Do you want to build a Windows installer on Debian using NSIS, but need the special “large strings” build?
Well, you’re in luck, because I’ve had the same problem before you and created the Debian packages you need.
32 bit:
64 bit:
Common:
17 Dec
Missile Miner
I’ve created a small game prototype last week: Missile Miner.
It’s a game that’s obviously inspired by Asteroids, but with a different goal: You are a miner who mines asteroids for fun and profit. The native aliens don’t like that!
Play it here:
http://prototypes.hannobraun.com/missile-miner
Source code is available here:
https://github.com/hannobraun/missile-miner
Obviously it’s not finished: The aliens shoot missiles that don’t do anything besides following you and it could use some polish. Hopefully I’ll find some time to work on it more in the near future.
25 May
Orbital Invaders: Not Fun
I’ve recently started working on Orbital Invaders, an improved sequel for Tiny World War. I thought that the general idea was interesting and could be developed into a great game. Maybe that’s right, maybe not. What I do know now is that the prototype I’ve built is no fun at all. Since I don’t see any ways to make the core mechanic fun, I’m cancelling the project.
A boring game.
I’ve uploaded the prototype’s source code to GitHub:
https://github.com/hbraun/orbital-invaders
You can also play it online, if you’re interested:
http://hannobraun.com/orbital-invaders/
Instructions for playing: Drag the mouse to place satellites in orbit. Use the mouse wheel to dilate time for a satellite, to make it follow its orbit faster or slower. Satellites will shoot aliens if they’re near, so make sure they don’t reach Earth!
Do you think it was the right decision to cancel this project or is there a way to salvage the design? Let me know in the comments.
9 May
Tiny World War on Kongregate: Lessons learned
About two weeks ago, I took part in Ludum Dare #23, the 48-hour game creation challenge. Despite all odds, I managed to finish a game, Tiny World War. I decided to upload it to Kongregate, a portal for web-based games, and see how that goes.
Kongregate is a popular portal where people play mostly Flash games. It’s very easy to submit your own games to Kongregate, and since I heard that they’re very good at generating revenue from those games I had wanted to try them out for a while.
I didn’t expect the game to do well there. It’s unpolished and not very accessible. My motivation for doing this was mostly information gathering: Getting some first-hand data on how many people play a new game on Kongregate and what kind of revenue I can expect from that.
Two player version
The game was originally built for two players, both sitting at the same keyboard. This is of course a big hurdle for players since they’ll probably not have a friend with them when playing games on Kongregate.
Unsurprisingly, the game didn’t do very well. As of today, it has been played 404 times. This has generated a total ad revenue of $0.75. My share is 40% of that ($0.30).
Not enough people have rated the game, so it is still under judgement. This means the average rating is not yet published and the game still shows up in Kongregate’s “Under Judgement” list.
Singleplayer edition
The only feedback the two player version generated was a comment expressing the wish to be able to play the game against the computer. I hadn’t considered this before because I thought of it as not feasible. But the comment got me thinking and the next day I hacked together an AI for the game out of nothing but cheap tricks and some random numbers.
I released the resulting singleplayer edition as a new game on Kongregate. Of course this version had the same flaws as the original one, but at least it could be played without a friend in the room. As a result, the game generated much more plays and quite a bit of feedback. As of today, the game has been played 1391 times. This generated a total ad revenue of $2.62. Again, I get a share of 40% ($1.35).
The feedback generally fell into one of the following categories:
- “Interesting concept”: Quite a few people seemed to actually like it, which honestly surprised me. I expected this to be a throwaway experiment to get some insights into Kongregate.
- “I don’t get it”: No surprises here.
- “It doesn’t work”: Until I discovered Sauce Labs a few days ago, I really wasn’t set up to test with any browsers except Chrome and Firefox on Linux. This really showed, and a lot of people couldn’t play the game due to bugs that only surfaced on a few browsers.
- “Too easy”: As I implied, the AI runs mostly on good will and duct tape. This, combined with the fact that the game’s balancing is a bit off anyway, makes it really easy to win every game once you know how.
I tried to be as responsive as I could, answering comments, fixing bugs and making simple improvements.
The game came out of judgement with a score of about 2.5 of 5 stars. Enough to make the 2.0 cutoff (games with a rating of lower than 2.0 are basically hidden from Kongregate and are unlikely to see a lot of traffic). This is not good but definitely better than I expected.
Conclusions
Ad revenue doesn’t seem to be a good model to earn a living off games, which is pretty much what I expected. It might be okay, if I could crank out a decent game every few days (which I think is possible, but damn hard), but I don’t think that’s a way to get rich (wait, you’re telling me indie game development in general is not a way to get rich?).
Publishing a game on Kongregate is pretty much how I expected it to be: You get some initial plays by showing up in the “under judgement” list and once you get your rating, further exposure depends on the quality of that rating. I’m looking forward to uploading more games to see how they compare.
