GBGamesThe following just happened today at my day job:
Me: (out of nowhere) Red team or Blue team?
Coworker: … uhhhh…
Other Coworker: What?
Me: Red team or Blue team?
Coworker: What is this about?
Yet Another Coworker: What’s going on?
Me: Red team or Blue team?
Yet Another Coworker: What’s that about?
Me: Why does everyone ask me that?!?
Other Coworker: (pointing at me) Dweeb.
I’m the whimsical one at work, if you couldn’t tell. B-)
This past Saturday I worked on Oracle’s Eye for the first time in over a month. When I last worked on it in late December, I was trying to update the Frame Rate Independent Movement code I created. It was good enough when I implemented it, but I had a nagging suspicion that I didn’t do it right. I never did check in the changes I had made, and since it has been so long, I had to figure out what I was doing and then do it.
Originally, my code required that the Ball and the Player had movement functions that took an argument. This argument was the delta. For example, the Player could move 5 pixels each frame. 30 frames per second would mean that the Player should move 150 pixels per second. Of course, each frame might not be exactly 1/30th of a second, so I would have to calculate how far to move each frame so that the movement seems smooth. If, for example, a frame takes 1/30th of a second, then the delta multiplier should be 1. If it takes 1/10th of a second, then the multiplier should be 3. A frame that took 1/60th of a second would result in a multiplier of 0.5.
The sad thing is that it wasn’t all that clear how it should work when I originally implemented it. Also, I didn’t understand how to repeat the exact results in case I wanted to script it, nor did I know how it would work if I ever wanted to run a networked game on multiple platforms. After reading through a few more tutorials, I decided to fix it. I based my new code off of Sol’s Tutorials. Running the example game, I noticed that it isn’t terribly smooth itself. It periodically seems that the player’s ship takes small jumps. Perhaps it isn’t the best example to use? I’m open to better implementations if they exist.
This implementation works by setting game updates to specific time intervals. If the Player should move at 5 pixels per frame, then each update will result in a movement of 5 pixels. Multiple updates can take place during each rendered frame, but it is really easy to track the movement for each frame and use the data to accurately reenact it. For instance, I could eventually code replay functionality, which would be a great way to show solutions to the puzzles. I had to change a lot of the code to allow for this change, which shows how fundamental FRIM code is to a game engine. It wasn’t terribly difficult, and it didn’t take me too long.
The best part is that I’m familiar with the project again, which means that I won’t feel apprehension whenever I think to work on it. There were a number of days last month when I felt guilty for not working on the project. I just felt uneasy about the project, and while originally it was probably because I needed to focus on the direction to take it, it eventually was due to the fact that I hadn’t worked on it and had vague thoughts about not understanding it. Rationally, working on it would necessarily bring back familiarity, but it can be tough to pinpoint the fear sometimes.
I decided to focus on coding a configuration loader next. Basically, if I wanted to change the speed at which the Player, the Ball, or the game engine ran, I would have to recompile. Being able to load the configuration dynamically without recompiling or even rerunning the game would do wonders for productivity. I wrote some stub code on Saturday, and I will work on it this week.
While I could more easily catch up with the number of ideas I need for this week, I know it will be incredibly difficult to catch up with the number of hours to put in. After all, during a week, about 21 hours need to be fulfilled in the first place. To catch up with the previous hours I missed would be terribly difficult. But as Scott says, actually achieving the 1,000 hour mark is not as important as keeping development at the front of my consciousness. In the past 15 minutes to a couple of hours a week was considered good enough, but I joined the Thousander Club to do great. My status so far(actual#/for the week/for the year):
Game Hours: 7 / 21 / 1000
Game Ideas: 37 / 21/ 1000
So I did a little better with regards to new game ideas than I needed to for the week. Ideas are a dime a dozen, as they say, but it is still good to have them. There is no need to lose any creativity to forgetfullness since I’ll be able to leverage it in the future with new ideas.
Game development hours showed a marked improvement over the previous week. A few hours might not be directly related to Oracle’s Eye, but I’m counting my practice time with The Gimp since I think it is a skill that I can leverage with game development. I was using a number of tutorials, including the ones mentioned in an indiegamer.com post as well as a few Gimp-specific ones. You can see the results of my work from Friday and Saturday morning here:
First attempt 35KB
Second attempt 57K
with planet! 55K
with atmosphere…kinda 54K
The rest of my time was spent on programming, and I will cover what I did in another post.
Action wrote an article called If you knew you would succeed, how would you go about your work? that I found to be pretty insightful.
