Further to the last post regarding the terrible things that are happening to our games, these brave warriors are stepping forward and kicking Chav arse: http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net/

UFO: Enemy Unknown MULTIPLAYER!

We salute you! You’ve made me so happy!

Popularity: 53% [?]

So, you always wanted to make games for a living, right? Well now is your chance, as Lemmy&Binky offer you a one-stop guide that will get you making games quicker than [look up speed-related pop culture reference].

So without further ado, let us take you on a journey! A mysterious journey filled with excitement and wonder. A magical ride, where the only limits are… Sorry, what we meant to say was…

So without further ado–

Financial Support

Okay, so first things first. Your IGF winning indie game is not even going to get made if you’re out on the streets dining out of rubbish bins, is it? You’re going to need to be able to financially support yourself for maybe a year (possibly even two) whilst you make your game.

This is why most indie game developers tend to sell drugs and weapons to support development of their games (Libya is a good place to start with this). Some indie developers also like to dabble in sex trafficking, though many feel it too time-consuming. We strongly recommend you buy a copy of Dave Perry’s excellent bible on the subject of funding game development, “Sex, Drugs and AK47s”, which is available on Amazon and in all good book stores.

Quest for the Indie Stone

Before you start developing your indie game, you need to be in possession of one of the ancient Indie Stones. There are only known to be 12 of these in the world, which is the main reason the indie game industry is much smaller than the commercial game industry (the commercial games industry does not require mystical stones of any kind–just the tears of a disappointed child)

Of course, to obtain one, this means you will have to take an Indie Stone from another indie game developer. This is the only situation where indie game developers are permitted to kill each other.

One of the mystical Indie Stones

Protection

Now you’re in possession of an Indie Stone, you are a bonafide indie developer! Congratulations! This does however mean that you are certain to be getting a knock at the door from a slightly threatening man called Don Marshall. He will ask you if you want “protection”. Say yes! It’s just how things work on the indie game scene, so get used to it! We all have!

Design

This is where your creativity can go wild! Just jot down details of how your game will work, perhaps on the back of a used bus ticket or something.

Things to think about: How many same colour blocks have to be adjacent to “match them”? Write it down. How many different coloured blocks ARE there? Write it down. How fast will the blocks fall? Write it down. Are there going to be special “power blocks” that destroy all connecting blocks of the same colour? Write it down.

Done? Good!

Uh-oh, now the tricky bit. You need to actually make the game! Where the hell do you start!?

Development

Remember the fabled stone that you bloodied your Indie Knife to retrieve? Yes? Well, this is where it does its magic.

Now, first off, you need a hat. A top hat is considered the industry standard, but trilbies work just as well.

Start by turning the lights off in your computer room. Then, making sure you are in a comfortable typing position with the hat rested on your lap, put the Indie Stone into the hat, along with your written design.

Now you need to put your head into the hat. The mystical light that emits from the Indie Stone will transform the written words on your design into a strange code. You need to copy this code by typing it into a Word document on your PC.

Yes, you read that last bit right… you need to do this whilst your head is in the hat.

We’re sure you’ve heard that game development is hard, and this is why! This is called “coding”.

It is crucially important that no light from your monitor gets into the hat, otherwise it could interfere with the code that the Indie Stone projects. Light getting into the Indie Hat is the main cause of bugs in indie games (other offenders being bad handwriting, or using a baseball cap instead of a proper hat)

Once you’ve written all the code into the Word document, you need to email it to Bill Gates, who will “compile” it and send you back a working executable of your game! Hurray!

Testing

Testing is not very important. After all, come on! It’s only an indie game. Chill out! Geez!

Permission Granted

Awesmoe! Your game is finished! Congratulations!

But wait! Don’t go releasing it just yet! There’s something extremely important you have to do first, and that is… Ask for permission from George Lucas.

Yes, it’s true. George Lucas owns the copyright for any indie game that has ever been, or ever will be, produced. If you release an indie game without his expressed permission, then his lawyers will come down on you like a pack of wild dogs. Whilst we’re on the subject, it’s probably a good idea to call him rather than make a house visit, otherwise he’s likely to release his pack of wild dogs on you.

