Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Auro

 Man, I think I'm addicted to Kickstarter. I might need to start budgeting myself.

One thing I backed recently that I have high hopes for is Auro - it's by Keith Burgun, the guy who designed 100 Rogues, which was my go-to roguelike on the iphone - and possibly my favorite roguelike ever. It was highly tactical - even though you're only playing one character, you have access to a lot of powers that can move you and the enemies around the board in interesting ways, which added a level of depth on top of (under?) the usual roguelike resource-management game. Also, it wasn't too long! It's the only roguelike I've ever managed to finish - because it had a reasonable length, I was able to play it multiple times with the different character classes. And the paladin's 'ask god for help' power was hilarious.

Anyhow, it looks like everything I loved about 100 Rogues is coming to Auro and then some. And it's a hex map this time. +1.

I love turn-based games in general. I get to savor the play in a way that I can't with realtime. And I have time to think. But the retail games industry has always said 'turn-based is dead' - even though Civilization has always been such a hit. Good thing we have indie games.

Keith is asking for hardly anything to make this game - he's already hit his goal of a mere $7500 - but, come on, what's that going to buy them? After shwag and overhead and taxes? Maybe a month of dev time for one person if they're in a place where cost of living is low? I'm hoping he raises a lot more.

 

Oh, It's One Of *Those* Days

Been trying to record some footage of the swinging game prototype and it's one thing after another.  The windowed build isn't recording ... my cool debug info doesn't show up in the deployment build ... Bandicam is sucking down too much cpu, making it too slow ... our other computer is fast enough, but refuses to acknowledge the gamepad ...

I'm running out of Saturday. Oh well, nothing for it but to keep plugging along. See if I can get it recording at a decent speed on the gamepad-happy laptop, or maybe get that half-assed mouse support working? 

 

 

Ads?!

As you can probably see (unless you're running an adblocker or looking at this through an rss feed), I broke down and put adsense on the blog. Hey, if it monetizes as well as sixty second shooter, free money.  Should pay for what I'm spending on typepad and then some.

 

 

Did I mention I'm teaching at DigiPen now?

I'm teaching a class this semester, a "Technology for Designers" class - it's a survey of various technological topics (graphics, AI, physics, etc) to give them a good overview on topics they might not go into too much detail with in the rest of their curriculum.

A lot of smart people in that class - they've already taught me some stuff, including some cool Excel tricks.

Already more work than I expected, but seems like it might be a good way to bring in a little extra cash while I continue to foolishly pursue the white whale of indie game development.

Or maybe it's the worst of both worlds: not making enough to support the family, and at the same time taking time away from my indie game development. Hmm....

Whatever. Teaching seems to run in my family, so giving this a shot.

My wife's more successful than I am

My wife opened an Esty shop, CatShyCrafts, about the same time I launched sixty second shooter. She's made more money with it than sixty second shooter has ... and just made the front page of the Etsy newsletter, which is huge, sounds like the Etsy equivalent of being featured in the iPhone App Store.

So, I've been making games professionally for twenty years ... and she's been making crafts professionally for, oh, three months.  Hmm.

As you can tell, I'm jealous. But proud at the same time! Prealous. Joud.

Edit: (Cathy pointed out there's some implied sexism in this article - by pointing out that my wife's more succesful than me, I imply that the status quo is the reverse. But my main thing was really the disparity in experience! Anyhow. I also conflated money with success, as long as we're pointing out things I'm doing wrong.)

Why haven't I been blogging much lately, you ask?
I guess I just don't have that hour-a-week I used to spend on it anymore. Second daughter, for one thing.

For those interested, the games in the logo image are, left to right:
- Magic Candle 2 (or maybe 3, I forget)
- Die By The Sword
- Spider-Man 2
- Schizoid

Is GameFly Really Worth It?

I tend to have GameFly games out for a while.  I wondered to myself - is this really worth it?  If I just bought used games, would I not only spend about the same amount of money but also get to keep the games?

Turns out GameFly lets you look at your rental history.  So I did.  Turns out, for games I actually finish, I tend to have them out 4-5 weeks.  So that's a cost of $16-$20 or so in Gamefly time.  These are games that are still fairly recent releases, that I could buy for around $35.  

Factor in that some games I discover I hate and return immediately, and the savings goes up considerably.

And although sometimes I like to have the games for my collection, the truth is I almost never, never, ever go back and play those games again.  So there is just about zero value to me to keep the games.  

So.  Yes.  GameFly really is worth it.  And no, they didn't pay me to write this.

I would pay Intuit $50 a year to *not* make me upgrade

Last week at the office we were talking about how annoying Quicken has gotten lately - the number of clicks per transaction has doubled or tripled, and it has stopped feeling "Quick".  Maybe they've fixed that in the 2010 edition, maybe not, I'm too scared to find out.  Joel Spolsky's article is dead-on.  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html  Just replace "Office" with "Quicken".

In other news, the IGDA Leadership Forum this year is even better than last year's.  A full report will be forthcoming.

Sofia's a frickin' genius

Not only is she reading *One Fish, Two Fish* to me at bedtime, she started to learn to "program" today with Kodu Gamelab.

Ok, I was giving her step-by-step instructions, I don't think she could have done anything with it on her own.

Cathy's not impressed.  "She is almost five, you know."

Neat, neat program, though - as a primer to programming it's awesome.  And we could practically have written Schizoid with it - color-coded enemy bashing is built in.  A bargain at $5.