linkrealms. They are very close to launch BTW. They’ve added pets to the game; most notably chickens. You can raise and breed your own chickens to be used in fights (basically a mini-game). They showed me the intricate system that creates the AI for the chickens. It’s data driven and looks very similar to neural nets. Also these pets can learn from you as a player. They watch what you do and then will start to take on some of those behaviours. They’ll also be adding wolves as another pet that can accompany you and protect you as well.

Two Experimental Games – Josh Jones
10 Second Path was an experiment in creating an animation based on the users input.
Mouse Hug was really fun. It was basically like wrestling with the mouse. Two players will use one or two mice and then “wrestle over” the mouse cursor to keep it on your side and then click as much as you can. First one to get 20 clicks wins. Also, if the mouse is moved out of the circle, then you both loose. It was quite addictive as well.

SONR – John Turner
I didn’t get a chance to see this one, but Jay mentioned this one in his blog.

Ayrik’s A Feeble Saga 2 - Eric Wiggins & Jason Faller
I didn’t get a chance to see this Unity game, but Jay covered this one. I’m assuming this was also the MMO RPG that Jason said they were going to demo. If not, then I missed yet another game.

Massive Freecell – Bryan Livingston
I only saw this one from afar, so I don’t know much about this other than it looked good. I believe Jay also mentioned this one in his blog.

Zen Tac Toe – Don Jordon
Don mentioned that he finished his Tic Tac Toe game for Android, and it is now in the Android market. Congrats Don for finishing it and bringing it to market. Now I just need to finish my game.

Frayed Knights - Jay Barnson
Apparently Jay showed his Frayed Knights a little bit to a few people as well. I don’t think he was planning on demoing it, but when asked to show his game, how could he refuse.

There were also lots of good discussions happening as well. I talked to Joe Larson of Cymon’s Games, and he’s helping to bring the old type-ins back, as a help to budding programmers. Some of you may remember these. These were the programs listings that appeared in magazines back in the late 70’s and early 80’s that you’d “type in” and then run. They were a great resource for learning and that is how I learned a lot back in the day. I learned more from books and these type-ins than I ever did in any high school programming class. My first official computer class was a joke. It was a beginning BASIC class that was taught by one of the athletic coaches (I guess they couldn’t find anyone else), and I ended up teaching the teacher more than he ever taught me. Anyway, thanks for doing this Joe. The more that the youth can learn by example and not be afraid of “code” the better future developers we’ll have.

Thanks again for everyone that came and made it an awesome evening. See you all at the next one in July.

Viva la Indie!

P.S. Jay's write up can be found here.

EDIT: Added Curtis Mirci and Dave Matney to the list of credits for Siphon Spirit, though Peter was the only one demoing it this time around. Also added Paul to credits on Linkrealms. Also fixed verbiage about mouse hug and added link.

Utah Indie Games Night - January 2010

2010-01-29T21:37:00.019-07:00

My apologies on the delay of this write up. I was involved in the Global Game Jam (which was the next day after our Indie Games Night) and it kind of sucked up all my time. Anyway, we had a totally awesome Indie Games Night last Thursday night. We may have hit a new record; we had close to 60 people in attendance. The excitement and energy was at an all time high. (Special Thanks to Skyler Bradsby for the poster)

"What the iPhone Market Means to Your Development." - Ontario Britton

We started the evening off with an awesome presentation from Ontario Britton of PepperGum games. He totally brought down the house with his mix of comedy and info on selling games in the iPhone market. It was the most entertaining and humerous presentation that we’ve ever had. He mentioned that you need to “know your context” whenever you start a project. In other words you need to know who your target market is and if your planned of distributors/portals (in this case the Apple App Store) fits with that target market. He showed some stats that showed that about half of the people in the app store are from the US, and that most iPhone owners are young to middle aged adults (and not teenagers as is commonly believed). He also mentioned that you shouldn’t spend a lot of time on any feature, unless it has some sort of viral component to it. He mentioned that the best way to get your game noticed was within the app store itself, though banner ads could be expensive and getting on the top 100 list is difficult (but very helpful once it makes it there). Lastly, he mentioned that his 3 pillars to a successful game are:

1- Have a well executed game design (targeted for your market)
2- Polish, Polish, Polish
3- Lots of good marketing

DazLinks – Brian Howell & John Renstrom
After that Daz3D showed their nearly complete tool called DazLinks. I believe they are planning a full announcement around GDC in March. It’s pretty amazing what it can do. It helps solves the problem of using off the shelf 3D models from Daz and being able to bring it into a real-time rendering game engine. Previous to this it wasn’t very possible for game developer to use Daz3D models in their game (except for maybe title screens and the like) and the polygon count and number of textures was just too high to use in a game engine. Daz Links will reduce the meshes (and skeletons) from the model and clothing down into just one mesh. It also combines textures into one (and properly UV maps everything). It will also reduce the number of polygons down to a manageable level, without any noticeable loss of form (in most cases). It can be used to generate different models at different Levels of Detail (LOD) from the same model, so you don't have to create these yourself. Also with Daz morphs, you can use one model and modify it to be a troll or elf (all from one model), which also helps generate more content for your game. In short it helps Indies by making cheap models usable in your game. This looks to be a promising tool indeed.

Here’s a YouTube video that gives you a little more info can be found here.

Siphon Spirit - Curtis Mirci, Peter Anderson, & Dave Matney
Curtis and Crew showed off their upcoming game Siphon Spirit. Basically the object is to collect (or “siphon off”) energy from various orb (or “spirits”) around the game screen. You have to get close to the orbs but not collide with them (else you die). Some orbs will shoot at you so you have to be careful. Also as you progress to higher levels, some orbs will move and try to collide with you and thus kill you. It was an interesting game mechanic, and it’s certainly one that can ramp up with progressively more difficult levels.

Experimental Games – Josh Jones
Infinite Number Adventure – This game was an experiment in randomly generated maps. It randomly places object that you have to go around and collect. You get bonus points if you stay within bounds.

Psycull: Perfect Storm – This was an art game and is a commentary on the role of a producer in a game company. You have to balance the ideas (represented by little clouds) coming from the developers/artists below. Sometimes you have to move them to other people or throw them out. When the milestone time hits, your project is evaluated. If there’s too many ideas, you have a poor product, or if there too little ideas in some areas, then you also have a poor product.

This is why you're FAT - Paul Milham
Paul was showing of a flash game that he and Mike Whitaker put together in a couple days close to Thanksgiving. It’s cool game where you shoot turkeys as fast as you can in 60 seconds. When you hit them, the bigger turkeys become smaller turkeys, and the smaller ones turn into lots of turkey carnage. Once the timer runs out, you eat all the turkeys that you’ve killed and you become a very fat guy. The more turkeys you’ve killed the fatter you get. It was fun to play, and it sounds like it’s done fairly well on Newgrounds and other flash portals.

Frayed Knights - Jay Barnson
I didn't get to see a whole lot of the progress on Jay's game, but it looks like he had spent a bunch of time working on dungeons in a Minotaur like level. He mentioned to me that "mazes suck" and he was trying to not leave the player just wandering aimlesslyaround in the dungeons, by making certain parts different from each other (landmarks if you will).

Flash Level Editor – Carson Barlow
Carson showed me his level editor that he built on top of flash. It allowed for placement of static and moving platforms, as well as walls and other obstacles. Eventually this will be used in a game of his, something akin to Dante's Inferno.

Zombie Defense – Darius Ouderkirk
I missed Darius showing his latest changes to his zombie game, but I caught up with him on Friday at the Global Game Jam (which was awesome BTW). The changes have been with the AI and game balancing, so nothing has changed visually yet. He fixed an issue with balancing so that you now have to have a mix of different kinds of units in order to win. Game balancing can be very hard to do, but it can make the difference between a game that is fun to play and one that isn’t.

There were also lots of great conversations going on all over. I’m sure there was a lot that I missed. Jay and I had a commiserating session on why both of our games are still not done. Yes, we’re still at it several years later. It was a nice “kick in the pants” for me. I also talked to Mike Rimer for bit (I was nice to see him again), and he mentioned to me that his business partner (the guy who started Caravel Games) has gotten really burned out and has turned everything over to him. So Mike has been busy this year dealing with all the business side of things and hasn’t been able to work on anything new. I guess the bright side is that DROD is still selling and making some money. Mike, I wish you well and hope things improve.

Thanks to ITT-Tech for providing us a place to meet, and a big thanks to both Daz3D and ITT-Tech for sponsoring the food. And thanks to everyone that came and made the night so awesome!

Viva la Indie!

Jay's writeup can be found here.

