Happion Labs GameDevBlog

I'll be talking at iFest in Seattle on November 9

You know why I named my new company Happion Laboratories?

Because I'm all about the pursuit-of-happiness with it.

And I'm going to talk about that some at iFest.

Come on by!

Don't keep score by how much money you make; keep score by how little you spend

Yet another mistake to avoid when going from Corporate to Indie - which ties into some of the other mistakes I've written about, like hubris and team size - is spending money.

(I suck at this game. But I'm getting better.)

I suppose this depends a bit on why you went indie. If you decided to become an indie game developer to see if you could make a lot of money, then you could throw some money at it to see if it sticks and then go back to your high paying corporate job and it would end up costing you less in the long run. (Or there's that one in a thousand chance you actually make a ton of money, in which case, again, spending money might be a great investment.) But if, like me, you decided to go indie because you wanted your freedom, because you wanted to stop working for The Man, then read on...because spending less money usually means spending more time, and for me that's great, because I want to prolong my indie adventure as long as possible.

Lately I've come across the blog of Mr. Money Mutache and I really like the cut of the guy's jib. We're kindred spirits in a lot of ways - saved up quite a bit, quit our jobs before the crash, started businesses that didn't work out so well, have families, and try to keep our spending frugal. But Mr. Money Mustache spent less than half as much as me each year and has thus been able to maintain his financial freedom while I am going to have to either increase my indie revenue or go back and work for the man again. If I had been like MMM after I quit, and the Fristrom-Pascual family had really tightened our belts, we could keep doing this indefinitely even on the average indie salary of $25K / year.

Put another way - there's two ways you can make your indie game development company viable: making more than you spend or spending less than you make.

People tend to focus on the first. But the second works too, as heroes like Jason Rohrer show.

There's lots of advice and ways to cut costs on your game development (work from home; use hardware that's a couple years old; use free software; pay only with rev share) but that's a tiny part of the picture, right? The real cost is the cost of supporting yourself and your family.

And Mr. Money Mustache has a lot of good advice on how to keep that down. I highly recommend checking him out and other frugality websites. 

But here's some of the stuff I'm doing lately. (Better late than never.) I switched from using Quicken to using You Need A Budget last year, kind of by coincidence, and because You Need A Budget puts the Budget part front-and-center I suddenly realized with embarrassment just how much the Fristrom-Pascual family spends each month. It also didn't let me pat myself on the back just because I'd had one good month out of several, which Quicken did. I'm not even going to say what our monthly budget was because it's so embarrassing - I'll just say that even though I thought I was being frugal, I was still acting like I had my Activision salary.

One thing we did even before I discovered MMM: every line item on our budget that was optional?We cut that in half: Date night. Restaurants. Fun Spending. Even Groceries. The kids' extracurricular classes (Sofia was in a highfalutin' dance class that, in hindsight, was for rich kids. It's Boys'n'Girls club classes for you now, Sofia.)

Turns out it was easy. The only target we couldn't hit was groceries, but we did get it down from over $800/month to $550, which, from what I hear, is pretty impressive for a family of four in Bellevue. But even there, there's still room for improvement. We could eat oatmeal more often, and I don't really need two six-packs of beer a month ... and I've quit drinking coffee before, I could do it again ...

After we'd done that, our monthly budget was starting to look reasonable. I patted myself on the back and said that was probably as cheap as we could go. (Because, you know, Jason Rohrer's lifestyle looks so out of reach it gives me that why-even-try feeling, like when I look at the highest scores on the Geometry Wars leaderboards.)

But that's when I came across Mr. Money Mustache (via You Need A Budget, btw) - and realized there was so much further we could go! There's still some big ticket items we can take care of!

There's No Such Thing As The Fastest Code? How about: There's No Such Thing As The Cheapest Budget. (I bet even Jason Rohrer looks at his monthly spending and thinks, "We could really cut back here." sometimes.)

We can get cheaper health insurance. (The ACA has prodded us into doing this anyway...turns out the kids are eligible for Washington's Medicare.)

And wait! Why do I have disability insurance? I was talked into this years ago. "What if you lost the ability to earn an income, Jamie?" That would be tragic sure, but my particular disability insurance doesn't just cover my ability to earn in income, it covers a whole bunch of stupid shit. And I was paying $2000 a year for it. Basically, unless I lose both my hands or my sight or my mind, I'm still going to be able to do what I do, and that's pretty darn unlikely (and if it does happen, I'm sure my extended family will rally around to help us), so - screw the disability insurance. (I still have life. That's a lot cheaper.)

