There were three priests playing pool. One of the priests asked the others, “If you knew that the world was going to end in the next 10 minutes, what would you do?”

One priest answered, “I’d go to the church and lead the people in prayer. I’m sure there will be plenty who are afraid or lost, and I would want to be there with them to pray for forgiveness and strength.”

The next priest said, “I’d go home and pray alone, as Jesus suggested was best in the gospel according to Matthew. I’d shut myself in my room, and I’d pray for forgiveness and strength.”

The two looked at the third priest and asked him what he would do. He replied, “I’d finish this game.”

The End of the World is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

It’s now Day 6 of that weekend due to a pulled back muscle, and I blame my niece.

More accurately, I blame myself for not taking care of my body better. I’ve been super focused on making progress on Stop That Hero! end game victory and defeat conditions, especially in the last few weeks. In terms of my health, though, I felt under the weather in the previous week, and sitting at my desk for many, many hours on end is punishing on your posture.

Driving for 7 hours to Chicago last Friday didn’t help.

Then I saw my niece, and while playing with her, I discovered that jumping up and down makes her giggle. If you have a niece, you know that her laugh is one of the best sounds in the world, and so you keep doing whatever it is that makes her laugh. So I kept jumping up and down for much longer than I’ve ever done in what is probably years.

And throughout the rest of that day, I went from feeling perfectly fine to feeling a light twinge in my back to being unable to move my arms, legs, and head easily.

I was in a lot of pain, and driving for another 7 hours was not going to happen until I could sit for longer than 5 minutes without feeling like I was being tortured.

The Difference Between Having a Job and Owning Your Business

Now, if I was still working at a Day Job, I’d most likely get paid time off, and here would be an excuse to actually take advantage of it! One of the benefits of a good job is that they pay you if you can’t work, bizarrely enough.

But since I’m an indie developer who isn’t finished creating his first game yet, let alone earning income from sales of said game, every day I’m unable to work equates to money lost. I’m burning through savings as it is, and the productivity hit from being sick or injured isn’t helpful.

When you’re sick, you feel miserable and unmotivated. Maybe you can do only half of a day’s work today? When you’re injured, it can either be no problem (I don’t need my ankle to type code), or it can be debilitating (if you’re in extreme pain when you lift your arm, you probably shouldn’t be mousing with it).

But either way, if you run your own business and are unable to be productive, it’s frustrating. It’s especially damaging if you don’t have an automatic selling system in place. Ideally, if I had games to sell, I could make money while I sleep, or while I’m on vacation, or even while I’m unable to work. Until then, it’s almost as if you are carrying the entire business on a tightrope, and you’re just trying to make it across to the other side before you fall. My savings are providing me with a safety net, but I’d rather the money go towards more productive uses.

While I haven’t been able to work on code this last week, I did take advantage of the downtime to catch up on an Internet business marketing audio course I’ve been meaning to finish. I brought my game development notebook with me, so I spent some time going through it and remembering how Stop That Hero! has progressed, as well as thinking about the future direction of the project.

In the end, I tried to make the most of my situation, so this last week wasn’t a total productivity loss, but it’s still frustrating that I couldn’t get back to work.

Taking Care of Your Indie Self

Days before I pulled my back muscle, I recall thinking, “Self, it’s been some time since you last did a good stretching session or even went for a walk. You should probably start getting your body moving again before you regret it.”

And I said, “Ok, Self, sure. I’ll get moving as soon as I finish working on the combat mechanics.”

There’s lots of excuses for not taking care of yourself. Gym memberships are too expensive to justify when you have no income. It’s too cold to go outside. Driving downtown to the excellent Des Moines skywalk system to walk indoors is too inconvenient. You woke up too late (again), blowing past your scheduled exercise time.

But in the end, they’re excuses, and eventually your body pays for your health debt.

If I was more strict about taking an hour every morning to do stretches and exercises, maybe my back muscles wouldn’t have been so shocked by all the sudden jumping and movement, and I wouldn’t have lost a week of productivity. Maybe if I didn’t care about feeling silly, I could have at least walked up and down the stairs within the building I live in.