If you knew your current project was going to be a success, would you get more passionate about it? Would you exert more effort to see it through? Would you try to complete it faster?
The point here is…if you know you’re going to succeed…why are you hesitating and slowing down progress towards your goal? You may make routine progress…but if you’re going to succeed, why not take steps to reach that success sooner and more deeply?
I’ve dedicated this Saturday to game development. The last time I did so was for Game in a Day, and it was definitely my most productive development session. I think that taking such massive action should help jumpstart progress on Oracle’s Eye. In the past I would have only a few moments of real work at a time. Now, I want to take my game development full throttle.
How to Be a Demo God by Guy Kawasaki gives 11 tips to entrepreneurs looking for venture capital at Demo.
While I don’t plan on being involved in Demo in the near future, I was wondering how his points can apply to a shareware game demo. Some of them don’t seem to fit at all, such as “do it alone” instead of with a partner. Then again, making sure you demo runs on its own instead of requiring the existence of exotic-third party applications might be something that would be desired.
So how can they apply? I’ll try to answer, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts. I don’t have the personal experience of putting together shareware demos myself, so what follows is what I’ve gleaned off of the various shareware marketing and sales articles and posts out there.
I suppose there is a challenge applying these tips to shareware games. You can’t depend on the player making it all the way through the demo, so you can’t easily define the “end” of it for that potential customer. Perhaps it shows that there is a flaw in your game demo? Should your demo be so good that people play through it completely, or is it possible to be better even if the person only plays a portion of it? If the person stops part of the way through, will they simply uninstall and forget it or will they actually drop you a line to tell you why? With a shareware demo, your captive audience isn’t forced to sit and watch for six minutes. Your demo better be spectacular and make the potential customer want to see more.
Besides attempting to work on game development for 1,000 hours this year, I also wanted to come up with 1,000 new game ideas. The Thousander Club is definitely a great way to raise your game.
As a reminder, I should have about three hours or ideas per day. Below I list my actual numbers versus the numbers I should be at:
Game Hours: 1 / 83
Game Ideas: 11 / 83
Ahem. Not so good, but I didn’t join until the second week of January. Still, it doesn’t justify the majority of the missing numbers.
If I notice that I am getting down on myself too much for not hitting the right numbers, I might start displaying them differently. Until then, I think it is good to know what progress I am making as well as how far along I should be. I will try to post these updates regularly on Monday.
It’s the one year anniversary of my blog! Since January 27th, 2005, I’ve made over 250 posts on topics as varied as game development, game design, general geekery, health and fitness, marketing, politics, and books. There have been over 200 almost 300 comments on my blog, and I’ve gone from 50 accidental hits a day (people leaving within milliseconds) to somewhere between 450 and 600 hits per day depending on which web stats package I use. w00t!!
Here are a few of the posts that I think were significant:
January 29th, 2005: I wrote My Ability to Create in which I wrote about…well apparently Steve Pavlina if you didn’t get past the first few paragraphs. I think I’ve improved my writing and blog posts since then. You know what the heck I am writing about by the time you hit paragraph two at the latest. B-) Anyway, I also talk about how, objectively speaking, I did not have the skills to create a product. I couldn’t really prototype, let alone make something to sell.
I noticed at the time that a big part of the problem was that I was expecting to improve my skills by squeezing time in between all of the other aspects of my life. I was going to grad school AND working full-time. I was making plenty of time to be with friends, and dropping other tasks to do so easily. I was driving to a train station in Chicago and then taking a train downtown in order to get to work, which meant that I was commuting 10-20 hours a week!
I have since been taking a train that has a stop near my house. It’s a little more expensive, but being able to get to work on a train that I am almost always guaranteed a seat on is great. I read books, articles, and otherwise make good use of my commute. It’s also quicker. I get to work within 30-45 minutes. Getting to leave my house later and getting home earlier really frees up a lot of my time. Money well spent.
I also stopped going to graduate school. My thinking was, “I already have a degree. I don’t have professional experience in software development, so what good would it be to spend another couple of years getting another piece of paper that says I went to school?” Not having to worry about classes, homework, and exams, especially for topics that have no direct relation to my game development, has been great.
Now I dedicate certain nights to coding and development. Those are MY nights, and I will only occasionally allow some other event to interfere, such as an IGDA or Chicago Indie Game Developer Club meeting. I’m not always great about making optimal use of my time, but it is definitely better than hoping I can squeeze some time in.