Reviews

There is an age old ritual between indie developers and indie game web journalists that all successful indie developers adhere to. It is somewhat time consuming and can be expensive, but is a sure-fire way to ensure your game gets positive coverage across the internet. You must make the Indie Developer Pilgrimage.

Indie Developer Pilgrimage

The Indie Developer Pilgrimage has been made countless times by thousands of veteran indie game developers over the years, and is seen very much as a rite of passage for those who have never made the journey. The pilgrimage begins at London, England, before travelling over the Atlantic to New York, then up into Ottawa in Canada, followed by a journey back over the border and to the west coast of the US, the long trek across the Pacific to Tokyo, Japan, finally arriving back at London for a pint of Worthington’s and a game of Click the Spot. This epic journey can be seen below:

This article was part of the “So You Want To be An Indie Developer?” combine. For other “So You Want To Be An Indie Developer?” opinion and hintery, click one of these lovely links below:

Gibbage.co.uk :-
http://www.gibbage.co.uk/2006/11/so- you-want-to-be-indie-developer.html

Cliffski’s Mumblings :-
http://cliffski.blogspot.com/2006/11/so-you-want-to-be-indie-developer.html

GameProducer.net :-
http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/11/20/so-you-want-to-be-an-indie-developer/

Reality Fakers :-
http://sharpfish.realityfakers.com/?p=103

Zoombapup :-
http://www.zoombapup.com/2006/11/so-you-want-to-be-indie-developer.html

BoneBroke :-
http://www.bonebroke.com/blog/index.php/2006/11/20/so-you-want-to-be-an-indie-developer/

Introversion :-
http://www.introversion.co.uk/news/index.php

They Came from Hollywood :-
http://www.tcfh.com/news.html

Popularity: 5% [?]

Well guys, gals and other assorted genders, it’s been an all action time in development of The Forgotten Element. Since the incident with the coding monkeys and that faulty plug socket, the pressure has been on both of us to do some bloody work ourselves, so we’ve been slogging it out non-stop ever since, not taking even a second to relax.

Progress? Well, there’s been loads!

For example, we noticed that Mia looked a bit silly walking in diagonals since she only had the four direction walk cycles, so we promptly set about adding diagonal walk cycles to make sure her walk would be as natural as possible, given you see a lot of her walking in the game. We now have nigh on 400 frames of animation for Mia alone, and still many more to do. One thing that is very important to us is finding out what will happen to the Battlestar Galactica crew when they get caught by the Cylons, and if Adama keeps his moustache…

Where was I? Oh yes, we’ve also been working on a parser so that conversations and cut-scenes (using the patented and quite funky Elemental Conversation System) can be written in nice and simple TV script-like formatting. This works really well and has certainly speeded up the scripting process no end, and our only real concern now is that since Locke didn’t push the button, he, along with Desmond and Mr. Eko, might be in pretty bad shape (if not worse!) but hopefully everything will turn out okay!

What else?

Well, scripting the actual game is going pretty well too. We now guestimate we have approx 75% of the prologue playable throughable, though some placeholder locations and Guybrushes a-plenty still inhabit Seahorse Island. Nikolas has also put together some cracking musical treats along with, quite literally, cracking thunder and rain in the mix. To do this some justice we’ve added a lightning overlay effect that syncs up to his thunder, and it all looks (and sounds, obviously) pretty funky. Now to get those particle effects finished for the rain!

Oh, and we also now know exactly what was in the Dead Man’s Chest.

So yes, non-stop work on The Forgotten Element…

Popularity: 6% [?]

Woo, the friendly game industry fellows over at CGEmpire are planning to start a community game project on their forums! Using the newfangled and exciting XNA technology and written in (super elegant and nice and easy, yet a tad slow) C# all the folks over there are going to try and design and write a full game by committee!

Sounds like an ambitious plan! But I’m game.

Get yourself over there (and go oooh at their new fancy front-page and gallery system) sign up, and take a look. But do come back now, y’hear!

Popularity: 3% [?]