And if nothing else, the mental clarity that exercise brings should be enough of an incentive if I insist on having workaholic tendencies.

Cliff Harris of Positech Games advocates archery as some fun physical exercise. David Michael, author of The Indie Game Development Survival Guide, lifts weights. A colleague of mine makes an effort to walk periodically throughout the week (and I should really take up his offer to join him once I recover).

Even with daily exercise, it might not be enough. Noel Llopis writes about his standing desk experiment and the news that sitting for prolonged periods of time can be deadly. I’ve been wanting a standing desk myself, if only for the change in posture.

How do you take care of your physical health as an indie game developer? How much of a priority do you give to exercise in your life?

The Perils of the Sedentary Indie is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

One big part of this kind of learning is the idea that your subconscious mind needs time to let things sink in while you aren’t thinking about the topic. You sometimes get the most insight into a textbook after you wake up in the morning. In the following video, there’s a mention about taking time to let hunches and ideas incubate which I think goes along with this idea.

The video argues that exposure to lots of ideas and thoughts is the primary driver for innovation. Not all of this exposure leads to good ideas, but “chance favors the connected mind.” Having all of these various thoughts in your head, you might get overwhelmed thinking about them purposefully and actively, but incubation time, getting away from problems, seems to help. I’ve woken up from a good night’s sleep with awareness of program bugs I introduced into my project before I went to bed, and usually the fixes for those bugs came along as well. B-)

I think I’m focusing much more on the incubation aspect than the video did, but I believe spending time away from a problem can help solutions develop in your mind and develop good ideas.

I think I’ll go for a walk now.

Where Good Ideas Come From is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

Last Monday, I gave my two weeks’ notice to my day job. I’m going to run GBGames, LLC full-time.

After 5 years of part-time development and not much to show for it, I was frustrated. I had no urgency. I found myself losing focus often, even after I admonished myself for doing so. Week after week, I’d get disappointed in my lack of productivity. I’d identify the problem as a lack of seriousness or a lack of clarity or a lack of efficiency, and I’d claim, “No more! This time, it’s for real!”, but then I’d find myself at the end of another week with little to no forward progress and hardly any change to my work habits.

Well, no more! This time, it’s for real! B-)

I’m cutting myself off from the peace of mind of a regular income from a salaried position, with nice benefits, at a really good company, with great coworkers. I could work in much worse environments. I was able to spend money on food, clothes, utilities, and toys without generally worrying if I had enough money to cover it. The people were great, and the company policies were what you thought of when you thought of best-practices.

So why walk away from that? Because I’m also cutting myself off from an obligation to be anywhere for 40-60 hours a week. Those hours are mine now. I have the freedom to use them however I want. Instead of being a cog in an otherwise pretty great wheel, I’m making my own wheel.

Of course, with that freedom comes great responsibility. I’m solely responsible for the success or failure of my business. My future income depends more on my marketing, sales, creativity, and productive output than the time I spend sitting at a desk. It’s going to be hard work, and I’ll encounter challenges the likes of which I’ve never seen.

But it’s time. I have an opportunity to make a mark on the world. I am done with feeling like the lion’s share of my attention is being given to what I should to be doing to the detriment of what I want to be doing. I’m only going to get older. I turn 29 in a couple of months, and before I know it, I’ll be 30. And then 40. And 50. And so on. If I’m going to run my business full-time, it might as well be now, when I have less responsibilities and obligations. I’ve prepared for years to do it. I’m as ready as I’m going to be.

Let’s go, World. I’m ready to rock.

(Photo: Empty Cube | CC BY 2.0)

Going Full-Time Indie is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

Let’s look back on 2009 first. I created an index card and kept it with me throughout the year to remind me what I wanted to focus on:

My four main focii: being more decisive, creating more value, delivering more value, and being healthier.

Being more decisive was meant to remind me that I need to be more active in my pursuits if I expect to make a difference. I may want to run my own business and create games, but unless I make bigger and better decisions, I’ll continue to get mediocre results.