Looking back, I’m very happy with the decision to stop going to grad school. I’m also happy with the amount of time I freed up with the other decisions I made. Now, I just need to be more vigilant about guarding that time. For a good example, part of this blog post was written on a development day, which shows I need to set a goal to be more efficient with my development time. B-)
January 30th, 2005: How I Want to Make Games just pointed out that I wanted to make games available for Gnu/Linux. Some people think I want to do so exclusively, but I also understand that I’ll need to make games available for Windows and Mac OS X. My main point, and I still maintain this point, is that I don’t want to ever release a game that isn’t also available for Gnu/Linux. I never want to release a Gnu/Linux port months or years after the Windows release either.
March 21st, 2005: Learning Kyra was the first part of a series of blog posts in which I write about the Kyra Sprite Engine, a cross-platform library for handling 2D images in games. I found that writing about the experience was good for helping me to clarify my own knowledge, and I hope it has been helpful to anyone else who is trying to learn about Kyra. I’ve learned a lot since this first post. For instance:
#include “SDL.h”
All well and good, but why not use the system include instead of a local one? If you know, please let me know why the first way would be preferable.
Since then, I was informed that “SDL.h” is used instead of <SDL.h> because it is what the libSDL documentation and examples use. It is more cross-platform friendly. I’ve also learned that my concept of system includes vs local includes was muddy at best. You link SDL using the compiler. It is sort of like having the libraries brought to the compiler. I was under the assumption that if you were using system libraries, they would never use quotes since those were for local files such as your own code.
It’s little experiences like this that show that I’ve improved as a programmer, if only marginally.
April 15th, 2005: The Courage to Take a Seat is about the importance of courage in business and in life. If you don’t play, you’ll be forced to stand on the side and watch as other people play instead.
May 23rd, 2005: Out of Touch with Games was about the idea that novelists can’t write great novels until they read lots of novels, good and bad. Maybe it was written around the time I read Stephen King’s On Writing? Anyway, game developers can’t expect to make great games if they work in a vacuum. They need to play great games. They need to play bad games. But they need to play games. A lot of developers will be asked “What games are you playing these days?” and the answer will almost always be, “I don’t have time to play games.”
I can’t say that I’ve made too much headway in this regard. I still rarely play games, although being a staff reviewer at Game Tunnel has helped by providing me with eight to 12 indie games a year. I schedule time to play those games, but I feel guilty scheduling time to play other games when I could use that time to make my own. But let me never say, “I don’t have time to play games” since it is more accurate that I haven’t dedicated the temporal resources to them. B-)
June 10th, 2005: June’s Game in a Day Theme: Fusion was the first of a number of updates of my progress from Game in a Day. My project wasn’t exactly a big success. It wasn’t anything like I wanted it to be. TomB was right when he said I would spend too much of my time buildig infrastructure instead of a game. I had eight hours left before I finally had ANY kind of gameplay.
It was surprisingly fun for what it was, but the main thing was that I did it and survived. I need to participate in a few more of those this coming year. Heck, I even get my name up in lights!
July 27th, 2005: Simple Game Project for August: Oracle’s Eye was a description of a game project that was supposed to be simple enough to be completed within one month. I finally got it to a playable state at the end of November, and spent December tweaking it as I could. I learned a bit about project management, but not nearly enough! I decided to keep working on it even after “completing” it. The first 90% was complete. I just had to work on the remaining 90%.
I also enjoyed all of the feedback I was getting from a number of game developers. People were quick to give me encouragement and one was apparently bored enough to spend the time porting it to Windows. B-) I’d like to say thank you to everyone who has been so supportive of this game. If I ever code it so that credits appear, I’ll be sure to add your names.
August 7th, 2005: Secret to Getting Results wasn’t exactly a huge or popular post, but it seemed important enough to mention here. I found that the link to the referenced article was broken, but it is fixed now.
August 22nd, 2005: In Incorporating GBGames, I realized that I couldn’t just keeping thinking about forming a company. I had to actually DO it at some point. That realization made a huge difference in my thinking and, as a result, my actions. I have since decided to go with an LLC instead of an S-Corp, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am now much more dedicated to starting this business.
August 27th, 2005: I’ll Look for Anthony Salter’s Name links to an inspiring article about taking action towards your goals.
September 21st, 2005: Report: Grand Rapids Schmooze 2005 documents my contact with a number of people from the ASP over the course of a weekend. It was definitely one of the best trips I had ever taken.
September 22nd, 2005: Returning from Grand Rapids, I learned about the The Death of John “overcode” Hall on September 17th. I basically wrote about how surprising it was that John was only a year older than I was and had accomplished so much. It really made me think about what I was doing with my life.
October 14th, 2005: IGF 2007 declared my intent to enter the Independent Games Festival for 2007. I felt a bit discouraged by the lateness of Oracle’s Eye, but I decided that I might as well aim for a big target. I got quite a few supportive comments here, too.
