Before Double Fine had their really successful campaign and seemingly everyone thought Kickstarter was suddenly this brilliant way to raise money for indie games, I looked into it.

As development continued on Stop That Hero!, I worried about continuing to fund it with my savings before I actually ran out. I was aware of Kickstarter, since I backed Addicube and most recently Bhaloidam by Corvus Elrod, and I also backed Anthony Salter’s Inaria on 8-bit Funding. All of which were successfully funded, by the way, and I’m proud to have been a part of the reason why.

It seemed to make sense that a relatively unknown indie project could expect to get at least a little bit of funding to help make a game a reality, and I figured a Kickstarter campaign for Stop That Hero! would be an excellent way to experiment with crowdsourced funding.

I figured that I should look up how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign, and I found a lot of good information. Unfortunately, what I learned is that running a Kickstarter campaign is a lot of work, and that means dedicating time to it, and that means I’d be dedicating time away from the project I really want to work on.

Having to spend time on backer award, a high quality video trailer explaining the campaign, and finding people to fund the project? If I had dedicated marketing staff, sure, but I don’t. Plus, I clearly underestimated my budget needs for this project as it is, and I would need to ensure I knew how much to ask for so that I didn’t end up being underfunded. I’d also want to ensure that the requested funds were realistic. I’m not going to be getting millions of dollars for my project, and if I asked for that much, it means a high likelihood that the campaign itself will fail and so I’d lose access to the money that actually gets pledged.

Recently, I read an article on The Ugly Side of Kickstarter, and while the title makes it sound like it exposed some seedy underbelly of crowdsourced funding, the reality is that they’ve found what I found: that a Kickstarter campaign requires a lot of work and isn’t some magic money-making machine.

Basically, my takeaway with my own investigation was that Kickstarter campaigns are fantastic if you have the time, the marketing ability or star power, and a really good reason for it. It’s great for backers to feel some ownership in the development process and for developers to get a great marketing outlet and potential customers.

But I definitely wasn’t going to launch a Kickstarter campaign when I didn’t plan for it in the first place. Perhaps for a future project, but not as an afterthought. No one benefits from a half-assed Kickstarter campaign, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to put together a full-assed one in the time I could spare for it.

Have you looked into Kickstarter, 8-bit funding, or similar crowdsourced funding sites to fund your indie game? Have you backed any projects? How was your experience?

Why I’m Glad I Didn’t Try to Create a Kickstarter Campaign is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

Corvus has done more involving story and play than anyone else I know. He has a wealth of knowledge about games, story, play, and community. He’s worked for decades exploring various aspects of “participatory storytelling,” and he talks about the meaning of game mechanics in his Notebook, among other topics. On his old blog, he hosted the Bloggers of the Round Table, which always had fascinating, thoughtful posts on all sorts of topics related to games. Every time I interact with him, I feel privileged because I always come away with a new idea or thought.

So it is with pleasure that I ask you to pledge to fund his current project, Bhaloidam.

What is Bhaloidam? It’s an open and accessible storytelling platform, but Corvus can explain it better than I can in this short video:

I could say it is like a powerful yet intuitive Dungeons and Dragons, but it is much more than a role-playing game system, and I would be doing Corvus a disservice.

Bhaloidam is the expression of my belief in the power of story and play and my belief in the importance of our communities.

If you want to see Bhaloidam in action and get a feel for it yourself, you can schedule an online game play demo.

The Kickstarter project is, at the time of this writing, 60% funded, but there’s only a week left to get the remaining 40%. Do you have $9 to pledge?

Bhaloidam is the culmination of all my creative, philosophical, spiritual, and intellectual, personal, and professional pursuits. It allows me to be an actor, a cartoonist, a computer animator, a writer, a director, a web designer, a storyteller, and while it doesn’t allow me to be an architect, the application of mathematics to creative expression scratches what I imagine is much the same itch.