Utah Indie Games Night - October 2009

2009-10-16T17:09:00.017-06:00

What can I say? Last night was just awesome! We had a great turnout with close to 50 people in attendance, which might be a new record. There was just so much energy in the air, you could almost feel it. Needless to say the even was a lot of fun, and that's what games are about, right? Also we had Panda Express (Yum Yum!) for dinner this time instead of the usual pizza, so that was nice change of pace.Add Image

Game in a Day
Steve Taylor started of the night with a great presentation on doing a "game in a day". Steve's definitely a proponent of this exercise, having done it about seven times himself. He's even had his whole company drop every thing else and focus on doing a game in a day. He did this to help build the team and help bring some more synergy and efficiency to the team. It's not necessarily the game that the goal, but the lessons that you learn from it. One benefit to doing this exercise that hadn't occurred to me was that it can motivate you on old projects. Especially if you're in a rut in your current project; taking a break from it for a day and focusing on another game can "jazz you up" and help bring some energy back to the old project. One of Steve's game in a day projects, Rome, also became the basis for their latest game Kingdom of Kelflings.

If you’re interested in doing a game in a day, contact Steve at stay@wahoo.com. Also Josh Jones is working to bring the Global Game Jam to our area next year. More details will be made available to the group later as they are "fleshed out".

Okay the highlight of the evening can be summed up in one word - Archon!

React Games (a small independent studio here in the valley) came and sponsored our little event. They wanted to throw a party of sorts anyway to celebrate the opening of the pre-sales for the PC version of their game, so we decided to combine the two events. I think it worked out well. React has remade the original Archon game into something beautiful and very faithful to the original. I remember playing Archon as a young teenager on my Atari 800XL and loving it. Admittedly I never got good at it, but I was always captivated with its combination of strategy-based and skill-based gameplay. There were some similar games that came later on, like Battle Chess, but I still think Archon has more rich strategy than these others. The original was only a one or two player game, but now React has added a four player option, which I think is cool; it certainly enhances the gameplay. You can play four players in either a free-for-all mode or a team mode. Also the graphics also are just gorgeous; I wish I could make my game as pretty.

They also sponsored an Archon Tournament and the winning team won T-Shirts. This was the first time we ever had a tournament during Indie Night, and I think it went really well. There were lots of players over there competing for the prize, and I could tell that there was a lot of excitement going on. It also looks like the React guys got a lot of good feedback from the players, by getting their opinions and watching them play. I think it was a win-win for all involved.

Also, Congratulations to Justin Barlow and Jake Dinkins for winning the Archon Tournament, and taking home the booty. Way to go!

BTW, Jay has a great writeup on the game here. Also, if you want to get in on pre-sales (which will get you a reduced price and early access to the game) please go their site www.ArchonClassic.com. I may have to pick up a copy myself. ;)

Other demos for the evening

DazLinks - John Renstrom (Mogware) & Brian Howell (Daz3D)
Mogware and Daz3D have teamed up to create a product called DazLinks. It helps solve the common problem of being able to use stock 3D models in games. Most models that you buy cheaply (from places like Daz3D) have a very high polygon count, and usually too high to be used in a real-time rendering engine. Daz Links helps solve this problem by reducing the meshes down to a manageable level. It also combines textures into one, further optimizing the model. It can generate different Levels of Detail (LOD) from the same model, so you don't have to create these yourself. Also with morphs, you can use one model and modify it to be a troll or elf, which also helps generate more content for your game. In short it helps Indies by making cheap models usable in your game. This looks to be a promising tool.

Our Tower Game (working name) - Paul Milham & Mike Whitaker
This is a flash game in its early stages. It's a real time tower defense type game where you are trying to stop an invading frog army. You set up towers to fight the oncoming army, and as frogs die they give up their "gibs", which you then collect and use to build better towers. One unique thing about this game is that the towers are made up of two parts, a base and a weapon, which you can customize to have more options on what your tower can do and how vulnerable it is to attack. I know the art is early, but I liked the cartoony style that they have going in the game.

Zombie Defense - Darius Ouderkirk
I played this for a while and it looks like it's coming along. Most of the changes, since I last saw this have been changes to the AI. My understanding is that, he added some restrictions on placement of fences and how buildings were placed on the screen, which greatly simplified the AI. I gradually built up my machine gunners, riflemen, and fences and was able to protect my last few blocks of the city, although I lost most of the city to the Zombies. Though that's part of the decision process in this game. Protect too much and you're spread too thin; protect too little and you risk losing all the citizens as the zombies just gain enormous strength.

Experimental Games - Josh Jones
I played Josh's two new experimental games

Minput - This game has only one action you can take, but you decide when to take it. There's a hallway with people running down it. Your one action will block the hallway, but the outcome is different depending out who you let pass before blocking the path.

Fail Fail - This is a simple game where you have to decide what the content of the picture is (or rather the source of the photo), but you only get to see a small portion of the picture at the top. It is either a picture with dogs (Mutt Fail) or a picture of an accident (Epic Fail). The pictures are dynamically pulled from the web, which explains why Josh was laughing so hard when the full pictures were shown. I initially thought that he knew the answers before hand since he wrote the game, so I wondered why he was laughing, but once I knew that they were new to him too, I understood.

Balloon in a Box - Tim Tillotson
I played Tim' iPhone game, where you had to move a balloon through a small maze, by tilting the phone, until you reached the checkered flag at the end. After the first level there are fans and darts to avoid, which will pop your balloon and you'll have to start over. I found that I had to fight my natural instincts as I familiar with the tilt games where you move a marble through a maze, but in this game you have to tilt it the opposite way (as the balloon floats up). Another thing challenging about the game is that you can only see a portion of the maze at a time, so you don't fully know where the destination is. However this is helped by the fact that the portions you have visited in the maze are lit up, while the unvisited sections are dark. This way you have a better idea where the end may lie.

Andriod Tic Tac Toe - Don Jordon
Don showed me his Tic Tac Toe game on his android phone (T-Mobile myTouch). He had been doing this to learn the android API, and it looks like it’s coming along. I'm really amazed at how the iPhone and Android platforms are taking off. These platforms might not be the best to bring in lots of cash, but they are a great way to get started as a hobbyist or a way to release a game that acts like a marketing tool (such as a small iPhone game that in a way advertises a better experience in they PC game of the same name).

Good Conversations
Inevitably there are some great conversations that happen at our Indie Nights and last night was no exception. I'm amazed at the variety of experiences and types of backgrounds of people in our little indie group. I talked with a guy that just moved back to Utah from Texas and had worked on the Guitar Hero team. I love Guitar Hero, though I really stink at it. My 14 year old son can put me to shame quickly on it. Another guy talked about how he felt Indies may take over the game market. I'm not sure if that will happen completely, but there is a lot of truth in how the old methods of making games are dying out and the Indies and small studios have a better chance at survival. The big

budgets and big teams of the mainstream industry combined with dropping game prices is just not a sustainable thing. I also had a good talk with Jay about Adventure Games and how they are making a bit of a come back. I'm encouraged by this as it's one of my favorite genres, and I'd like to make a point-n-click adventure someday (though I need to finish my current game first).

It was a really great night; certainly one of the best that we've had. I feel a lot more motivated and energized to work on my own project now. I think the indie scene is only going to grow more, and I'm glad to be a part of it.

Thanks again to everyone. Thanks Ninjabee for providing us a place to meet. Thanks React Games for sponsoring the food and the wonderful Archon Tournament. And thanks to everyone that came and made the night so awesome!

Viva la Indie!

P.S. Jay's writeup can be found here.

Utah Indie Games Night - July 2009

2009-08-01T15:27:00.022-06:00

We had an another awesome Indie Night, with possibly a record turnout. We had somewhere between 50 to 60 people there. It was really packed with people and packed with games and information. There was so much going on I was unable to talk to even half the people there, and I'm sure I missed a lot of what was happening. Even my conversations seemed a bit rushed as there was just so much happening. It was a really busy, but very enjoyable night.

We started the evening off with a presentation by Chris Evans on iPhone Development. He (along with his brother Marcus) shared some good information on just how quickly the iPhone has grown as a gaming platform. Just some pronominal growth. He shared some examples of some iPhone apps that have made millions, but then quickly showed what the more normal numbers were (which are very low). My biggest take away was the $250 dollar rule that Apple has. Apparently a developer won't get paid anything from Apple until it had made at least $250 dollars gross (per country). And with a lot of apps priced at $1 that means you'd have to have at least 250 sales in the US before Apple cuts you a check. At that point Apple takes 30% and the developer gets the remaining 70%. This is why most apps make exactly $0 (since they never get over that hurdle). Seems like Apple has quite a raquet going on. Chris mentioned that their iPhone game is still wating approval from Apple to get in the app store. Apparently long delays for approval are not uncommon. Their game is called "Max Diamond: Treasure Hunter Extraordinaire" from Morphosis Games. Look for it soon on the iPhone app store.