November 20th, 2005: On this day I announced the “completion” of Oracle’s Eye.
November 22nd, 2005: On this day, I announced the continuation of Oracle’s Eye. I’ll finish it.
November 30th, 2005: Action vs Waiting, Practice vs Talent was concerned with the idea that experts become experts through practice, no matter what the subject matter. By doing something more, you learn more. Experts do 10,000 hours worth of more than non-experts, but even dedicating 10 hours to mastering a topic can only help you.
December 2nd, 2005: Somewhat Interesting Game Idea: A Buggy Game was just a fun exercise in creativity, but a number of people responded with comments and concerns. I plan on posting other Somewhat Interesting Game Ideas in the future.
December 20th, 2005: Forming an LLC in Illinois documents what I had learned about forming an LLC. I figured that putting it up would be useful to others, and it inspired a similar post for Wisconsin.
January 4th, 2006: The First Law of Motion discussed the idea that until I take action, I won’t change my course in life. At the same time, once I take action, it will probably be very easy to continue to take similar actions.
January 9th, 2006: The Thousander Club follows along the same lines as the November 30th post on the importance of practice. 1,000 hours in a year is aggressive for part-time practice, but by accomplishing it, you would have no choice but to improve. Even if you don’t do 1,000 hours, you should show some definite increase in knowledge.
I’ve made many observations about game development, some that seemed to be insightful, some that betrayed my lack of experience, but looking back, I see that I’ve definitely grown in this aspect of my life. In fact, I can look back and generally say that I’ve improved in a number of a different areas. That’s not to say that I don’t have a long way to go.
Here’s to a second year!
Thanks to a comment from a previous post, I decided to follow the advice on GameProducer.net specified in the article 1 hour solution to any problem.
… decide that you won’t check email before you have done that one daily hour. Don’t watch tv, don’t visit those nice discussion forums you usually do, don’t allow yourself to do any nice thing you usually do – until you have took action for at least one hour.
So I did it. I set an alarm for an hour and started planning my next steps with Oracle’s Eye. Before I get to the results of that hour, let me just say that I couldn’t believe how easily distracted I could get. I’d want to check my email to see if someone responded to a message I sent the day before. I wanted to see if a question I asked on the Indie Gamer forums was answered. I even wanted to start a blog post! There were a number of smaller things that I refused to do during that hour as well. Still, I didn’t think that hour would be so difficult. Perhaps with practice it will get easier.
So how did I productively spend that hour? I started by trying to picture what I wanted Oracle’s Eye to be like when it was completed. I then worked backwards by trying to list each “accomplishment” I would need to complete the entire project. Among the subprojects: defining a level structure, creating a level editor, selecting a level, loading a level, playing background music, and playing sound effects. I also wanted to add animation to a number of objects, fix the collision detection, improve the frame-rate independent movement, and create a menu system. I want to be able to build the project for Gnu/Linux and Win32 from a single codebase.
Having all of these specific subprojects is a bit less unwieldy than simply wanting to “complete the game project”.
I then needed to manage what actions will be involved in actually trying to finish a subproject. I picked frame-rate independent movement first. Here is a portion of my next actions list:
Frame-Rate Independent Movement:
- To get game time to run at regular intervals
- find/read FRIM references
- define # of milliseconds in interval
- verify that the code already in place will run updates at interval
- change/update code so that it does, if needed
That doesn’t seem so hard, right? Perhaps I’m leaving out some details, but the very next action is good enough to get me going when I do sit down to work on this part of the code. It might be all I need to keep myself going, filling in the gaps as I go. Otherwise, I’ll just run this exercise again to get a better next actions list.
I’m still surprised at how easily distracted I was. I’ll need to work on that issue. I have a sign on top of my monitor that says, “What is the best use of my time right now?” that I apparently ignore now. I do so many things from one moment to the next without consciously thinking about whether it is the best thing I could be doing at that moment. In the future, I think during the hour it should be ok for me to at least write down those things I think to do. I can remember to do them later when it is more appropriate. It won’t really serve as a distraction in that case since I can get it down on paper and get it out of my head. We’ll see.
In any case, forcing myself to work within the hour actually made me more efficient with the time I utilized. When I needed to look up something for my list, I noticed that I was much quicker about searching than I would have been if the hour deadline wasn’t approaching. It would take me less than a minute to get the information I would need. Normally I might take five minutes or more because I would check if there are any comments on my blog or check for interesting new posts on the forums. I had a feeling that each second counted, and for the most part I treated them that way.