…

So, Bhaloidam (both as a storytelling platform and a philosophy) is it for me. I am Bhaloidam. Along the way I’m sure to design more games (In fact, I’ve three in the works), but it’s Bhaloidam that lies at the heart of my career. It’s Bhaloidam that reflects not only who I am, but who I have been and who I want to be.

You can read more at the official Bhaloidam site. With a $9 pledge, you can help make Bhaloidam happen, and you’ll get an electronic copy of the 72-page, full-color, comic-format Bhaloidam handbook. For $9 more, you’ll get a printed copy.

There are also many other options available at different perk levels. For $45, for example, you’ll get the “skein pack”, which includes 1 printed copy of the Bhaloidam handbook, 4 Lifewheels, set of 360 tokens, 4 timing track pawns, and a set of 3 custom dice. You can also choose to give it to a friend as a gift.

So I’d like to ask you to do two things:

1. Pledge at least $9 to fund Bhaloidam. There are 12 different perk levels, from the basic ebook to the $900 “Storyteller Special.”
2. Tell at least one other person about Bhaloidam. Send them to the Bhaloidam site, tell them about the Bhaloidam Kickstarter project, and invite them to the online game play demos Corvus is hosting.

Let’s get Bhaloidam completely funded!

Do You Have $9 to Kickstart Bhaloidam? is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

I’m not celebrating because it’s not a good milestone to hit. I didn’t know how long it would be to take the Ludum Dare #18 prototype and make it into a full commercial-quality game, but I did not expect it to take a year. In fact, when the 2010 Ludum Dare October Challenge was announced, I thought a month sounded like a good time period. If it took three days to prototype the game, surely four weeks would be plenty of time to polish it up and release it.

Tomorrow is October 1st and the 2011 Ludum Dare October Challenge (even though an announcement went out saying that it started already), and I was hoping to have the game released before then. In fact, I thought I would have something released by today, but there were some AI issues I tackled last week that I’m still working on.

But eventually I am going to release my game, and I realized that I have never accepted payments for a video game before. Until last month, I wasn’t even registered with a payment processor.

So last night, I posted a few pre-order forms on the Stop That Hero! website. If you want to get the game when it is released for Windows, Linux, or Mac, you can reserve your copy of the game now.

In posting the pre-order, I realized I made a big step. I had some nervousness, partly because I’m selling a game that isn’t released yet, and partly because I’m asking for payment. I’ve never done it before.

It’s possible that no one will care, that no one will even click on the links to buy, but that’s not the point. The point was that I decided to ask people to do so in the first place.

You can’t make money without asking for it, and I decided that until the game is released, the worst-case is that no one bothers to pay me for it. But if I don’t ask for pre-orders, then there is a 100% chance that I won’t get paid anyway.

I’ve taken a step to change that certainty into a possibility, and it’s one of those moments that makes you feel good to run your own business. I don’t have to accept circumstances. I can take action to change them.

In this case, my game is taking longer than expected to make, and I could decide that it means delaying the possibility of sales until the game is released, but I could also try something to see how it goes. The worst case is that it has no effect, that no one will reserve their copy of the game, but there’s a potential now for a lot of upside.

And now I’ll get back to work. Eventually any pre-orders have to get fulfilled with a real game, and I’d like that to be before the end of another month.

Getting Used to Accepting Payments is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

Members of the general games-playing public are invited to show up, meet local indie developers, and play the games they’ve been hard at work creating. It’s fun, it’s free, and absolutely everyone is invited!

I’ll be demoing Stop That Hero! for the first time in public.

When? 1PM – 4PM, Saturday August 20th, 2011
Where? 243 S. Wabash Ave Room 924

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Do you plan on attending?

See Stop That Hero! in Chicago is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

Check out the 2011 candidates to get your last minute votes in!

This post was scheduled to be published at a time when I will not be able to access the computer. I’ll respond to comments when I return at the end of the month.