We had a record number of games that were shown. So many that for the first time I wasn't able to see them all. Here's what I was able to see.

Kiten - Josh Jones
This was an experimental Flash game that has an AI that adapts to the player. It's a fast paced frantic shooter where you shoot at the enemies as fast as you can. The enemies adapt to either "hold back" or "really bring it". The AI can even be a blend of other AIs. You try the game yourself here.

Pain Town & Rafkill - Jon Rafkind
Pain Town is a fighting game along the likes of Street Fighter or Mortal Combat. I was very impressed. The controls and everything seemed very fluid. He's been working on the engine and the game for about 3 years now. You check out the game here. He also showed my an older game of his called Rafkill, which is simple top down vertical shooter. He mentioned that he sold it to another company that then they changed the graphics and marketed it as "Tusk".

Zombie Defense - Darius Ouderkirk

Darius showed me the progress he's made on his game. Mostly they were changes in game balance and AI. For example instead of the Zombies coming from everywhere, they all start from one location (or a few locations in upper levels). This allowed for better placement strategies for the different units. Also the money you earn is directly related to the buildings you've saved, rather than the number of Zombies you killed. This put the emphasis back on defending the whole city.

Qubix - Paul Milham
This is a fun flash game where mere survival is the object. You have a cube that you move with the mouse and it grows if you touch other cubes of the same color and shrink if you touch cubes of a different color. As time goes on the other cubes move faster and faster. There are also timed events that happen periodically where the cubes start criss-crossing , speeding up, or if you're lucky they'll all turn your color and you can gobble them up. The game is over if you shrink to nothing. The game is nicely balanced and is very compelling.

Tank General - Shylar
This is a real time tank warfare game made in Director; something like "Scorched", but in real time. You control your tank with standard WASD keys and the mouse. You have to kill the enemy tanks and large bosses around various terrain. The terrain can block the artillery of the enemy tanks so you can use that to your advantage. Occasionally you'll have to dodge homing missiles as well. There are power ups that increase your moving speed or aiming speed or give you rapid fire. It looks like this is coming along nicely.

Wii Dancing Game - Les Pardew
Les of Alpine Studios came and showed the Wii dacing game that his team is working on. I can't say too much about this game, but the motion was really fluid and it was awesome. I think this one will be a hit, especially in families with young girls.

Heroes For Hire - Mike Whitaker & Ed Nielsen
They told me the name will be changing as there is a AAA tile with the same name; probably something like Trio For Hire. Anyhow, this is a flash based game that is similar to Rampage (and XCom), except you are trying to save the city and not destroy it (though you just might do a bit of destruction while getting rid of your enemies). I saw Mike playing as a robot defending the city from a giant kid in a Godzilla suit, a one eyed spider, and a giant garden gnome. The art was fantastic and added a lot of humor to the game. It had sort of an "Alien Hominid" sort of feel to it. They are planning to enter the game in the Newgrounds contest. Good Luck to them. I hope they do well.

Radioactive Joe - Carson Barlow
I didn't get a chance to look at this one other than a DVD cover that he made for the game. This was made for his capstone project at ITT-Tech. It looked pretty good based just the cover screenshots. It looked to be an action adventure, sort of Zelda like.

Darkened Dreams 2 - Curtis Mirci & Peter Anderson
I didn't get a chance to see the progress that they've made on this game. Just a really busy night. Though based on Jay's report, most of their progress has been "under the hood" and nothing that could really be shown visually.

I also spoke with Gabrielle Long, a talented freelance artist that is looking for some contract work or a full time position. You can check out her portfolio here. If you'd like to hire her or know someone that might, you might want to drop her a line.

I'm amazed at how this event has grown. We started out almost 4 years ago with just 11 people getting together in Nijabee's small basement office, and now its grown to a much bigger event. I'm glad to see the Indie spirit alive and well. I always come away from these events very inspired and with renewed energy. It was a blast.

Viva la Indie!

Jay's write up can be found here, and Josh's write up can be found here.

Utah Indie Games Night - April 2009

2009-05-01T20:28:00.009-06:00

We had another fantastic Indie Games Night last night. We had close to 40 people there in attendance. Not quite a record but still a great turnout. Some of that was due to a field trip of sorts from some ITT-Tech students (thanks Ray). It certainly looked like everyone was enjoying the evening. As usual there was a lot going on, so I feel like I've missed out a little bit on some great conversations.

We started the evening off with a presentation by Darius Ouderkirk on "Choosing a Project Wisely". Darius gave us some good advice on picking the right project so that it would increase your chances on finishing it. It kind of boiled down to "knowing yourself" (your strengths & weaknesses), "knowing your audience" (their likes & dislikes), and "knowing your purpose" (what's my goal in doing this? to learn? for fun? for profit? etc.). He had a lot of good items to consider before starting a project to make sure the project is a good fit for you. A couple of points that he mentioned that I've learned the hard way are:
1) Keep it small (if you don't keep it REALLY small you may never finish it)
2) Do what you do best and outsource the rest (My first serious indie project was in 3D, and I learned that that's not where my skills were, so I had to put that project on hold.)

Darius was kind enough to share his slides with the group. You can find them here. He also plans to write more about the subject, so keep and eye on his blog here.

Here's my summary of the projects that were shown

Zombie Defense (working title) - Darius Ouderkirk
Darius' zombie tower of defense game is coming along nicely since he showed it to the group at our last meeting. He now has different placeholder art and the gameplay has improved some. There are now three types of zombies (or monsters) that attack; Lurchers (the basic ones), Crushers (slow but powerful), and Runners (quick but weak). To defend against on onslaught you have Machine Gunners, Cannoners, Snippers, and Rifleman with various strengths and weaknesses. Sandbags, fences, and bridges can also be place around the buildings. He mentioned that he'll be adding country style maps (in addition to the city maps already there) with differing terrain, which could add even more strategy to the game. He also showed me some of the concept art that for the game, that his artist came up with. It's kind of a cartoony anime style and it looked really cool. I think this will be a great game once it comes together.

Kingdom of Keflings - Steve Taylor
Steve also showed Ninjabee's kingdom building game for a bit. It's something akin to Civilization but made more accessible to the average player. I believe it might be the first game that will let you use your NXE avatar in the game, basically putting YOU in the game. As always Ninjabee does an excellent job on their games.

Demons of Corrath - Justin Mayhew
This one is still more in the concept stages. Justin described the gameplay as a side scrolling hack'n'slash type of game where you are defeating waves of monsters thrown at you. The original thing about the game was that once you were dead, you didn't just respawn, but rather you enter the dead underworld and had to fight the dead spirits there. Every spirit you defeat there adds to energy and if you absorb enough, you can reincarnate and come back to the land of the living. So lives in this game aren't just a stat, but a game mechanic as well. Justin mentioned that he's currently looking for a programmer to help him finish the project.

Vespers 3D - Mike Rubin
Mike showed some of the new additions to Vespers. I noticed that it a very nice intro sequence now. There seemed to be a lot more walkable areas now, and characters that you can talk to, since I last saw the game. There were a lot more enviromental or atmospheric items to fill in the rooms, so that they don't look so bare. Mike mentioned that most of the coding for the game is done, and that most of the work lately has been just adding content. I noticed that object that you could interact with would highlight as you moved the mouse over them, which was a good visual clue to let user know that something could be done with that object. That way they wouldn't waste their time typing in commands for objects that didn't exist in game internals. I also had a hard time hearing any of the voice overs in the game as the room was really loud
with lots of people talking. It certainly was quite the event.

Frayed Knights - Jay Barnson
Jay showed off his latest build of Frayed Knights. It has new dialog, spells, monsters and part of a new chapter. I got see the spell casting better than I have in the past. He showed a part of the new chapter where we were suddenly fighting three different skeletons with swords and shields. Then he threw different spells at them like "angry flowers" (I guess flowers are really scarry to dead people) and a spell that throws them throw a window (the window just appears out of nowhere for a comedic effect). It's shaping up to be a nice game.

Darkened Dreams 2 - Curtis Mirci & Peter Anderson
Curtis and Peter showed their progress on Darkened Dreams 2. The biggest thing that I noticed right off the bat was that there was a lot of final art added to the game. It's looking very nice now. He showed some combat with killer rats and rabbits. Remind me not to go strolling around that countryside. ;) They mentioned that their focus has been turning this into an RPG Maker of sorts. The editor will be the big selling point to the game, as it will be fully moddable. The user can add and modify maps, items, abilities, characters, enemies (NPC), dialogs, quests, and more. There was even some rudimentary scripting in the engine as well. It looks very customizable and would probably be a good fit for those wanting to build their own RPG. The character builder had tons of options and looked like it could create a wide variety of characters (male, female, and children).

