Wanted to thank Colin about his feedback on the Post GDC Rant.
He pointed me to some of his articles that I think are pretty amazing and important to share:
Enjoy!
Facebook ads killing our startup productivity
Yeah, that’s true, we’ve tried to use Facebook to validate some assumptions and guess what? It’s been 30 hours and our ad is not yet approved.
On the other hand, google’s ads started to show 3 hours after being created.
Mr. Facebook, you suck one more time.
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Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
Still being simple in a complex world
After about 4 months of thinking about several game ideas, I decided to stick with an old project that I always wanted to do: Still being simple in a complex world.
This phrase came to my mind a long time ago (in 2002?), and ended up being an image of a stick figure inside a real photo.
Since that day the idea has been coming back again and again. Every single time, a short concept would be added until now. I finally think that all the ideas for this game start to make sense and have some cohesion (at least in my head), and will start working on it as soon as I come back to Argentina.
The aesthetics of the game will all be related to the theme (Still being simple in a complex world), complexity will be expressed on the character, surroundings and the (generative) music as well.
I’m really excited about this, specially because my <3 @vegetaldeana will be helping me with the graphics (the world will include photos).
Now it’s time to get some rest. I’ll leave you a flower that may or may not be important in the future.
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Post GDC Rant
So… GDC is over.
I have mixed feelings about it.
The bright side
Some highlights would be:
- I met Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Noah Falstein.
- I met a bunch of cool indie devs including Colin Northway ( Incredipede ) and Justin Ma ( FTL )
- I did a great effort to help some friends from Argentina and I think it was worth it.
The dark side
I’m really disappointed about the Indie Summit. I went to a couple of sessions and found out that many of them were completely shallow.
Exceptions: Indie Soapbox, Design Occlusion is Killing Your Creativity.
I would love to see more discussion about game design and game development.
I get it guys, marketing and production are important for indies, we already know that a game may take 3-4 years, we already know that it’s a lot of work, and that most of the times we need to sacrifice other parts of our life to get our games out there.
But that’s just the surface, all that information is not new. In fact, if you start looking at other independent disciplines, you’ll see that these are the same things that musicians and other types of independent artists struggle with.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m okay with the motivational talks and all, but we need to dig deeper.
I have talked to some indies about how they approach game design, and the answers were mostly trial and error. If we want to create good games we need to overcome this. We need to control our medium and get wiser at how we use it.
I have not seen a talk about how an indie developer overcome some technical difficulty or a game design flaw in their games, maybe I missed it, may be there weren’t, but even if I missed it, we need to start sharing this knowledge a little bit more.
I’ve been following Chris Hecker’s interest on marketing, I think his approach is similar to what I’d love to see in the different disciplines: research and collaboration.
I hope I’ll have some research to share as soon as I start working on my next game…
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Once upon a time…
… Tim Schafer, check…
… Ron Gilbert, check …
Brian Moriarty, you’re next.
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My book about Moai SDK is about to be released!
Yes! Finally, after a couple of months of hard work, the book is almost there.
I wanted to thank Aldi ( http://www.vegetaldeana.com.ar ) for the amazing cover picture, marquete, Eric Edelman and Adam Villalobos for the reviews and the guys at Packt Publishing for making this possible.
The book will be available starting on tuesday at Packt’s website: http://www.packtpub.com/developing-mobile-games-with-moai-sdk/book
Hope you enjoy it!
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BlackBerry 10 Support for Moai SDK & New Moai SDK release
Well.. the past few weeks have been busy.
I have been implementing support for BlackBerry 10 on Moai SDK.
I’m really happy with what I’ve achieved on this. I had to dig a little bit more on Moai SDK’s structure, and finally got to understand how every piece of the ecosystem interacts with one another.
The good news is that right now, Moai is running smoothly on BlackBerry 10. On the blackberry10 branch from my fork you will find it (see link above).
One important consequence of the port is that I had to implement SDL support for Untz audio system… so, basically all the platforms that support SDL can now use Untz as the audio framework. It was sort of a quick hack, but it’s working nicely.
We’ll probably get rid of Untz sometime in the near future, the plan is to implement a new library that abstracts the backend and has one common interface for loading audio files and that will also allow you to do DSP and synthesis.
It’s been a while since the last Moai SDK release, and we have a bunch of cool features and fixes on the master branch of the git repository.
We’ll probably make a new release of Moai SDK next week or the other, I’ll be cleaninig up and merging all the BlackBerry 10 work and making all the builds stable between this and next week. I’ll try to get the Linux branch merged as well, but that may take some more time, we’ll see.
Thanks to everybody that contributed and hope you are enjoying working with Moai SDK!
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‘Cause you were so bright…
… your next life will be as a star, that will guide all the dogs to finally find a place they can bark home.
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Fixed Visual Studio 2010 build in MOAI
Since the errors in the Visual Studio 2010 project were pretty much the same as the ones in Native Client build, I managed to fix them as well.
Enjoy!