Last Day to Vote! is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

I saw some people playing this game earlier during GDC outside of the IGDA booth, and I wish I hadn’t pulled a back muscle recently so I could participate.

I recorded this second session, which was much bigger. I had to stop recording since the Moscone Center was closing for the day and I was not a volunteer, but I tried to capture the thrilling conclusion to this session:

I need to hang out with playful people more often! B-)

EDIT: Ah, it’s an Indiecade thing! Free Ninja

This post was scheduled to be published at a time when I will not be able to access the computer. I’ll respond to comments when I return at the end of the month.

What Is This Ninja Game? is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

The Independent Games Summit was full of different groups of indies. Some knew each other from TIGSource. Others have been around forever. And since we’re all indies, we each had our own unique story and reason for being there. Even so, it felt as if everyone knew each other and were fairly supportive. It was like a very odd yet loving family.

I only had a Summit & Tutorials pass since it seemed to be in the sweet spot between the too-expensive All Access Pass and the “let’s hang out with people who want to find a job at the Career Pavilion” Expo pass. While I couldn’t attend a lot of the cool talks and panels in the later half of the week, I was still able to attend any of the summits.

At one point, I skipped out on the IGS summit for an AI summit talk on pathfinding. James Anhalt of Blizzard talked about the pathfinding problems of StarCraft 2, Alexander Kring of Nihilistic focused on Heroes on the Move, and Nathan Sturtevant from the University of Denver worked on Dragon’s Age: Origins. They each gave a glimpse into the tech behind the games, and the Q&A session at the end made me laugh because it was almost all complaints about StarCraft.

If I would have attended the Google Android Day tutorials, I apparently could have received a free Google device. I didn’t, but I got to see the long line for the tutorials that morning. It’s kind of the same, right?

On the other hand, I did sign up for an Intel AppUp event with Mike “PoV” Kasprzak and Phil “philhassey” Hassey and received this baby:

It’s a Meebo-based EXOPC Slate! I finally got a cool consumer electronics device!

The best part of GDC was meeting everyone I’ve only ever spoken to on IRC or on web forums. Whether I was having lunch, standing in line, or walking to a session, there was always someone’s name to call out to and say “Hey! I recognize you from your online avatar!”

I briefly met Leigh Alexander, Drew Sikora, Ian Schreiber, Noah Falstein, and Derek Yu. I met game developers I’ve talked to on the Indie Gamer forums and in the #ludumdare IRC channel. I met game developers I’ve only heard about in passing.

And I got to hug Corvus Elrod of Zakelro! Don’t forget to vote for the 2011 IGDA board!

The Ludum Dare meetup was fun and had a good turnout:

There were so many of us, we needed multiple tables!

And here’s a link to a bunch of us wearing LD48 shirts.

And one action shot of PoV eating:

I was finally able to attend the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers Choice Awards.

Congratulations to Mojang for winning five awards between the two events, including the Seamus McNally Grand Prize in the IGF!

At the end of the week, we had the Ludum Dare Jam at Noisebridge, a really cool hacker space.

And an action video of Phil Hassey sleeping:

I had to leave the jam early and get on a plane the next morning, but I definitely want to do GDC next year! Heck, two days into it, I half wanted GDC to be over so I could get back home and make games sooner!

In the meantime, what was your favorite part of GDC?

This post was scheduled to be published at a time when I will not be able to access the computer. I’ll respond to comments when I return at the end of the month.

The After GDC Glow is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

After years of being one of those people who was a bit jealous of everyone who was going to the Game Developers Conference, I realized that I’m now one of those people to be jealous of. Today I will be setting foot in San Francisco, and tomorrow I will pick up my badge for the GDC!

And then I’ll be wide-eyed and star-struck and generally feel like the humble newbie I am. B-)

I’ll be attending the Indie Games Festival for the first time, meeting Ludum Dare regulars at the Ludum Dare meetup for the first time, and otherwise taking in the sights and sounds of GDC…for the first time!