Again I want to send a big thanks to Ninjabee for hosting the event and helping it to be a great success. They just keep on getting better. Also thanks to everyone that came. It was a super evening!

EDIT: Jay has posted his writeup now here. Also Darius is putting his presentation into a series of articles on his blog. The first one is on his blog now called "Choosing a Project: Know Yourself".

Dr. Dobbs Mystery

2009-04-30T13:06:00.006-06:00

It appears to be a case of identity theft. Back in January, a friend of mine sent a scan of the latest (and last issue I later learned) of Dr. Dobbs Journal. I couldn't believe it. It was almost like looking in a mirror. The guy on the cover looks very much like me. How dare he steal my identity! What mad scientist did this? and why? Apparently this imposter is still at large. He's probably still writing articles and passing them off as his own. I have been unable to determine who this guy is. If anyone has any leads on this guy I'd certainly appreciate it. It the meantime my evil twin (or am I the evil twin?) is out there minding his own business. He has to be stopped! ;)

Here's a better comparison, so you can spot the suspect.

Utah Indie Games Night - January 2009

2009-02-01T22:22:00.010-07:00

I apologize that I'm finally getting around to this write-up. I've had some important family matters that have taken up most of the weekend. We had a wonderful Indie Games Night this past Thursday. There were lots of new and familiar faces at the event. The event was well attended and we may have hit a new record in attendance. There were a lot of other students coming in and out so it was hard to count how many were actually there for the event. It appears there was somewhere around 40-50 there.

We also had a record number of projects being shown; Seven in all. So many in fact I wasn't able to see Josh's last two mini monthlies there at the event, but I checked them out in his blog later.

As usual there was so much going on, I felt like I was missing some good things. There was a lot of industry talk going on. There was lots of talk about the recent SensorySweep Fiasco (the company has been sued for not paying employees), and also some talk about combining Avalanche and FallLine Studios (since they are both owned by Disney).

We started the evening off with a formal presentation by Josh Jones on "Motivating Crunch: A MiniMonthly Postmortem". Basically it was some of the lessons he learned from his Mini Monthly projects. He talked about dealing with crunch time and staying motivated. He mentioned that you need to be accountable to yourself and use some time management techniques to "Manage the crunch". He mentioned that everyone does "Work work", "Fun Work", and "Fun" with our time. You need to always make some time for the "Fun Work", even if that means doing less "fun". You can access his flash presentation here.

Here's the projects that were shown:

Tank Raige Arena - Nick Terry

Nick showed off his 3D Tank shooter MMO. It has been the culmination of over 4 years of work, and it looked pretty fun. I believe he said that engine and everything was built by him. The arena is populated by other players and enough bots to balance the game. If you fire too much too fast your gun will overheat and will need to cool down before you can fire again. If you die you will respawn in another part of the arena. In the final game a portal will open after beating the boss (which isn't there yet), and that will let you move to the next level.

Darkened Dreams 2 - Curtis Mirci

Curtis showed his RPG in development. He showed a bunch of features in the Level Editor, which he plans to ship with the game so users can create their own levels and quests. You can also customize your character as well. Not just attributes, but the appearance as well. In the first version of the game, it had a text based input interface with some minimal graphics to show relative positions of rooms, objects, and characters. Very similar to a lot of old text adventures and early RPGs. The second version is based on XNA and is looking very nice.

Zombie Town - Darius Ouderkirk

Darius showed his zombie game that uses a "Tower of Defense" play mechanic. You start out by picking your Home Base then Zombies will attack that building (or group of buildings). You can also set up a number of hero units (Snipers, Machine Gunners, etc.) to help defend the base. You can also setup sandbag blockades and bridges also to help you hero units defend their base. You can setup your defenders on buildings, on the street, or behind sandbag blockades, or on bridges. The game is built using TGB, and is coming along nicely.

Smote - Bryan Livingston

Bryan has put together a robust framework for an MMORPG (currently entitled "Smote"). Currently it is using minimal graphics, but the engine seems to scale well. Something needed in an MMO. It playing the game I was able to jump, fly, fight enemies, and restore my health. He was debating about whether to make the game gamepad driven or mouse and keyboard driven; each of them have their pros and cons. He plans to use the standard fantasy theme of most RPGs, but to use retro Vector graphics to help set it apart from other RPGs.

Galactic Winds - Carson Barlow

Carson showed off one of his Student Projects. It was a 2D side scrolling shooter. You are piloting a space ship above some terrain shooting at alien ships of different kinds. There are some ships that come in like a wave and then stay in position. Each type of alien has its own behaviors to make this classic gameplay interesting. It's looking good.

Two Mini Monthlies (Think Again & Good and Evil) – Josh Jones

Josh showed his last two mini monthlies. The one called "Think Again" appears to mostly be a puzzle game, where you have to place diamonds of different size to correspond to the numbers on the board so that that many diamonds are touching that circle. I wasn't completely sure what to do in "Good and Evil", and his blog mentions is not much of a game but more of an art piece describing the good and evil all around us.

LinkRealms

Herb, Dan, and Paul were also there and showed some of their new YouTube gameplay videos. As always these are looking really nice.

I also mentioned to everyone at the event, that Aaron Reed's new interactive novel Blue Lacuna is out now. I was also really impressed with his marketing effort "Blueful" that was very original. It has pieces of the story strewn throughout the real internet on sites like YouTube, MySpace, LiveJournal, Flicker, etc. It was very interesting.

Josh also blogged about the event here in his blog. Also I'm sure Jay will write about the event eventually, but I know he's having some internet connection problems right now. Look for his writeup on his blog http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/.

Again I want to send a big thanks to ITT-Tech for hosting the event and helping it to be a great success. This was one of the best one's we've had. Also thanks to everyone that came. It was a super evening.

Viva La Indie!

EDIT: Jay just posted his writeup here. Also my appologies to Bryan for calling Smote "smoked". I'm not sure why I had that wrong in my head somehow. I fixed it above.

Utah Indie Games Night - October 2008

2008-10-24T18:23:00.012-06:00

We held another Utah Indie Games Night last night, and it was another great evening indeed. We had a few new faces show up as we usually do, and attendance was a little above normal. I counted around 32 people there last night. Also, for the first time ever (that I can recall) the pizza ran out, which is another indicator that there were a lot of people there.

Unity3D Engine
We started off the evening with a presentation on the Unity3D engine. Brent Arnold did a wonderful job showing off some of the capabilities of the engine. He showed off the indie game Off-Road Velociraptor Safari that was built with the engine. He also brought up the editor and showed some sample projects and a basic overview of creating a game. He even showed one of those projects (a game where you fly a ship through hoops in a courtyard) deployed to an iPhone. You can run your Unity3D game in a browser (with a plug-in), or on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and the Wii. It looks to be a very capable and promising engine. The authoring environment is still Mac only at this point, but it sounds like a Windows version is coming. There is an Indie license of the engine for only $199, which makes this a very great deal for us indies. It almost makes me want to start a 3D project. (Almost that is, I still do need to finish the 2D project I’m currently doing).

After that we broke out into smaller groups and a looked at some demos that some of the group brought.

Forgotten Lore - Ryan Day, Brent Haworth, Mike Keller
Ryan and his crew showed off their RPG game that they’ve been making using RPG Maker. It has started as a school project for ITT-Tech, but it sounds like they’d like to continue with it after they graduate. The game currently uses the default tile set that comes with RPG maker, but they have plans to change the art. If they hadn’t told me this I wouldn’t have known, as the art looked great to me. One thing that sets this game apart is that you are not out on a quest to save the world. Your four characters are not necessarily “good guys”. You are just trying to survive and stay alive. When you enter villages you can pickpocket villagers, but you could also be caught by the law for doing such too. How good or bad you want to be is up to you. The project looks great so far.

PongOut – Derek Lansing
Derek brought a school project that he has been working on called PongOut. It’s a two player game that is a combination of Pong and Breakout. Basically the gameplay is like Pong where you knock balls back and forth, but you also have to protect the bricks behind you. There are special bricks that if hit will cause you to Freeze for a while, or turn you invisible (not a good thing in this game), or cause your up and down controls to be swapped (very confusing while it lasts). It’s currently played with Xbox controllers (or other gamepad), and it seems to work well. The game is based on the TorqueX engine so it uses XNA and can be run on an Xbox (with the XNA creators club subscription).

Mini Monthly Games – Josh Jones
Josh showed off some more of his new flash based mini monthly games. I had played Cat Ties earlier but I was rarely successful at getting a good decision tree. After talking, to Josh it sounds like there is not an ideal tree that works in all cases, so that made me feel better. I guess it wouldn’t be as much fun if there was. He also showed off Spooky View and Pagoda, which I honestly didn’t get a good look at them though. I’d like to try Pagoda sometime as Adventure games (including text adventures) are one of my favorite genres of games. You can try them yourself by clicking on the links above, or by going to Josh’s blog at http://vazor222.livejournal.com/.

