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Promotion woes So, yeah, I took offence to this statement. Yes, we are offering the game for free, but that doesnt mean that I and the rest of the team didnt pour countless hours of hard work into it. We all want to see that hard work pay off in the form of getting people to play and enjoy the game... and that means promotion. If I just made the game, uploaded it to a server and moved on, Id be doing the adventure game community a disservice as well as disrespecting the talents of the people who worked on the game. Help! My Artist is AWOL! The first was Dang, the lead background artist for Nelly. (His work is brilliant, by the way!) Right around the holiday season last year, we disapeared on me! This was particularly troubling because he was living right around the area where that tsuanmi hit! I feared the worst, but kept my fingers crossed. A few weeks of unanswered e-mails went by when finally he resurfaced! He had gone home to Vietnam for the holidays and luckily avoided the tradegty! Then it happened again. James Campbell ,lead background artist for "The Goat in the Grey Fedora" disappeared for a while as well. Although much less life threatening, I was troubled by his absence as well. The deadline for release is rapidly approaching and I still needed 3 backgrounds from him. Two for cutscenes and one for gameplay. About 2 months went by before I heard back from him only to learn that he had a major hard drive crash! Luckily, he's a good computer user and backed up his files! But Im still worried, it's only about a month and a half before the scheduled release and the game is suposed to go into beta testing this month! But I still dont have those graphics! Hopefully he will come through and I will still be able to get everything done on time!
Besides that Ive been hard at work on the preproduction of our next two games! This time arround I am taking a back seat in the graphics department and have recruited some top notch artists who can do the job much better. I will focus my attention on programming and managing, a daunting enough task on its own! The two games are well under way and should be to the point where I can build a tech demo for the team. Jason Ellis is going to have his hands full as well. Not only will he reprising his role as Nick Bounty, but he is also writing the other originial game, Nelly (the wonder dog). If that weren't enough, I am also going to ask him to start writing his own Developer Diary and keep it up to date... we'll see. Thats all the news for now, but we do have some exciting things planned for the future, including maybe a contest or two? Keep watching!
Looking to the Future Posted: 13 June 2004 Well, I can honestly say that I didn't see it coming. A Case of the Crabs has taken off in ways I never expected. I've been trading ideas with respected developers of adventure games, the game has been favorably mentioned in the NY Times, and there are rumors of more high profile appearances to come! But it's all happened so fast that it's hard to keep my head out of the clouds and get a firm grasp on what exactly I should be doing with all of this attention. It is very difficult to try to see ahead into the future when I feel like the future is upon me now! It's the feeling of pressure that I have to strike now while the iron is hot or get left behind in a sea of stranded developers. The problem is, I don't have enough experience to point me in the right direction. One of my dilemmas is whether to keep Pinhead Games entirely freeware. I develop games for the love of doing it, but I still have to work to pay the bills. This leaves less time to develop and perfect my games. A profit will also allow me to have proper funding to solicit better artists, animators and musicians to create original quality content. At the same time, I like the idea of letting people play the games for free! I want them to be accessible to anyone who wants to take a look! Maybe instead of distributors I should be looking into advertisers or sponsorships. Another option I've considered is viral marketing (Don't worry, it has nothing to do with viruses). It's a "word of mouth" marketing tool that is becoming more popular on the web these days. Some good examples are the Jerry Seinfeld/Superman American express stuff or the Burger King sponsored Subservient Chicken. The creator of Samorost has done the same thing with his games by creating interactive pieces for Nike and the band "The Polyphonic Spree" Of course, these are all just ideas right now. I'm not sure how to go about making them a reality and that's where I'm going to need the most help. For now, I'm going to keep my options open, finish getting that multimedia degree I went back to school for, and pushing for the best games Pinhead Games can produce! Problmes with Slowdown Posted: 19 May 2004 Another potentially fatal problem arose recently concerning the speed at which the game was running. For reasons that I'm still not entirely clear on, Brain Hotel started running at a snails pace. I had only completed a minor amount of additional programming and could not see any reason for the slowdown. Nothing like this had happened in "A Case of the Crabs" so the problem had to be one of two things, the new MAAGE interface system or the graphics. I started with the graphics thinking that would be the easiest to fix. One major difference between the two games is that Brain Hotel is in color while A Case of the Crabs was done in black & white. Perhaps this made the available color count much higher and thus caused the slowdown. I took all of the background graphics and converted them to 128 color gifs instead of the millions of colors jpegs I had been using. This didn't help the slowdown at all. In fact, not only was the slowdown still intact, the overall file size of the program was now significantly larger. I assume it has something to do with the way Flash compresses jpegs, but it didn't matter because it didn't fix the initial problem. I then thought it may be in the onscreen object graphics, but there was sometimes only one on the screen and I hadn't added anything since the before the slowdown started. That meant is was in the code somewhere and that sucked. There was a lot of code to pick through and not much of it was entirely different from the code used in A Case of the Crabs. I had redesigned the way the MAAGE interface works so I decided to start there. A few of the upgrades to the engine are default actions on objects, restrictions on interactions with objects while commenting or interacting with other objects, an interface upgrade on how the engine handles the USE command, and a new method to fill the inventory blocks with objects as you pick them up. (This is still not perfected, while the objects fill in sequentially, I can't close the gap once you've used an object so a blank space is left). I searched the code for days while continuing to program, but the slowdown kept getting worse. I kept downgrading the graphic quality and screen resolution