I’ll be there through Saturday, so feel free to contact me through Twitter: @GBGames

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! GDC!

Off to My First GDC! is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

And somehow I hadn’t realized it before. I knew that the interface should be separate from the game, but I didn’t know that the interface was responsible for more than merely displaying the game world and its objects. It’s a heavy-weight in its own right, handling menus, HUDs, and inputs that the simulation ultimately doesn’t even know is happening.

I used StarCraft‘s interface to illustrate the idea that the player interface is more than a mere window into the simulation. It can have complex logic that the game simulation doesn’t actually care about. As far as the simulation is concerned, it receives commands. Most of the actions you take in StarCraft do not result in commands to the simulation.

If you click on an SCV, and then click the Repair button, and then click a burning Bunker, the interface is responsible for figuring out what you’re trying to do. It isn’t until you click on that Bunker that the simulation receives a command along the lines of “SCV 1 REPAIR BUNKER 5″. Up until then, only the interface has to know you’re working with a particular SCV, what commands are available to an SCV in general, what buttons to display in the SCV menu, which SCV menu you’re looking at, etc.

Stop That Hero!’s interface

Now that I know that I can expect the interface to my game to be incredibly complex as opposed to a dumb and simple view, it actually made it much easier to realize how to proceed with my project. I don’t have to do everything within the simulation, and in fact, I can expect a huge part of the work to involve the player’s interface.

Stop That Hero!‘s interface isn’t like most games in that there is no avatar to control. You’re not directly moving an entity with the arrow keys or commanding it to jump with the spacebar. You simply create them at the appropriate towers in the world, and they’ll figure out where to go and what to do on their own.

But how do you create them at towers? The original prototype had a menu hardcoded at the top right of the screen. If you wanted to create a monster at a tower, you had to click the monster icon at the top right, then click on the tower. If you had enough resources, you summoned the monster you selected.

It was functional, but I didn’t like how it felt. Why is the selection of the monster to summon separate from the act of summoning? While it makes it easy to create a bunch of the same type of monster at once, it’s also easy to accidentally create a monster if you click on a tower without wanting to.

I wanted something more intuitive, and it turned out that pie menus are exactly what I want.

Except my GUI code is incredibly basic. I have menu screens and buttons, and everything assumes it is starting at the top left corner of the screen. In order to even simulate a pie menu, I needed a way to display menus at arbitrary locations, and it would help to be able to offset a menu from its center instead of the top left corner.

Which meant giving menus dimensions (how else can you know what the center is?) and having my IMGUI-ish system understand how to display and detect updates at arbitrary offsets.

In the end, after some research, questions, and determination, I do have this sequence working:

First, click on the tower you want to summon a monster at:

The Monster Summoning Menu appears over that tower, which means it is right under your mouse cursor:

Select the monster you want to summon by moving your mouse cursor to the appropriate icon. Right now, I only have a Slime, but others will be added later:

Congratulations! You’ve summoned a Slime monster!

Besides the infrastructure changes to support arbitrary menu placement, configuring the menu is easy, and each button fires off whatever event I want when it is clicked.

Tricky Aspects

One of the things I still need to figure out is what to do with a tower near the edges of the screen. Right now, the menu is always centered on a tower, which means clicking on a tower near the side of the map results in a menu with icons you can’t see. They’re being displayed off screen.

It’s not such a problem if I can display the menu outside of the screen the way a game like SimCity/Micropolis does, but since I’m not using Gtk to render the menus, they have to be rendered within the screen. I could add more screen real estate around the play area, but I’m trying to keep the game at a low resolution like 800×600 to accommodate players with older computers and netbooks. I could make the play area scroll, so even if you were at a corner of the map, it would be displayed in the center of the screen, but I want the players to see everything at once. I could reduce the play area so that I have a border to work with, but I’m not sure I like losing so much level data just because of the UI.