Boingz – Ninjabee
I also got to play a little with Ninjabee’s new WiiWare title BoingZ. Brent Fox had it loaded up on a Wii DevKit and let a bunch of us try it out. It was really fun. The object of the game is to get all of your little guys back home by “flicking” them from point to point and also “stretching” them across ravines to turn them into bridges. It should be coming out on the Wii really soon, so look for it, it’s a fun game.

I also spoke to Adam Helps and Clarissa who are putting together the second annual SparkArts Festival on November 21st & 22nd. It sounds like the event is growing and should be even better than last year. I be sending out some more info on this to the group later.

I also spoke to Steve Morrey for a bit an he’s in the process of starting a new MMORPG kit project (not be confused with MyDreamRPG – He’s no longer involved with that project). I believe it was going to be called DreamRPGOnline. He’s been working with clustered servers in the corporate world for a while, and it sounds like he using some of those lessons learned from clustering and applying them into this new project. He hopes to launch this soon, so watch for it.

All in all it was a great evening. I also come away "pumped" and excited, and tonight was no exception. It always gives me some extra motivation to work on my own indie projects. Now I just need to finish my game...

Jay also has a writeup of the evening here.

Utah Indie Games Night - July 2008

2008-08-01T15:44:00.006-06:00

We had another awesome Indie Game Night last night! Ninjabee was nice enough to host the event once again and I thank them for that. We were a bit low in numbers (just around 20 people compared to our usual 30-40 people), but the evening was still awesome. I'm not sure why we were lower in numbers; perhaps it coincided with others summer vacations; perhaps the high cost of gas kept some away; perhaps something else; I'm not really sure on that.

Anyhow, we did things a little different than past events, we had a formal presentation to start off and then we broke out into smaller groups like we normally do. It was a format we had tried to do one time when we held it at ITT-Tech, but due to some unforeseen issues that day, it didn't work. However I think it worked well this time, and a number of people mentioned to me that they thought it worked well that way too.

10 Quick and Dirty Tips To Help Sell Your Game

Jay kicked off the evening with his presentation on Indie Games Marketing. He did an awesome job! It was chalk full of some good information. Most of the material came from things he's learned along the way, and some came from Joseph Lieberman's book The Indie Developers' Guide to Selling Games. I think everyone came away learning something new from this.

If you want a refresher on the presentation, or you happened to miss this great presentation, you can get Jay's PowerPoint slides from our group's website at http://groups.google.com/group/utah-indie-games/web/Indie_Game_Marketing.ppt. (I think Google forces you to be signed in to the group in order to download this though).

Now Boarding

Daniel Orcutt demoed a newly finished game called "Now Boarding" . He came representing a couple of friends (gabob.com) that used to live here in Utah but have since moved to Kentucky to do indie game development full time. I guess property values and the cost of living are much cheaper out there. The game is a tycoon or resource management type of game, where to have to manage your passengers and planes. You have to get people on the right planes and move the planes to the right airports, all while keeping your customers happy. Like most tycoon games it starts at a slower pace, and then builds up to a crazy frantic pace. As you progress further in the game, you can get employees that help you take care of different tasks. It's an awesome game and it hope it does well for them.

Mini-Monthly Flash Games

Josh Jones showed off three more of his little flash demos. I only got a good look at two of them however. First he showed a sort of simple adventure or RPG, where you had to escape the room, by jumping on objects and finding keys. It was a bit challenging.

Second, he showed his mudslinging demo where two players compete turn by turn to get the most mud balls on their side of the court. You can either add a ball to your side or take a ball away from your opponents’ side. In making this game Josh happened upon an interesting physics variant that made for some interesting behavior. If the balls of mud collide with each other, they push each other up, creating these mud stacks that almost look like they are alive. It's like mud creatures that are being formed out of the balls that are being slinged. It's fun to watch.

Here are links to the three games he showed off.
http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vazor/tarijump/tarijump.html
http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vazor/mudsling/mudsling.html
http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vazor/playfate/playfate.html

LinkRealms

All three of the LinkRealms guys were there showing the progress they've made on their MMORPG. Some the things I notice were they added various types of Gryphons. They apparently can shower your character with ice crystals and cause you to freeze, or they can spew out poison that can make your character ill, or they can spew out fleas that caused your character to start scratching profusely. Fun stuff!

Lastly there were tons of informal discussions going on as usual in small groups. I feel I missed out on some of these, but there were plenty of good conversations being had. I always come away from these renewed and inspired, and last night was no exception. It's given me a little push that hopefully will get me going again on my own project again. I can't wait till the next one!

Here's some other write ups:
Jay's write up http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/2008/07/controversial-indie-games-get.html
Joe's write up http://mymediaempire.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/utah-indie-game-night-7-31-08/ (It's nice to see someone else blogging about the event other than Jay and I).

Edit: Look's like Josh wrote one too. Thanks! http://vazor222.livejournal.com/6887.html

Couple of Side Notes:

Most of you remember Mike Smith who used to be a regular at our Indie Game Nights, before he moved to Washington. Mike informs me that Caster http://www.elecorn.com/caster3d/ is in Beta now. If you're interested in beta testing it, give him a holler at (elecorn AT gmail DOT com).

Also, here's some coverage of Indie Games at E3 (I didn't know that there were "Indie Games" at E3). There are two games talked about here that are very innovative and unique. If you have around 9 minutes, check out http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/20343.

Viva La Indie!

Utah Indie Games Night - April 2008

2008-04-25T17:29:00.004-06:00

We had another great Indie Games Night at the Ninjabee offices in Orem. We had a pretty good turn out with around 32-35 people there in attendance. Mike Rimer brought along some friends and family, which included one young man that could juggle 7 balls at once. Yes we had entertainment of all sorts last night!

One downside of last night was that Jay Barnson (of Rampant Games) wasn't able to be there last night (for the first time ever), and has left me be the lone blogger of the evening. Hopefully my words will do justice to the evening, as I'm not as proficient at the blogging thing as Jay. Also, there was just so much going on, I'm sure that I missed a lot of what was happening. Anyone care to fill in the cracks on what I've missed?

We had pizza, sodas, and plenty of good discussion about indie games. We also saw a number of faces that we hadn't seen in a while, so it was nice to see them back. Unfortunately the time went so fast, I was unable to talk to everyone as much as I wanted.

There were a total of six games that were shown last night. Three of them haven't been shown to the group before. They are:

DROD RPG
Mike Rimer and Adam Peterson showed the latest game in the DROD series, and got some good feedback from people playing the game. Admittedly I didn't get a chance to play it, or look at it much in detail last night as there was so much happening. In talking with Mike later, it sounds most of what had changed since I had seen it last was more levels and some "polish" related stuff. He also mentioned that you can now play the game (at least mostly) with the mouse now. The game would do some pathfinding to allow you to move around fairly quickly using the mouse. They wanted to make the game a little more accessible to new players, and because of the new gameplay (with RPG elements), it was more feasible to allow for some mouse control. I hope that does well for them, and brings more players into the world of DROD.

Woggi World
Nathan Stoker showed the group "Woggi World". It's a site that is dedicated to teaching kids how to be safe on the internet, serve in their community, and also learn something about good nutrition. This is done through a collection of flash based mini games, and a online community that let's them communicate with others in a very limited and safe way. Nathan was one of the artists working on the project, and it looks *VERY* nice. I love the art style of the site; cute, cartoony, and fun. One of the mini games involved shooting vegetables at kids in a lunchroom, to keep them away from the cake in the middle of the room. Once the kids grabbed all the slices of cake, the game was over. Another was a racing game, where you had to pick up food along the way as fuel. Good food would keep you going along at a good pace, and snacks would speed you up, but then quickly slow you down later. It's a very simple game and it helps get a nutrition lesson across in a fun way.

When I first heard of Woggi World, it didn't sound much like an "Indie Project", but after hearing about how the guy who started the site has funded the entire project out of his own pocket. It definitely sounded "Indie" to me at that point. Even if it was funded by outside sources, it certainly has a lot of the "indie spirit", as they are try to champion a very noble cause. Admittedly I spent quite a bit of time looking at Woogi World with Nathan, as I have young children that could benefit from this site. If you have small children, you might want to go check it out.

Rover Game
Revere Burnett and his brother showed their rover game that is in its early stages.
It's a 3D game that uses the Orge engine. My understanding is that it is a sci-fi “Zelda-esc” shooter/RPG of sorts, where you have to use your rover to defeat some morphing alien blobs that are taking over a space ship. He now has some enemies in the game, which happen to look like triceratops dinos at the moment. I'm assuming its just placeholder art, and that the dinos will eventually be replaced with aliens.