The only non-positive thing I can say about Kongregate is that they don’t offer a lot in the way of analytics. Since I didn’t collect any myself, I don’t really have a lot of data beyond what I talked about in this article.
One thing I found interesting: Not a single person complained about the graphics, which are not very good (I did them myself). Maybe that just didn’t come up because the game’s other flaws were too glaring or maybe people on Kongregate are very tolerant when it comes to that. We’ll see how that goes in the future.
The future
Since you read this far, I guess you have some interest in me and this humble start into my indie game dev adventure. I’ll definitely release more games, maybe even a polished sequel to Tiny World War. If you want to hear about it, feel free to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter.
8 May
Ludus: 12 hour game for #bbg challenge 5
I’ve taken part in the fifth #bbg game creation challenge. Last time I couldn’t finish, but this time I got something done. My entry is called Ludus and it’s a game about gladiators.
You can play the game using Google Chrome or check out the source code on GitHub. I recommend you check out the README for info on the game.
I’m a bit ambivalent about the result. On the one hand it’s nice to have finished something, on the other hand I could really have used more time to iterate on the game play. Doing the user interface took forever though, so I had to do most of the actual game logic in the last two hours.
But it was definitely a worthwhile experience. I haven’t created a mouse-focused game UI like that before and there was a lot to be learned here. I’ve also made about a million (actually, more like 12) notes about things to improve in noop, most of which I expect to implement this week or maybe next.
I don’t know yet, but maybe I’ll polish the game a bit and release it on Kongregate. I’ll keep you updated.
23 Apr
Looking back at Ludum Dare #23
Last weekend, I took part in Ludum Dare #23. Ludum Dare is a 48-hour game development contest. This time, over a thousand games were made for the contest alone. The Ludum Dare Jam, which runs a day longer than the contest and has more relaxed rules, is still ongoing as I’m writing this, so there’s more on the way.
Gathering at the Spielmeister offices
There was a real-world gathering at the Spielmeister offices here in Darmstadt (where I live). Since writing games is usually more enjoyable with others and there was free beer to be had, attending this gathering was pretty much a no-brainer.
The gathering started Friday evening. Since the contest didn’t start until 3am that night, there was some time for setting up our gear and getting to know each other. I worked at Spielmeister in the past and know the guys there pretty well, but there were some participants I had never met before. My plan was to take it easy, go home early and come back Saturday morning to start working on the game.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that I drank a bit too much of the free Spielmeister beer, after which nothing would do but go out and enjoy Darmstadt’s exciting nightlife (Darmstadt residents can decide for themselves if I’m being ironic). Fortunately other local indie devs agreed and shared in my Friday-night adventure.
After that, Saturday was pretty much ruined. I was way too tired, didn’t get a lot done and spent too much time trying to solve problems that weren’t really relevant to the situation at hand. Fortunately I got in a good night’s sleep and came back well-rested on Sunday.
Time was scarce, but I managed to turn things around and finish an actual game.
Tiny World War
The theme for the contest was “tiny world”. I bounced around several vague ideas, but in the end couldn’t resist the temptation of working on a game based on orbital mechanics yet again.
My game’s called Tiny World War. Go check it out.
I think it turned out to be an interesting game, which unfortunately suffers from its inaccessibility. I also couldn’t get a lot of playtesting in, which probably didn’t help. If you played the gravity levels in Osmos, I guess you can find your way around.
All things considered, I’m pretty happy how it turned out.
Tools of the trade
Last week, I released noop, a small HTML5 game framework which I used for this contest. I’m very happy with the results. The basic approach of using a light-weight entity system without much magic behind it worked very well.
As was to be expected, I ran up against some limitations. I was pleasantly surprised about how easy this was to solve, however: I just copied the modules I was having problems with, made some modifications and changed the module’s name. The other (unchanged) modules didn’t care and kept on working without any problems.
Since I didn’t even put that much effort into making the framework’s modules so loosely coupled, I feel that this validates the kind-of-procedural (but actually inspired by data-oriented design) approach I took with the framework.
Coming up next
I plan to use noop again soon(-ish) for the current #bgg challenge 5 which ends in mid-May. I’ve also got some other projects in the works which might or might not see the light of day any time soon. Whatever it will turn out to be, more stuff is coming up, and you will read about it here.
Update: @Spielmeister‘s write a recap of the event at
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/24/local-gathering-at-spielmeister/
20 Apr
noop, a HTML5 game framework
I’ve been working on a HTML5-based browser game for a while. Since I want to re-use some of that game’s code for Ludum Dare, the monthly HashBBG challenge and possibly other contests I’ve decided to extract the useful stuff into a framework and release it to the public.
Check it out here:
https://github.com/hbraun/noop
If you have any questions, feedback or other comments, feel free to post them here on this blog.