Creating and delivering more value? Those two were inspired by Steve Pavlina’s article How to Make Lots of Money During a Recession. Creating and delivering real value to customers is the best, most sustainable way to earn a living. You can probably trick people into parting with their money, but if you can deliver your creations to people who are willing to pay for it, you’ll be well ahead.

And finally, being healthier. I wanted to lose weight and feel as fit as I did when I was in high school.

So how did I do in each focus last year? Miserably.

At the beginning of the year, I was able to leverage the work of outsourced contractors to create a Facebook game, Sea Friends. You can read the post-mortem, but here are the key highlights:

• It was the most aggressive schedule I have worked on outside of 48-hour game development competitions.
• I learned a lot about what I can accomplish by leveraging other people’s time.
• I got a taste of what life is like when you put everything else on hold and dedicate your time and resources to a single pursuit.

That last bit, however, got me in the end. I spent way longer recovering from this project than I would have liked. Between a day job and working on this project, I had no time for relaxing. I couldn’t afford idle time or time spent on anything that wasn’t getting that game finished. I paid someone else to shovel my car out of the snow during this time because I couldn’t afford the time to do it myself! So I needed to take time off, and unfortunately that downtime lasted much longer than anticipated.

And as for Sea Friends, it’s not a very good game, but it still had a few hundred daily active users as recently as a few weeks ago. I could have spent time improving it, but between feeling burnt out and the proprietary nature of the Flash file, I couldn’t motivate myself to do so. I’m not proud of it, allowing those two things to stop me, but it’s what happened.

After Sea Friends, I had a whole year to release a new game, but outside of Ludum Dare competition entries, I didn’t finish anything. So much for creating and delivering value.

I suppose I’m being overly negative. Late last year, I also invested in an online educational course on Internet business development, and since my focus has been there for the past few months, that’s why there has been a drop in the Thousander Club entries (and blog entries in general!). What I’ve been learning there should help me not only with GBGames but also a different website I started.

The focus that resulted in definite improvement was the focus on being healthier. I went from 188 lbs in February to a peak of 192 lbs in May down to 180 lbs in December. That’s a net loss of 8 lbs, and 12 lbs were lost between May and the end of the year! I’ve also been playing soccer, so I’m feeling more fit in general, too. Aside from a pulled hamstring in October, I’ve been improving my health slowly but surely.

So if 2009 was a mediocre year for me, what makes me think that 2010 will be any different?

Because I’ll be leveraging Purpose, Discipline, and Habits this time around.

Last year, each focus was practically the equivalent of a bad New Year’s Resolution. They were vague, and I didn’t do anything to change my life so that each focus played a big role. Yeah, I had a reminder in the form of that index card, but what was it reminding me to do or be?

I realized I didn’t want a repeat of a mediocre year, and so I decided I was going to make changes to my life to ensure it.

First, I didn’t want to feel aimless, drifting from one interesting project to the next without accomplishing anything. I needed to figure out what I really wanted out of my life. I needed to figure out my purpose.

Using the exercises in the book Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life, I was able to get a good start with this statement:

A Life on Purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, all driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

Bam. It’s great to have something to help me make decisions. If it doesn’t lead to more freedom and fun, I’m not interested. If being that person’s friend is discouraging and stifles my creativity and curiosity, I don’t want that friendship. If my heart isn’t in it and I can’t improve, why should I bother doing the same old same old? And if my health deteriorates because of it, why should I accept it as a fact of life?

Ok, so what do I want? Generally, I want to be a prolific creator. I want to be a lifelong learner. I want to be fit and healthy. I want to be a leader and role-model. I want to live a life of passion.

I’ve identified four major goals that I want to accomplish this coming year, and while I won’t be able to list all of them here, they all pass my “Is it a match for my purpose?” test.

One goal is to earn regular revenue from GBGames. So far, the only revenue I’ve ever earned is from ads, and it was never significant in the first place. I could basically pay for web hosting. With the recession, my revenues have dropped.

So how do I plan on changing things this year? Hasn’t my goal always been to earn revenue from GBGames? Yes, but I never gave my business the attention it needed. This year, I’m taking steps to change my life so that I can give it that attention.