I thought I’d write a bit about our newfangled Conversation Engine, how it came about, how it works, what it’s capable of and where it’s going.

The system was born out of necessity. Well… I say necessity, we could very easily make the game in AGS alone. It just wouldn’t be exactly the way we want it (and we’re awfully stubborn like that). What I really mean is it was born out us wanting to do certain things that were either not possible with AGS scripting, or requiring quite a clart on to get going in AGS.

First off, the gesture system. In AGS you have things called “views”, which are your loops of animation for four (or eight) facing directions for characters. In AGS you can assign a specific view to a character for their talking animation, meaning it will play the loop associated with the direction they are currently facing.

This did not suffice for what we wanted to do. We wanted the characters to emote, in appropriate places, to the dialogue. We wanted them to react with shock when someone makes a startling revelation, to cross their arms when they feel threatened, or put their hands on their hips when feeling defiant. We wanted them to turn their heads to face the character they are speaking to. To do all this requires transition frames. It would also need not one talking animation, but one for each possible pose, for each possible character. This is something that AGS does not natively support, so we went about writing our own system.

Now we have this XML driven system that allows us to define “poses” for different characters. These poses detail their idle animation, as well as the transition in and out from a standard root pose. As well as this each pose defines the talking animation in that pose, i.e. the mouth opening and closing, or possibly a more involved animation.

This means instead of saying:

“do talking animation 1”
“say this”
“do talking animation 2”
“say that”

We can now say:

“cross your arms”
“say this”
“put hands on hips”
“say that”
“point aggressively”
“say something threatening”

The system will blend in and out of each pose automatically, making the changes in poses smoother, nicer and with no big jumps.

Also we have things called “gestures”, which are different single actions they can carry out when in a specific pose. For example Mia, in her normal pose, can brush her hair back, before reverting back to her original pose and carrying on. We’ve got a fair few poses and gestures for all principal characters already, and we’re hoping throughout the course of the three acts we will end up with quite a lot. Hopefully this will help to add more emotion to the dialogue text. As way of example, Dr. Carter acquired a lot of his character from a single pose that he was given a while after he was first drawn.

Once all this was in place, we set about developing our own flowchart style conversation engine, firstly to get by some limitations with the AGS conversation scripting (which seems like older legacy stuff done before full AGS script was added). We have a bunch of nodes defined in an XML file, each one in turn is processed, but any are able to reroute to any other node in the conversation file. This allows us to have different paths depending on conversation choices, or ultimately conditions such as “is the player stood here?”, or “has this bit of story exposition been revealed yet?” We added different kinds of action nodes, allowing us to tell characters to walk from A to B, say things, change poses, perform gestures, and attach objects together and all manner of other things (ultimately we’ve also added the overlay stuff mentioned in previous parts of this diary).

We’ve now realised what we have is not so much a conversation engine but also a cutscene engine, and it has now been used on pretty much every complex series of actions in our game demo.

As a happy side-effect of this system, it means that our good friend Nikolas is able to implant the music directly into any point of the game he chooses! Without a copy of AGS, he is able to direct the music himself by adding nodes straight into to the XML files. This music can be synchronized with game events–for example, changing the music to being more sinister as soon as Clancy enters the room.

Since this, we’ve started moving our focus from our implementation of the aMuse system in Forgotten Element from being used exclusively, to being used only where appropriate. We think Nikolas will bring much more to the game if he’s free to work like this, and to be honest we want Nikolas’ awesome music, unbridled and free to do what he wants, much more than we want to showcase aMuse, though we will still be releasing it once it’s done, it may be lower priority than originally thought. Another problem with using aMuse is that Nikolas owns a shitload of really expensive sample libraries, being a professional musician and all, which due to the nature of aMuse we would not be allowed to use without violating copyright. This means we would suffer a hit on music quality right off the bat having to use freely distributable sample libraries for aMuse to use… that said Nikolas has had some interesting ideas how we could add more interactive elements to the music and still retain the non-looped grandeur of his stuff. Huzzah!

Go Nikolas!

(Isn’t he lovely?)

Popularity: 4% [?]