And Cathy and I have a rule to make sure our businesses are actually businesses and not hobbies that sometimes pay for themselves - whatever they make the previous month, the most we allow ourselves to spend on them the next month is half of that. (This is more important for Catshy Crafts than Happion Labs - I've always been cheap when it came to game development, prefering to invest time over money.)

And, hey - how about we cut all those optional line items in half AGAIN? And get cheaper internet? And cut back to one disc at a time with Netflix? And lower the heat? And turn off the freaking lights and television when we leave the room? Now our budget starts to look less embarrassing: we've cut our spending by over 30%!

What else can we do? We can refinance our home loan. We can sell that second car. (We almost never both drive somewhere different at the same time - that $500/year in insurance+maintenance is an astronomical Per Use cost.) We can ditch our smart phones. (Wait, MMM gets $10 iphones? We'll have to look into that when my current contract is up.)

And the weird thing? Giving up these luxuries is inexplicably making me happier. I don't know why - maybe I've genetically inherited my mom's stoicism and just didn't realize it until now - or maybe it's because I get a kick of moving up on the how-little-we-spend leaderboards. Anyhow, so far, it's not a hardship.

Long and short of it is, if we can cut our spending by 30-50%, we can be indie 30-50%...or more... longer. Rock.

Hosting a subversion server on an Amazon EC2 instance

I was hosting the subversion server for Energy Hook on Unfuddle, but that got pricey after I hit the free tier storage limit. So, at the suggestion of @Kostas_Zarifis, I switched to hosting on EC2, which took most of a day to figure out but has only cost around a dollar a month.

But I'm an idiot and forgot my password and deleted the key pair file which had been lingering in my downloads directory and purged long ago. Whoops.

So I had to do this again, and was taking notes on the process as I went, but decided to reboot my computer midway because I was having internet issues, and, well...lost the notes. So, here's my best attempt to reconstruct them, but there could be some gaps. If you try this and have trouble, let me know where you get hung up in the comments.

• After I have my EC2 account set up, Launch Instance
• I choose Windows 2008 R2 Server. 
• I go to Add Storage because I know that 30 gigs is going to get used up quick (almost 20 of it starts out used by the OS, etcetera). This is costing me around $10 a month but is still cheaper than unfuddle. If you want the free SVN, leave it at the free level!
• I confirm and Launch.
• I generate the Key Pair.
• I right click on the instance once it's running and Get Windows Password.
• THIS TIME, I'm saving my Key Pair and Password someplace safe. :P
• I connect with Remote Desktop and find that I can't seem to download SVN or anything.
• So I go to Server Manager->Server Summary->Security Information->Configure IE ESC and turn that shit off for Administrators, whatever it is.
• Okay, I can download stuff now. This time I'm going to be better than last time, I'm going to use VisualSVN Server, which has more security! 
• I manage to set up a test repo, (using https: and port 443) and I can connect to it from the Server, but not from anywhere else. Do I have the port wrong? The address? Firewall problems? Who knows!
• Eventually I figure out to go to the EC2 Management Console->Security Groups->the group for my new instance, and add rules not only for TCP port 443 but also ICMP, so I can just Ping the darn thing and make sure I see it at all. (After I add the rule I have to remember to Apply Rule Changes.)
• Now things seem to work from the client side. I can
  svn ls https://my-public-ip-here:443/svn/happionlabs 
  and see my test repo. (There was a moment of hilarity, because in trying to figure out what was wrong I turned off the https: security on the server side, which changed the port to 80 without me noticing, so I couldn't figure out why, now that I'd figured out how to open the freaking ports, things still didn't work. Haha. Ha.)

So there it is. A bit of extra work but a thing. 

Everyone Should Have Music

Back before Energy Hook, I was working on a guitar game for Microsoft where you'd actually improvise your own music as you played, and then what you'd improvise would loop, creating patterns of repetition and variation ... in other words, music.
That game was troubled - they didn't think Torpex had the bandwidth to complete it, outsourced the production to a Japanese studio, messed it up, and cancelled it. Buy me a beer sometime and I'll bitterly tell you about it.