My best option if I want to keep the pie menu is to detect if the menu is being displayed offscreen and have it adjust automatically, but I’m not sure if the menu appearing away from where you expected it becomes too unintuitive, defeating the purpose. Otherwise, I might have to get rid of the pie menu altogether.

RTS development in a vacuum

In any case, I now have a player interface that I can easily change, but one thing I didn’t anticipate was how similar it is to a real-time strategy game’s interface. I didn’t really think of Stop That Hero! as an RTS, and yet I suppose Dungeon Keeper and Populous had RTS-like interfaces, too. Or, rather, the interface is composed of icons that let you influence the world.

I discovered that while FPS or platformer development articles and tips are a dime a dozen, RTS development seems to be something that everyone must reinvent themselves since there is a lack of information out there. I know of a couple of strategy game programming books that focus on DirectX, and either people found them lacking, or they focused heavily on DirectX as opposed to the game.

Even if there was a basic breakdown of every aspect of an RTS project, leaving the research of each item as an exercise for the reader, I’d find it more helpful than figuring out what those aspects might be as I stumble across them myself.

While most games probably have a hard-coded GUI baked into a game, some games are more expandable upon release. I remembered that Total Annihilation allows player-created units, and I figured that there had to be a way to provide access to the GUI so that new units can be created by the player in game. I checked out the game’s modding tools and discovered how it handled its GUI elements. I spent an entire day perusing technical references and modding tutorials, peaking at the game’s default data files, and generally immersing myself in the internals of the game. It is fascinating how GUI images are tied loosely with the name of the unit or command.

World of Warcraft isn’t an RTS, but its GUI is supposed to be highly configurable by players, and there are interesting references explaining how the XML ties in with Lua commands and functions within the game.

Looking at how other games do it with the limited access they provide is like trying to study a map by staring at the back side. It’s hard work, and I’m sometimes limited by the games I have access to for the most part, but it is sometimes the best guidance I can get when it comes to figuring out how to implement my own game.

Stop That Hero! Is Apparently an RTS is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

After years of having to hear about the conference and the summits and the talks and the panels and the awards and the parties after the fact, I am actually going to be a participant!

Now I’ll get to attend the Indie Games Festival!
Now I’ll be able to meet game developers and journalists in-person instead of merely through IRC, Twitter, or blogs!
Now I get to be snubbed by major game developers when they hear I’m an independent game developer!

There were always excuses not to go in the past, such as not being able to request enough time off from a day job or not having the money. And the cost for registering for the pass, booking a plane, and staying at a hotel for a week was a big obstacle.

And cost was still a major stumbling block for me. Until I can make some income on a regular basis, I’m trying to be very careful with how I spend my money.

So how did I justify the massive expense this time?

For one thing, I have a friend currently residing in San Francisco who said I can crash at his place. No need for a hotel now!

Now, the GDC pass was tricky. I could have saved a lot of money by getting an Expo pass, but I wouldn’t be able to participate the entire week. Getting an All Access pass was prohibitively expensive. I opted for the Summits & Tutorials Pass since it seemed to offer the right balance of access and cost. While I won’t be able to attend a number of events, I will be able to go to tutorials and the Independent Games Summit.

Still, it wasn’t chump change, and I still had to book a flight.

My decision to pay so much at this time was based on a few thoughts:

• I can technically afford to go, and I might be too poor to go next year if my income level doesn’t change from $0.
• I can finally meet people who are involved in the industry, whether peers or mentors. My involvement has almost always been virtual. At least in Chicago there was the IGDA chapter, but the local game developers tended to be inactive, and they seem to drop like flies.
• I hear it is an experience.

So, bottom line, I’m going because it is a huge opportunity for me to be more involved in my industry and get to meet other participants.

I’m really excited. I’m actually going to be at GDC, and I’d love to meet you!

Who else is going to GDC?

I’m Going to the GDC (FINALLY)! is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development