The next time you have a project that is sticking around on your list for too long, try to take at least some of it out in one hour. Even if you get somewhat distracted as I did, you might find that the time you do focus on the project will be incredibly productive. For another example, I dedicated an hour to catching up on magazines and got through a few of them before stopping to make dinner. I might catch up on the last few Escapist issues if I dedicate another hour tonight. B-)
Tom Buscaglia’s awkwardly titled article on Gamasutra, Game Law:
Prior Restraint the Games – a Rant, was printed on January 19th, 2006, but I only just now read it.
It is easy to complain on web forums. It is easy to say, “Good job!” when someone writes a well-opinioned piece on games. Buscaglia argues that it is easy and it isn’t enough. Gamers and game developers need to organize in order to make sure that change is effected that preserves the game industry.
When Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was trying to pass a law banning the sale of violent and sexually explicit games to minors, I wrote a few letters. I wanted my concerns to be heard. I had to push, but I eventually got a response.
The Sun-Times never did print my letter regarding this law. Unfortunately, I never sent similar letters to the Chicago Tribune. I never sent one to smaller, local newspapers. I never sent them to national newspapers. I never submitted it to any gaming news sites! There was definitely more I could have done to raise awareness of the issues. I am glad that people like Jason Della Rocca are around, but I really can’t depend on everyone else doing the work for me.
I do know that I will not be voting for Blagojevich in the future. I won’t be voting for Don Harmon or Deborah L. Graham either. I guess what frightens me most is the idea that the alternatives won’t be any better, but I don’t like the idea of having my vote held hostage just because the politician is “good enough”.
My last documented development session was mid December. It’s now about a month later, and I haven’t worked on Oracle’s Eye.
I could list a bunch of reasons why I haven’t been able to work on it. Christmas took up a lot of my time. I was out of town for a week at the end of December, and I don’t have a laptop I could have used to work on the project. I moved during the first week of January, and only now do I feel that my computer area is mostly distraction free.
But those are just excuses. Clearly I didn’t give my project the priority it deserves. Still, I think there was something more to it.
I would decline invitations to events and say, “No, I really need to get some work done.” Then, during the time I should have been working on game development, I would get too easily distracted. Email would get checked way more often than it should have. I’d shuffle through papers on my desk. I would handle other tasks in my list of things to do. Then it would be incredibly late, and I would have to go to sleep to go to my day job in the morning.
It would be another evening wasted. I could argue that I at least got to cross some things off of my list. “The day wasn’t a total loss!” Of course, that’s not a useful justification when I haven’t done what I should have been doing for a month. If I keep this up, December 2006 will show up and I still won’t have a game to show for it.
So why haven’t I been able to even look at my project for so long? I finally identified it as fear. I’ve gotten the project to a point where I don’t have clear specifications and so it is hard to know exactly what to do next. I had the same problem when I started the project. I didn’t know what to do, and so I didn’t do anything. I didn’t want to do anything wrong! I’ve since learned that it is better that I do something rather than nothing. By hacking at my code until I have something useful, I now have a base to work with. Now, when I have to decide on my next task, I can more easily see if it will make the project better or worse.
So I sat down and wrote down all the things that would need to be accomplished in order for Oracle’s Eye to be considered really finished. For each of those accomplishments, I can then write down a plan of action. Afterwards, it should be a simple matter of just following the plan. Once the plan is completed, I can repeat the process with another accomplishment. It won’t always be easy to list out exact actions, of course. After all, I’m still learning about the problem domain. Still, it should get me out of this slump.
While I was writing this post, I realized I was referring to my lack of progress as a slump, which reminded me of Steve Pavlina’s article From Slump to Supercharged. Rereading it, I see that I was able to diagnose the problem correctly.
So let’s dive right into the heart of the problem. Why are you in a slump? You’re in a slump because you’re afraid. And you’re expending a lot of energy avoiding what you fear. It may not even be the subject of your work. It could be something totally unrelated, but it’s something that’s very important to you.
Near the end of the article, he talks about how fear and love are opposites. When you get rid of the fear of a challenge, you replace it with the love of the challenge. I noticed that when I was able to get past the fear of doing the wrong thing and could jump into development on Oracle’s Eye, I was loving it.
This week, I’m tracking my development time very closely. I’ve joined The Thousander Club at the beginning of January, but I haven’t done anything to show for it yet. Essentially that means that I am almost 85 hours behind for 1,000 hours of development time this year. I intend to catch up, which means that I’ll need to work on a plan to do so.
In the meantime, I just want to get out of my slump and start loving my game development again.