Flash Game Prototypes
Josh Jones showed off some simple prototype flash games that he's been working on. He got a number people playing them and received some good feedback on them. One was called Hopspot and it that one you had to move a dot through a few different ways until it reached the designated end point. Its basically a puzzle game, but it has a timing element to it that adds a bit more challenge to it. Another was called Rushed, and its something of an extremely short adventure game, where you have to go meet with some unknown alien species, and hopefully save the human race. He also showed a third game called Mindflight, but I wasn't able to get a good look at that one.

Towards the end, Herb, Dan, and Mike decided to show off their projects a bit more.

LinkRealms
Due to a little fiasco last time, Herb & Dan Flower weren't able to fully show off LinkRealms (because the ports that LinkRealms uses are in the same port range that World of Warcraft is using and those ports happened to be blocked at ITT-Tech). So we got to see LinkRealms in action this time, and not just prerecorded gameplay videos. Looks like it's getting better and better.

Vespers3D
Mike Rubin showed a little more of his progress on Vespers3D. Again I wasn't able to see much of what he showed off, as there was just a lot happening, but I know he's been making some progress. In talking with him and from entries on his blog, he's been able to optimize the performance quite a bit, and all due to an undocumented little flag.

If you're interested in finding out more about Mike's progress on Vespers3D, check out his blog here (http://monksbrew.blogspot.com/).

Thanks once again to Ninjabee for hosting the event and to everyone that came. It was a great evening!

Viva La Indie!

EDIT: Here's some links to Josh's Mini games if you'd like to try them out yourself.
http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vazor/hopspot/hopspot.html
http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vazor/rushed/rushed.html
http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vazor/timeplotter/timeplotter.html
http://vazor222.livejournal.com/ (more info)

Also Mike Smith (a regular at our indie nights, until he moved to Washington) mentioned he's been making progress on Caster, and is hoping for a July release. http://www.elecorn.com/caster3d/

Utah Indie Games Night - January 2008

2008-01-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

We had another good Indie Games Night at ITT-Tech in Murray. Attendance was down slightly, probably due to the weather, as it was snowing pretty hard down in Utah County, at the time we started. It was hard to see the lines on the road at times when I was headed to the event, so I imagine that the snow kept some people away. We had around 30-35 people there last night.

I’d definitely have to say that one of the highlights of evening was the food. ITT-Tech brought in some wonderful Mexican food from Red Iguana, one of the best Mexican places in the valley, and maybe on the planet too. It was a very nice change of pace from pizza, and no one went away hungry. Thank You again ITT-Tech!

We ran into some technical difficulties with the Link Realms presentation. There wasn’t any way to anticipate this, but apparently ITT-Tech has some ports blocked, to prevent the students from wasting time play games like World of Warcraft. And of course, these were exactly the ports that Link Realms is using. So in a nutshell, Herb wasn’t able to actually show the new version of the game in action. He still managed to give a good presentation, talking about the MMO industry, and showing some game play videos of an older version of the game. He also showed the editor that users use to create their own “Realm” within the game.

While the Mythyn Interactive guys and ITT-Tech were attempting to fix the issue, Jay and I presented a few games. I showed off Antibody (my “in the body” shooter) again and to fill some time I also showed the cool prototype Crayon Physics done by Kloonigames. It showed how some simple elements, like boxes, circles and some simple physics, can combine to create some emergent behavior that can make for many different solutions to a puzzle. Even more than a designer may anticipate (sometimes good, sometimes bad). Jay showed off some more additions to his Frayed Knights RPG. There is now a large fountain in the game that looks suspiciously like a toilet bowl (this is a humorous RPG after all).

Towards the end of the evening, we had a few guys that decided to show a couple of different projects that they’ve been working on, but we ran out of time, so hopefully we’ll get to see these games next time. I’m looking forward to see them. One of them was WoogiWorld, which is a game to help teach kids how to use the internet appropriately. It looks pretty interesting, from what little I've seen so far. The other game is in its early stages, and is a sci-fi “Zelda-esc” shooter/RPG of sorts, where you have to use your rover to defeat some morphing alien blobs that are taking over a space ship. At least that’s what I remember.

I had originally planned to limit the overhead projector presentations to 30 minutes, and then break-out into smaller groups after that. However that didn’t happen, mostly due the technical difficulties that arose. There were two machines in the room, but only the one with the projector ended up being used. Despite these challenges we still had a good evening. There was good food, some good discussions, some good info presented. Hopefully no-one went away disappointed.

Thanks again to ITT-Tech for hosting the event. Thanks also to Thomas Millen who put together that cool poster above advertising the event.

Utah Indie Games Night - October 2007

2007-10-31T15:39:00.000-06:00

We had another awesome Indie Games Night yesterday. We held it at ITT-Tech this time as they offered to host it this time around. As far as I know, ITT-Tech is the only school in Utah that offers a Degree in Digital Entertainment and Game Design, so holding the event there seemed like a good fit. The event was held in one of the Labs used for teaching the game design classes, and it was standing room only. We had somewhere around 45-50 people attend the event, which would make this a new record for attendance. Unfortunately, some of our other regulars didn't make it this time around; perhaps it was a little too close to Halloween this time around. Hopefully we'll see them next time.

There was tons of pizza and drinks, so I don't think anyone went away hungry. Also, for the first time, our group was able to present their games with an overhead projector. This made it easier for everyone to see the game, but it also added a little more formality to the process. Also there was a nice flyer made by a student, to let students know about the event. I'm showing it off in my blog here (hope that's okay).

There were four games shown (three formally, and one informally), and there were lots of good questions and feedback. We were a little light on the mingle time this time around (we'll probably need to change that up some for next time), but there were still some great conversations going on. Towards the end there were some good conversations about where the casual game industry is headed, and what that means for indies.

The games shown were:

Mythic Blades
Eric Petersen of Cartel Games demoed a updated version of Mythic Blades. It's a 3D one-on-one fighter game using a Greek theme. I believe he's using his own 3D engine underneath. Once the demo was on the screen, the gameplay and graphics just made everyone drool. Well done.

Frayed Knights
Jay Barnson showed his Frayed Knights RPG for the first time (to our group). It looks like he's made tons of progress in the short five months that he's been working on it. He has a nice dialog and combat system in place. I really like the cartoony graphics and the humor. He's using a combination of both the Torque Game Builder and the Torque Engine for this game.

Vespers 3D
Mike Rubin showed his progress on Vespers 3D. This is the first time I've seen it with Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) that talked and you could interact with. It certainly added a whole new dimension into the game. The art in the game is fantastic. He's using the Torque Engine for this game.

Antibody
After the crowd died down some. I did a quick showing of my 2D shooter (code named Antibody). Not as formal or as nice looking as the other presentations, but I did get some good feedback and suggestions. I'm using the BlitzMax engine for this. I've been very impressed with what it can do.

The more I get to know the Indie's in our area, the more I'm impressed with what is happening in the indie scene. There are many that are working on Indie projects; they are just sitting idle. I talked to some of the ITT-Tech students and there are some that are doing projects outside of thier own course work as well. There is a ITT-Tech Mod club, that is making a horror game using the Unreal engine. I also heard of a student making an RPG using RPG Maker. It's cool that ITT-Tech's program is more focused on "creating games", than creating game engines (that's been done to death).

See everyone at our next one in January!

Viva La Indie!

P.S. Also check out Jay's blog for his writeup of the event.
http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/2007/10/utah-indie-night-fall-2007.html

Utah Indie Games Night - July 2007

2007-07-06T16:55:00.000-06:00

We had a really fun night Indie Games Night last night. I counted around 25 people, which is down a bit from last time (July's a hard month with so much going on), but still a good turnout. As usual, there was lots of food, fun, and good discussions about game development and marketing.

Russell Carroll was in town and came to our meeting. It was good to see him at these events again. We got into some good discussions with him about portals and how a developer can leverage their traffic from them, and some other good marketing ideas. He also mentioned that he's working on a game project of his own, so I'll be interested to see what he comes up with.

There were six games shown last night. Here's a quick rundown:

DROD/RPG prototype
Mike Rimmer and Adam Peterson showed off a prototype of a DROD series game that has strategy and RPG elements. It looks real promising. You not only have to solve the immediate puzzle of the room, but you also have to make choices that affect your character and other challenges later. So you have to think more holistically and strategicaly.

Link Realms
Herb Flower and Paul Witte of Mythyn Interactive showed off some changes to Link Realms. In addition to new characters and monsters, there are now fences and gates that can help one protect their turf. I believe they said that the dungeons have been greatly expanded too.