There is a quote I like about discipline: “Discipline is remembering what you want.” A lot of people fail at keeping New Year’s resolutions because they think they need to dedicate all of their will power to accomplish it and they burn out. Will power is great for short bursts of focus, but it’s the wrong tool to use for the long haul. Discipline is the right tool. Will power will let you do things to change your environment so that discipline is easier to maintain. For instance, if you want to lose weight, using will power to avoid eating all of the junk food you keep in your home every day is a poor use of the will. A better use? Dedicating an afternoon of throwing away your junk food, shopping for healthier food, and planning healthy meals. Now you have healthy meals and snacks because you used your will power to change your environment to match your goals. Set your life up in a way that makes it easy to remember what you want out of it.

How do you do so? You install some good habits. If you can get yourself to go for a walk every single day after dinner without fail, you’re a long way along your goal of becoming more fit, and each day it becomes harder to fail.

So how do I leverage my purpose, discipline, and habits to help me accomplish my goal of earning revenue for GBGames this year? Frankly, my business plan is still being formed, and it’s the subject of another blog post. That said, in previous years, my business has suffered because it was always an afterthought. Development hours were squeezed into weeks full of non-development. 2010 will be the year that I gear my daily actions and habits toward improving my business. I’ve already taken stock of my current situation, and I’ve identified what needs to change. While I feel behind already, this work was important and needed to be done to pave the way for the rest of the year.

In previous years, I believe I have written inspirational posts about how things were going to change, but I never stuck by those convictions. This year feels different. It is different. I’ve hit a point where what I knew intellectually about the connection between action and results is now intuitively known as well.

While I intend to write more about my plans, for now, days after Groundhog’s Day, here’s to 2010!

Happy New Year! is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

There was an MK vs DC tournament, and if you were eliminated, you could buy back in for a donation amount that doubled each round. It started with only 18 people and doubled in size before Round 1 finished. Considering I haven’t played a Mortal Kombat game in years, I think I put in a respectable showing as Batman, even though I was eliminated three different times and only won once. The ultimate winner of the tournament received a PSP.

One attendee uploaded pictures for the event at Flickr.

Besides the tournament, there was an auction for games. I won three DS games, and there were more than a number of Xbox 360 and PS3 titles that went home with some healthy bidders. The mantra that night was “For the kids!”

Game-loving Chicagoans had fun and raised money for a good cause. For the kids, FTW!

Chicago for Child’s Play Charitable and Fun is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

From http://www.childsplaycharity.org/events.php:

December 9th 2008

Chicago, IL. (Plan B Chicago, 1635 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL 60647) Dawdle.com and Midway Games are sponsoring the first-ever Child’s Play fundraiser in Chicago! Join us for gaming, booze, and prizes! We’ll have a gaming contest (game TBA) and some other special items. Totally inspired by Funde Razor, we’re doing our part to raise the spirits of some very deserving kids.

To learn more, please go to http://www.dawdle.com/childsplay. To purchase your ticket, please visit to http://childsplay.eventbrite.com/

I’ll be attending, and so should you! Check http://www.childsplaycharity.org/events.php for Child’s Play events in your area.

Chicago for Child’s Play Charity is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

For revenge, GirlFlash decided to host Mini LD48 #2.

also, sorry if I am interrupting anybodies Independence day plans, but I’m English and this is how I get even =p

I won’t be participating. Well, maybe I’ll participate. It feels like a challenge.

Anyway, Independence Day is not only an excuse for grills, a day off from the day job, and time with friends. It is also a great time to reflect on what it means to be an indie game developer. Indies exist in many industries. Indie film, indie music, indie TV shows, indie books, and indie poetry all exist. Indie games are a natural addition. What drives people to forgo steady incomes and decent benefits and go indie? The urge to create something can be quite strong, and an indie might know that that something won’t get created unless he or she does the creating. The major Hollywood studios won’t green light all films, and the major game publishers won’t make all games. For quite a lot of people, these aren’t hurdles. The film or game will get made anyway. Funding comes from MasterCard and Visa. Sleep can be optional on some days. Poor substitutes for the high quality production equipment can be used to great effect. And the film or game will be finished.