to compensate (and hoping that AAlgar didn't notice), but eventually that stopped working as well. The game had slowed to a crawl. I stomped around the living room for a while cursing my decision to make my own engine and considered either shunning the Online and Mac User community altogether and turning to AGS (Which would in turn alienate the game's designer, as he is a Mac user) or quitting adventure game development altogether! If this slowdown was going to be a problem then all of my future ideas were in effectively in the toilet! I was about ready to give up, but I kept coming back to the fact that this problem didn't exist for my previous game. It had to be something that I changed. I searched all of the code again and nothing appeared to be causing the slowdown. It seemed to be a problem that would be caused by graphics, but I hadn't added any new graphics. What I had added was a new inventory item, but it wasn't in use. It wasn't even on the screen. Actually, it was on the screen, it was just hidden. All of the inventory items were. I began to think that maybe Flash was drawing all of these items on screen, hiding them, and executing their code. I decided to move the hidden objects about 400 pixels to the left, off of the gameplay area. And it worked! The slowdown was gone! I never did discover exactly what the technical reason was, but at this point I didn't care. Games could be made. Life could go on. Now if only I can just get AAlgar to make up his damn mind about the word balloons… Engine Trouble Posted: 3 May 2004 Let me begin by saying that I am not really a programmer at heart. My code is sloppy, un-optimized, and often redundant, but it works. Im really more of a visual designer. I think in pictures, not words or numbers. Programming just became a neccessary tool I had to learn in order to bring the pictures in my head to life. With this in mind it really isn't surprising to find a major bug in the MAAGE 2.0 engine so far along in production. The problem was essentially this: When attempting to use an inventory item with any onscreen object, the result would be negative, even if the two objects are meant to be used together. Somehow the generic negative response that is supposed to occur any time two things can't be used together was overriding the positive response. I searched the code for hours looking for the source of the problem and finally found that it had something to do with the way the variables reset within the onscreen object code. Ok, problem fixed... only I had actually uncovered a potentially much bigger problem. The way the MAAGE engine works, each new object type is built from the object built before it, sort of like copy and pasting the object and changing the specs of each. Can you see where this is heading? If there was problem with the code in the very first object (and there was), then every created object following that would inherit the same defect. And Ive made a LOT of objects since then. I wish the error was as easy to fix as a simple Search and Replace, but the code is broken into separate subroutines for each object, so everything has to be corrected individually. Luckily, at this stage of the programing there isn't much inventory to screen object interaction and I really only need to worry about those specific objects. The rest of the objects, though coded incorrectly, wont be affected. Now that the problem has been addressed, I can continue to make new objects with the new code and avoid a total breakdown when we finally get to the Beta stage! Provided, of course, that I haven't overlooked some other minor detail. *Sigh*... Cross your fingers for me! Sex, Lies, and Videogames (without the "Sex" part) Posted: 25 April 2004 It's been a month since I completed and released my very first Adventure Game, 'A Case of the Crabs' and I'm just about to start work on another game. Actually, nothing it that statement is true. The very first adventure game I wrote was Maniac Outhouse for the Commodore 64. It was an obvious parody of Maniac Mansion, the joke being that while a mansion has many rooms to explore, an outhouse barely had one. The only objective to the game was to pick up a roll of toilet paper outside and give it to the "maniac" in the outhouse. Not very impressive, huh? But to me it was a breakthrough. It represented a first step in the right direction. It proved to me that with enough dedication and creative effort, the goal of creating a half decent adventure game was not entirely out of my reach. And that's pretty much where it stopped. The C64 just didn't have the right software available to allow me to create games with more than 2 screens. But then came the Amiga! Commodore's follow up to the C64 seemed to be marketed directly to the creative designer & gamer(this ultimately led to it's demise). It was the perfect platform to resurrect my dreams of adventure game design. I got right to work creating "It's the Tim the Bird Game!", a stick figure game where you simply chase my bird around the room. You couldn't win. Then I started work on Maniac Outhouse 2: Day of the Toilet Paper! It was a neat parody idea, but I never actually got around to finishing it. I followed that with Nick Bounty and the Vengeful Curtain Rod. This game was shaping up really well and, I believe, was to be the first adventure game for the Amiga 500 to feature speech! I was just beginning to contemplate how I was going to get my game to the public when my trusty Amiga died, frying the hard drive along with it. It was a good many years before I had the courage to try again and this time the results would yield 'A Case of the Crabs'. So you see, It's not actually my very first adventure game, just the first playable one. I'm also not "just about to start another game", I'm actually quite deep in the process of developing a another game... three actually. Almost immediately after releasing 'A Case of the Crabs', I began working with AAlgar on a new game: Brain Hotel. He was working on the preproduction of that game while I was finishing up 'Crabs'. Production is coming along smoothly and we fully expect to meet our release date of summer. In addition to Brain Hotel, I have started another original game of my own. While I don't want to release any details about that game yet, I will say that the script is nearly finished and I will be attempting to recruit some volunteer artists when the time comes. But I said 3 games (And that doesn't include the mention of a Bounty follow up as stated at adverturegamers.com). The third game is in the Very early stages and is being directed by the voice of Nick Bounty himself: Jason Ellis. Another falsehood may be my ability to handle all of this. It's not as if I don't have a job and can sit home all day doing nothing but making games. And I've recently gone back to school to earn a degree in Multimedia. That effectively measures out to be, scientifically speaking, a shitload of work. Still, I'm confident that we have the ability to see these projects through to completion. And that's the honest truth. |