Soccer Like Game
Victor Chelaru showed off a new game demo made with his Flat Red Ball engine. I believe he said the demo only took him an hour or two to put together, which shows the power of his engine. Graphically the demo was very retro; just vector graphic circles and lines. There were four circles (one for each player), one smaller circle for the ball, a box with goal at each side and a score for each team at the top. It was played with four XBox controllers

Band of Bugs
Steve Taylor setup their newly released (on XBox Live Arcade) tactical game "Band of Bugs", for us to play. The game is excellent in every way. The graphics are beautiful, and the game is fairly easy to pickup. Kudos to Ninjabee for releasing another fine game on XBLA.

Fish School
John Olsen showed off his updated version his Fish School puzzle game (using XNA). Unfortunately I was unable to view this one in detail, but from afar it looks like he was making some progress with it.

AntiBody (code name)
Lastly, I showed off my shooter that is set inside the body. (Thanks Vic for letting me use your laptop for a while!) It's still very much in it's early stages. I have switched engines from TGB to BlitzMax. After encountering "brickwall" after "brickwall" (for me at least), the switch to BlitzMax was a good change. The game is just an infinite loop right now with random enemies spawned, but it was apparently interesting enough to keep one of the kids in attendance (I think he was around 8 years old), for quite a while. At some point he said, "Hey, this just goes on forever!", and then lost interest. Yep it has a long way to go yet.

Again I applaud all of you that are working on an Indie project, you are making it happen! As usual, this event has inspired me to continue in my own Indie efforts. Good Luck to all of you, and thanks for helping make our Indie Night AWESOME!

Viva La Indie!

P.S. Jay Barson also has a write up of the event here in his blog.

Utah Indie Games Night - April 2007

2007-04-27T14:05:00.000-06:00

We had another fantastic Utah Indie Game Night yesterday! I counted 31 people in attendance, which is slightly more than last time and a still a good turnout.

There was food, fun, and lots of good discussions about game development and marketing, and as always I get pumped from these events. I'm always inspired from seeing what others have done. I see a lot of dedication and talent, and I just stand in awe each time this event is held. This time I've found a renewed interest in XNA and Flat Red Ball, after seeing what's been done with it. I find it interesting that out of the five projects shown, three of them are XNA based. I'm going to have to look into that some more. It might be good to do some XNA, right after another "Torque is melting my brain" session.

Also we got some pictures this time; thanks to Eric Hamilton who brought his nice camera and took some great pics. You can find them here and here.

There were five demos that were shown to the whole group. Here's a quick run down.

Apocolypse Cow
Jay Barnson showed us his progress on Apocolypse Cow and it seems to be coming along nicely. There was a lot more finished models and art in the game, and an improved HUD display. It's looking simply, Bovine! ;)

Turn Based RPG Engine
Adam Helps was showing off his turn based multiplayer RPG engine. (Sorry, I forgot the engine's name) Though the game side is in it's early stages, you could tell he's done a lot of work on the engine itself.

NES Emulator for xBox
Bryan Livingston showed off his NES emulator running on an xBox 360. I was rather cool to be playing Mario Bros, Xenophobe, Spy vs Spy, and many other classics on an xBox. He ported a open source C++ emulator to C# and XNA, in about 3 hours. Pretty impressive, I thought.

Metal Bar
Vic Chelaru and Mike Smith showed us a game prototype (code named "Metal Bar") they made with Vic's Flat Red Ball (FRB) engine. It was basically a platformer where you play as a ninja and you run, jump and punch things. They told me they spent a few weeks on it, but the vast majority of it was engine code (porting FRB to XNA, I believe). I sounded like only a few of those hours were actual game code, thus showing the power of the FRB engine.

Fish School
John Olsen showed off his new XNA version of Fish School, and it looked really good. It is a matching game that has possibilities for both easy and really challenging levels. It's not a simple match-3 game; it definitely makes you think more than that. I was again impressed with what can be done with XNA

I applaud all of you that are working on an Indie project, as you are not just dreaming, you are making it happen! Like the others, this event has again inspired me to continue in my own Indie efforts.

Viva La Indie!

P.S. Jay Barson has a write up of the event here in his blog

Utah Indie Games Night - January 2007

2007-01-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

We had another wonderful Utah Indie Game Night yesterday! It was our seventh one so far, and the first time our numbers were down a bit, but it was still a great evening nevertheless (and still a great turnout). This time I was able to talk to most everyone for a while, and it didn't seem so frantic. We had 29 total people there, (but that's also counting some spouses and kids that tagged along). I think some of decrease was due to three things: The EA buyout of Headgate, which probably scared some of those guys off; The usuall ITT students didn't come, probably due to schedule conflicts; and lastly some really cold weather may have held back some.

There were discussions about the current state of Indie gaming, the Slamdance fiasco, the upcoming SparkArts Festival, and more. PS3, Wii, & Xbox 360 development also came up. There was some talk about Microsoft's XNA framework and how it could be a good thing for Indies and new game developers. I was also encouraged to hear about the Mono Project and how it could potentially make XNA cross platform, which would mean that your game could run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and an Xbox 360, all with the same code.

The were several demos that were shown to the whole group. Here's a quick run down.

Apocolypse Cow
Jay Barnson showed us his game now that it has reached an alpha state. This game has come a long way since it was last shown. Basically all the gameplay and all the levels are complete. It has a lot of great finished art, in there. There is still some stand in art and models, but the project is MOOving along nicely. ;) (Okay, I couldn't resist)

Link Realms
This game is getting really close to being released. We got to see the addition of dungeons and even a few new monsters that even the beta users haven't seen yet. I applaud Herb and Dan for the great and enormous amount of work they have done to make this a reality.

PathStorm
The guys from CaveBug (Brad Edwards and Josh Jensen), showed off their nearly released game. Basically it's a puzzle game where you have to clear the board by placing bumpers around the board so a ball will pass over every space as it goes in an out of exits on the side.

DROD: The City Beneath
Mike Rimer showed us the third game in the D.R.O.D. series. There are lots of new graphics and puzzles and it looks like you'll get to interact with more characters in this new one. Mike's son was even there showing everyone how to play the game and putting all us adults to shame.

Caster
Mike Smith showed us some of the new things he's added to the game, like the sprint move (which had a neat blur effect) and the freeze attack. Unfortunately, this game is at a stand still for the moment, due to his situation wih EA. Best wishes on finding a resolution to that Mike!

Thanks again to them an all their hard work, and also to Wahoo/Ninjabee for hosting the event yet again!

I applaud all of you with an Indie project, as you are not just dreaming, you are making it happen! I am amazed at the depth and breadth of the "Indie Scene" here in Utah. I see a lot of dedication and talent when I come to these meetings, and I feel inspired to continue in my own Indie efforts. I feel both humbled and honored to be associated with all of you guys.

Viva La Indie!

P.S. Jay also did a write up about the event in his popular blog here.

More Bad Game Legislation - Death Blow to Indies?

2006-08-25T13:07:00.000-06:00

Here we go again. I've just became aware of some more badly written legislation that will presented to congress soon. It sounds similar to a state bill that was defeated not long ago here in Utah (see here). This US congress bill seems well intentioned, as it seems the intent is to keep our kids away from adult games by making it illegal to sell them to minors. Well that sounds good, especially to parents, but I believe there are going to be some unintended consequences of this bill if it passes, and it could mean a death blow to some Indie developers. The bill can be found here.

Here's the part of the bill that has me worried

Sec 2. (a) Conduct Prohibited- It shall be unlawful for any person to ship or otherwise distribute in interstate commerce, or to sell or rent, a video game that does not contain a rating label, in a clear and conspicuous location on the outside packaging of the video game, containing an age-based content rating determined by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

This was obviously intended for video games sold through standard "brick-and-motar" retail stores, but the bill doesn't state that. It doesn't define the term "video game" to only mean "boxed PC or Console games sold it stores"; it leaves that wide open. It appears that no thought was given to other distribution channels and especially for the selling of "boxless" downloadable games sold exclusively via the internet.

That paragraph above paints things with too broad a stroke in my mind. It would make most things that most indies are doing right now illegal. It would be illegal to even just "distribute" an unrated game over the internet. At least that's the way I'm reading it. No more demo downloads (unless it's rated), no more free flash games (unless they are rated), no more hobby freeware games (unless you rate it).

Furthermore, the bill states that the rating must come from the ESRB, and last time I checked, it cost thousands of dollars to get a rating from them. Obviously this will kill most of the freeware out there, as very few people are going to spend thousands of dollars just so they can give away their hobby project to others for free. Also, considering that most indie games out there don't make enough money to cover the cost of an ESRB rating, it will certainly mean that ther will be a lot fewer games out there. It would probably mean less innovation, as less people are going to want to take a risk on something they've had to invest thousands of dollars into.