Anyhow, that's okay, because now there's this--Sentris by Samantha Kalman--and it's EVEN BETTER: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samanthazero/sentris-unleash-your-inner-musician

Cool Unity resources

Just heard of a couple cool Unity resources sites:

third-helix.com (you could filter for Technical or Unity Tutorials)

unitypatterns.com

I'm a gonna spend some time skimming these.

New Release Blues

You can get the new build at http://energyhookgame.com if you don't already have it. This build has gear customization (adjust the speed of your jets, the parameters of your energy hook, and more); new animations (hold X+Y to get at the third midair trick now); and leaderboards, so you can throw down. For now, you can grab whatever screen name you want, though I will be resetting things later when we get closer to Done. 

With the latest release I wanted to not only get every stretch goal to a first draft state but also polish glaring issues - janky animation in particular. (Especially since James Zachary has been doing some work and there's no excuse any more.) 

It's taken all week! I started cleaning stuff up on Monday, sweeping up dead leaves, so to speak, and have finally gotten to the point where I can push a release that doesn't suck.

This last glitch that I was cleaning up today was one for the books. The lighting in one of my levels looked really blown out - but only when I played the build, not when I played it in the editor. After much experimentation, I realized that if I went to the level from the front end, it had the problem. After looking at various lighting and camera and graphics settings and wondering what could be bleeding from one level to the next, I got fed up and started deleting objects from the front end, hoping it finally would go away.

The offending object? ParseInit, the object that handles the leaderboard API. 

But it wasn't Parse's fault. At some point, I somehow accidentally dragged the front end's directional light into the ParseInit object. Which is persistent. So the directional light was in every level. (It looked a little bad in some of the levels, but was particularly painful in the Misty City.)

Whew.

I'd also discovered that my lighting and shadow quality had ... drifted. Just didn't look as good as it used to. Maybe I applied some changes to a light prefab, or the camera, or something. Don't know.

All in all, I think Unity could use some way to lock your objects and prevent them from being changed once you have them at a state where you feel they're done. Sort of like taping down knobs on a mixing board - you don't want to accidentally bump them and mess things up just a little, because you might not notice until much later and be at a loss what got messed up.

And, just for giggles, this is the checklist I follow when I'm trying to get a build together:

Release Checklist

1. Does anything need its lightmaps redone?

2. Check log and update version number +1. Apply changes to prefab.

3. Set quality to normal.

4. Save project & exit Unity (just to be safe.)

5. If currently using NGUI Easy, delete and switch to NGUI Pro

6. Build windows

7. Test:

   1. PC

   2. Oculus

   3. 1st & 3rd person modes

   4. registering for leaderboards

   5. mainmenu leaderboards

   6. level coverage

8. If testing fails, fix & go back to 3

9. Once testing is solid, add changes. Commit changes

10. Build linux (universal)

11. Change Input for Mac: InputMac -> Input

12. Build & test on Mac (have to build from Windows so we have the lightmaps)

13. Switch back to Windows OS

14. Zip separately and share with Humble on Google Drive (this portion takes me hours because of my slow upload speeds - good to do at night)

15. Wait for them to get in there

16. Announce to: in-game news page, blog, forum, mailing list, facebook

 

Quarterly Goals

For the past six months I've been trying the 'quarterly goals' thing, where you have three professional and three personal goals each quarter - so I just finished my second quarter. The first quarter I hit 4 out of 6; this quarter I only hit 2.

One of my goals was to finish all the stretch goals for Energy Hook. I got close - leaderboards went in on September 30 - but they aren't social, and there's no achievements, so not quite there yet. 

Quarterly may be a little bit too spread out. The first month I did Other Stuff and didn't focus. On the other hand, that Other Stuff (redoing the character physics) was great, so, maybe Quarterly *is* good in that it gives me some leisure time to do good stuff that isn't directly related to the end goal, sort of like Google or 3M's employee discretionary time.

I'm going to do at least one more Quarter, and then I'll give bi-monthly a whirl. I always did like bi-monthly milestones when I did AAA - monthly too frequent, too much overhead.

So, my professional goals for next quarter:

* Get Energy Hook to Beta (that means feature complete; not just the stretch goals but also the billboards, hall of presidents, and social integration - and get the remaining levels done)

* Get the t-shirts made and delivered

* Try to contact 100 youtubers, as per NorthernLion's talk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc25J6nCEbE

Wish me luck!