The indie life. It’s exciting, it’s emotional, and it’s full of drama. There can be lean times. There’s the potential for great success, and there’s the risk of losing it all. But would you trade it for anything else?

If you’re already doing your own thing your own way, you probably have your own independence day to celebrate. If you’re still supporting your efforts through your day job as I am, then perhaps you’re looking forward to creating your own independence, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day! is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

Starting out by the blue people, I saw a green guy, and shot him… minus 10 points for killing a team member. I re-spawned and move out again. There’s a green guy. I won’t shoot him this time… oh, he shot me. Eventually I became hesitant to shoot as I didn’t want to be a team-killer. Instead I wandered the fringes playing with the destructible environment. Taking out half a building is great fun. Not knowing who to shoot isn’t.

Eventually I realized there were blue, green, AND red people in the game. *sigh* Green and blue guys are teammates. Red guys are enemies. That seems simple enough, except that I couldn’t tell the green guys from the red guys.

When it comes to the game interface, we try to make things as intuitive as possible. One way to make it obvious that two objects on a screen are different is by using different colors. In fact, I remember going to a Chicago IGDA meeting in 2003 to see John Tobias (of Mortal Kombat fame) give a talk on character design. He said that when he works on character design, he always applies the concepts of shape, size, and color to differentiate characters and objects.

When you’ve locked the shape and size of various objects, such as orbs in a puzzle game or soldiers in an FPS, the other option you have is color. But as Osver points out, color might not be enough for a significant percentage of your players, especially if you pick colors without considering their impact on the color blind. My beta testing for Killer Kittens has uncovered a number of problems, and one of them was the color scheme I used. Currently I have a blue ship on a green background, and as far as I am concerned, it is very easy to see the player’s ship, but I’ve had players complain that the “blue-on-blue” scheme is hard to see. GameProducer.net also documented a problem that a color blind player had during a demo.

What can you do? One tool you can use is this Color Scheme Generator. While it is aimed at web developers to help them pick a good color scheme for the Web, it can also be used to give you an idea what kinds of problems color blind players of your games may have. There is a drop-down menu at the bottom that lets you see the difference between normal vision and any of the various forms of color blindness.

Another option is to actually change how your objects look. Rather than have the same image with a different color, add something unique to each. The version of Frozen Bubble on this site allows for you to toggle “colorblind mode” with a key press. Notice the difference between these two images:

Whether you are color blind or not, you can play Frozen Bubble. As I understand it, the history of this feature came about because a few color blind players really wanted to play Frozen Bubble, and they were able to talk with the developers and add a feature that would allow them to do so.

Snood got around this problem entirely by having different shapes as well as colors. Even if you couldn’t tell the snoods apart by their colors, they had unique faces which made it easy to do so.

One nice side effect of making your game accessible to color blind players is that it also makes it more accessible to everyone. Perhaps one of your players has a monitor that doesn’t display colors quite the way it should. Your game can still entertain that player if your design makes use of more than color as a differentiator.

Another example is my Ludum Dare #11 entry , which involves moving your mouse to the goal while avoiding the randomly shaped obstacles. The goal and your mouse cursor are the same color, and the obstacles are a different color. I picked blue for the mouse and goal, and red for the obstacles. Even if you have some form of color blindness, you should be able to see the difference.

Now, just in case, I could also improve upon this design by making use of shapes. Since the obstacles are going to be randomly sized rectangles, I could make the goal a circle to differentiate it better.

I could even use a very detailed sprite to help differentiate it from the solid colors of the obstacles. There are quite a few options, but the point is that by taking into account the fact that some people are color blind, you could make your game more accessible, which means more people can play it. By ignoring this issue, you are putting up artificial barriers that prevent a significant number of people from enjoying your game.

Tags: video games, video game development, color blind, graphic design, character design

Game Design for the Color Blind Player is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

That’s orange juice with extra pulp right there. Mmm, hmm!

LD#11: Minimal Sunday Breakfast is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development