Also, in the bill it mentions that it will be illegal to sell AO (Adult Only) rated games to anyone under 18 years old, and to sell M (Mature) rated games to anyone under 17 years old. That may be easier for a "brick-and-mortar" retail store to do, as they could check some sort of legal ID when you are buying it in person. However, there is not a good way to verify someone's age online that I know of. They are asking the impossible in terms of enforcement (at least with current technology) for internet game sales.

I am not against ratings. I think they are a good thing. I think it's the responsible thing for developers to share content info with their customers, so that people are aware of what kind of content they are getting. Especially if the game may have some adult oriented content in it. I would even be okay with making the requirement that such info "must" be disclosed to the customer. As a parent I certainly don't want to be surprised by a game that looked okay at first, but then later discovered something offensive in it. I wouldn't want to download the latest casual "Match-3" game for my kids, entitled "Crown Jewels", only to discover that the "crown jewels" being shown didn't come from a mine.

Again I am for ratings, but what I don't like is that this legislation requires the game to be rated by an organization that will make the cost of doing business so high for some, that it will force them out of business. There are some ratings systems in the works like TIGRS that would fit the bill to let people know what they are buying, and that would be reasonable for an indie game developer to do. The arcade industry established a self rating system by the AAMA (see here for more info) that worked well and didn't require the developers to drain their pockets. I think that requiring an ESRB rating would only serve to line the pockets of that organization, and put many other developers out of business. Either the ESRB would have to make the rating prices reasonable for Indies, or the legislation would have to allow for other ratings systems, like TIGRS, in order for me to be okay with this rating requirement.

Jim Matheson is my congressman, and he is the one sponsoring this bill. I am saddened that he's trying to push this poorly thought out bill (I didn't vote for him BTW). It seems this bill was drafted quickly, just so that he can have some sort of "I'm doing something to protect families" stance for the upcoming election. I will be writing him and letting him know of the unintended consequences of this bill. I encourage other people to do the same, and let him know what this bill will do to your business. I hope this either gets re-written with provisions that the independent game development community can live with, or it gets shot down in the house and senate. It don't think this bill is a good idea (it's only half-baked).

Utah Indie Game Night - July 2006

2006-07-28T17:15:00.000-06:00

Our fifth Utah Indie Night yesterday was fantastic! We had about 33 people show up, which is our largest turnout yet. It's even a few more than our amazing turnout last time. It's an indicator that the word is still getting out and that these events do fill a need in the indie community.

Again there was so much going on, that my head is still spinning. There were people I wanted to talk to more, but just didn't get a chance to. I didn't get a chance to thank everyone for coming personally either. My appologies if any felt left-out of what was going on.

Ray Rackiewicz from ITT Tech came with some of his students in tow. They just started a Video Game Design program there about 9 months ago. It's the only one that I've heard of in the state, but I could just be in the dark on that (after all I finished college 14 years ago). But it sounds like the program is doing well thus far. I'm sure there are more ways that the student and indie games communities can benefit each other.

This time we had tons more room, thanks to Ninjabee's new office space. It was easier for lots of people to fit around on machine this time. However the downside was it was harder to hear some of the demos with everything else that was going on around you.

The demos that were shown (that I'm aware of) are:

Caster
Tatics Engine
I Got Balls 3
Vespas 3D
FxRedom
A yet to be named 2D Shooter (inside the body shooting viruses,etc)

That last one was mine; I don't have a name for it yet, but I did get some good feedback on it. Thanks everyone for that. Caster looks like it has some nice enviromental improvements to it. I was also quite impressed with Victor's "I Got Balls 3" demo and the engine he built to create that game. You can check out his engine out at http://www.flatredball.com/.

It's amazing to me to see the both the amount and quality of indies that we have right here in Utah. I never realized the depth and breadth of the "Indie Scene" until we started putting these meetings together. I feel both humbled and honored to be associated with such quality people. See you all next time!

Why We Do, What We Do.

2006-05-18T23:20:00.000-06:00

The question is often raised “what motivates people to write games and also write them independently?” The same question could be asked of artists, authors, poets, musicians, and film makers and I think you’ll find the answers to be similar. Although there are tons of things that could motivate us, I believe the answer to this boils down to two basic motivators: “Passion” and “Profit”. The drive for money and profit is pretty easy to see, but where does “passion” come from? Why would someone devote many man-months or man-years into a game that may never make a penny? Again it’s because money is not their driving force. I suppose one could be a motivated by a thirst for fame, though if this is your only desire, then don’t expect to get much fame in game development. Our culture hasn’t put game designers on the same pedestal as actors, singers, and sports heroes yet.

I think that “passion” is that love of something that goes beyond just mere appreciation. It’s where you love something deeply enough, that you want to be a participant, and not just an observer. In my case, my passion comes from a few things I think. First is just simply a love for games. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, right during the golden years of the arcade. I can remember the first time I ever saw an arcade game (Space Invaders), and how it just “wowed” me at the time. I can remember playing “pong” at my grandpa’s house for the first time. It was all good, and many more good experiences followed. Second, is a desire to pass some of this on to my children, and in a very small way “create a better world for them”. There seems to be much garbage in games nowadays, especially stuff coming from the main games industry. I see very little of what I want to play sitting on the shelves at the local Wal-Mart. There are either formulaic rehashes of the same old stuff, or they contain gratuitous amounts of language, blood, gore, realistic violence, and sexuality, that I won’t touch them (let alone my kids). I cringe at the thought of my young kids playing that kind of garbage, when I know there are many older (and often better) games out there to be played. I think it’s this motivation that got be to the point of starting my first (and still unfinished) Indie game.

If any of you have watched some VeggieTales videos, then you may have seen a little video clip (right before everything else) that shows a bunch of children playing in a park with the words “Why We Do What We Do” showing up at the end. I think that clip sums up my main motivation as well. I do it for them, so they have something better than the soulless garbage that is so prominent out there. I started on this path before I knew about the Indie Games community out there. I know now that I am not alone in this quest, and there are lots of good things coming out of that community. Again I feel there is some hope for the future of games, and I hope I can make a good contribution to this effort as well. I encourage you all to go play some Indie games, and discover what you’ve been missing. Then if you like what you find, please help support those developers, by buying the full version of your favorites.

Now that being said, I would be lying if I said that profit was not a motivator for me, but it is not my primary motivator. It would be nice if I could support my family doing this, but it’s “not in the cards” for now. Maybe someday …

Indie's Unite!

2006-04-28T17:17:00.000-06:00

Our fourth Utah Indie Night yesterday absolutely ROCKED! We basically doubled the numbers we had at our previous event. That was largely due to Mike Smith's help (Thanks Mike!), as he brought along about 8 friends from HeadGate Studios (who are doing projects on the side as well). We still would have set a new record even without that, but about all I can say about the turnout is -- WOW! We had 29 people there (and that's not counting about 3 spouses and 3-4 kids that also showed up). What a party!

There was so much going on, that my head is still spinning. It was cramped quarters with that many people there, and there were a bunch of demos going on at the same time (It would have been hard to do it all around one machine though). Also with that many people there, it meant that everyone missed out a little on what was going on. I personally feel I only took in about 1/4 of what was happening. We had seven demos (that I know of) being shown. I could of shown my demo of Maze Craze, but it really hasn't changed since our last one, and there wasn't much time left, so I didn't. (Hopefully I'll have made much more progress by our next meet.) The demos I'm aware of that were shown are:

Apocalypse Cow
Bug Warz
Caster
Vespas 3D (an interesting experiment into 3D Interactive Fiction)
WOG
D.R.O.D.
MMORPG kit for Torque (not sure if that's the actual name)

I came away both humbled and pumped at the same time. These events have always given me a lift up. I am also amazed at the variety of things being working on by the group. Not one of those demos was for a Match-3 clone, and there's quite a bit of innovation happening in the games. It's very clear that there's a lot of passion going on in this group. I'm also encouraged to know there are still studios out there like HeadGate and Ninja Bee/Wahoo that willing to let their people work on Indie projects on the side, and they don't "squash" their spirit and passion.

I am both humbled and grateful for having a part in "setting the ball rolling" for these get togethers. It's already exceeded my expectations. I sure hope they've been beneficial for all. I know they have been for me. Last night was great, despite some of the "chaos". Just some "growing pains" I guess. The future of this group is bright indeed.

Also I should point out that, Jay Barnson has done a fabulous write-up of the event here in his blog.

New to this blogging thang

2006-02-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

Okay so I'm a bit new to this Blogging thing. Hopefully there will be some words of interest or wisdom to follow. Perhaps they just be the ramblings of a "mad man" after everyone has just driven him "crazy". We'll see.