October 4th, 2007 Luke
I’m quitting my day job.
I’ll be jobless come October 14th, with the exception of some contract work that I’m doing(which currently has a cap of about $540/month earned - unlikely I can hit that).
I figured out that I’ve saved up enough money to take three months off from life, and then maybe go back to school in January.
But what am I supposed to do to fill up my time? This will be the first time that I’ve actually given myself time to work on my projects: I’ll be able to work on them in a general 9-5 workday, and then spend the rest of my spare time on another one.
With that being said, I’ve gotten a few ideas. One is that game idea, on which I still can’t figure out something to make playing a merchant fun.
Another is a Flash game community website. Basically, I’ll provide Flash Developers with the infrastructure they need to host and market their game for free, along with the extras they need to set up things like scoreboards. Then users will be able to sign up(or alternately play without signing up), and have all of their stats tracked while they play these games.
It’s definitely a complex idea, though. Probably the most complex that I’ve come this close to implementing.
I’m sussing out a designer to hire for this; I don’t feel confident that I can actually design the website well enough for it to do all that I want to. Plus, the designing will be a lot of work. I’ll need forum templates, main page templates, game page templates, scoreboard page templates, and more. And those are just off the top of my head.
It’ll be fun, though.
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June 11th, 2007 Luke
What makes up a puzzle?
I’m about to come up on my two months of summer vacation, and I’ve been considering my options in terms of making money, building sweet stuff, and keeping life non-cluttered. One of the things that I’ve decided to add to my ever-growing list of goals for this summer is making some sort of commercial-quality game; something that I can sell and distribute for $5/copy or something if I chose to.
Based on what I’ve been reading recently, the casual games market is the way to go for an aspiring game programmer; there are thousands of casual games out there to play, and websites like PopCap Games seem to be practically printing their own money! I’m not too worried about making money off of a game(although I won’t lie and say it wouldn’t be sweet), because this is more of a learning project than anything.
What makes a game casual, though? I had to define this before I tried to figure out what I would be building. I define a casual game as:
- fun to play
- easy to start - no 15-minute opening cutscenes
- little to no time investment required
- little to no storyline
That’s my list. A casual game, in my opinion, will be fun to play, and for the most part require almost no time to get going on. The idea is that you just start it up, play for 10 minutes while you’re waiting for something, and then go on with your day. The non story-based aspect of the casual game is listed because, as far as I can tell, there is little to no storyline behind a casual game. Generally there are just puzzles.
With that in mind, I decided that my best bet for making a game that would be easy enough to make and at the same time something people would play would be a puzzle game. But what makes something particularly puzzling?
I tossed around a few game ideas, but they all seemed to come down to being more action-based than puzzle-based. I realized that I needed to define the different elements of a puzzle, so that I could incorporate puzzling elements into my game. This is what I came up with:
- timers
- combinations
- automatic movement
I didn’t spend too long on the list, but that’s what I came up with. Virtually every puzzle in a game or otherwise that I’ve spent time on has incorporated one or more of those elements.
I’ve got a few ideas, now - I’ll be sketching them out some more over the next couple of weeks. For now though, I’ve at least got a basic framework of what a puzzle game needs to be.
Posted in Project, design, life, programming, puzzles | No Comments »
May 15th, 2007 Luke
Militarism’s finished. It’s been finished for two days, and I’m pretty glad with how it’s turned out and how quickly it’s being picked up; as I type this, we have 13 users. My advance invite only went out to about 5 people, and I’ve only personally recruited maybe 6.
However, this leaves me with another finished project, and that gnawing question: what now?
I need to build something else. Something else that’s really cool. I know Parakeet 2.0 is next on the list, but I’m still doing some ‘relaxing’(read: working on other things) before I really get started on that.
This is a problem that I always have when I’m working on my own projects. I’ll finish one, and then pause for a while to try and figure out what to do next.
I guess it’s not so bad, though; it does keep me a little more relaxed than some other people I know.
Well, back to hacking.
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March 19th, 2007 Luke
Recently, I bought the game Virtual Villagers(Chapter 1). It’s a great little casual game, and sometimes I need to distract myself from other things I’m working on. Virtual Villagers is great for doing that.
There are two computers here. Primarily, I use my eMac, but we recently acquired a Vista computer also. There are two separate versions of Virtual Villagers, one for PCs and one for Macs. I noticed this, but I still bought the PC version for $19.95. It’s a neat game.
I installed it on Vista, activated it, and set to playing. And it was sweet. So I said to myself “hey, this game is sweet. I should put it on both computers”. This, in theory, was a good idea. However, upon installing it on the eMac, I tried to run it only to find that my “registration key was invalid”. With a sinking feeling, I realized that they probably had two separate licensing systems; I would have to buy two copies of the game so that I could play it on both operating systems.
Initially, I was angry. I was strongly tempted to pirate it for the Mac; I’d already bought one copy, why should I need another just to play it on a second computer?! However, cooler heads prevailed and I ended up sending an e-mail to their support line. The e-mail read:
I am on a Mac computer, and when attempting to input my registration code the program told me that “The registration code is not valid.”
I expected a reply something along the lines of “we have your money, you have a copy, go buy another one”. But, to my surprise, today I received an e-mail that went like this:
Hello,
I will make an exception for you and give you a code for your other computer.
I need to make sure you are referring to Virtual Villagers: A New Home
(Chapter 1).
I also need to know which one you bought.
Encouraged by this response, I quickly sent back my information, and profusely thanked the sender. Maybe fifteen minutes later, I was e-mailed a link to a .zip file that would allow me to download the Mac version of the game, fully activated and ready to go, free of charge.
This heart-warming story does have a moral. And that moral is: customer service matters. Before I e-mailed support, I thought that I would need to buy another copy to play the game on my Mac. I was a bit angry, and everyone I talked to lately has heard me ranting about this. However, they responded to my issue and did their best to make good on the problem; they’re eating at least $19.95 on the sale of another registration key, just to get in my good graces. Which they did. Now, you could say I’m an evangelist. I’ve been raving about their game even more than I did after I played their demo, and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Great customer service is hard to find these days, and these guys definetly stepped up to the plate.
So if you’re ever looking for a great casual game to play, check out Virtual Villagers. I can vouch for both the game and the company that made it being awesome. And Carla Humphrey, if you ever read this…thank you.
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