Author Archives: Martin

Indie .plan

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I did it. I quit my job to make games.

It’s been a long-time dream of mine. Now I just have to make it work. Here’s my basic strategy: I’m going to make games about 50% of the time (probably more this first month or two), and do some freelance the other 50% of the time to make ends meet. I’m hoping the games I release will eventually make up for the difference, and (ideally) eventually become enough income that I can stop working freelance.

I’m going to prefer freelance projects that are games. With any luck, I’ll be making board-game conversion apps for most or all of that time. If you have a board game you want to turn into an iOS app, please do get in contact with me. (You can send email to any address at chesstris.com.)

It’s a great time to be an iOS developer, so I’m not terribly worried about what happens when/if I can’t make enough money with my games.

So what am I doing day-to-day? I haven’t exactly been secretive about my latest game project, but I have yet to write about it here on my blog. It’s scary for me to do this, because my game isn’t all that complex, (and we all know how rampant cloning is these days), but that’s about to change in a big way. I’m planning on writing a blog post at least once a week about my progress, with the first one to come either tomorrow or later this week. In the mean time, a brief description: The game is called Oppo-Citrus (say it out-loud), and it’s one interpretation of the opposite of Tetris. (One that I haven’t seen before.) It’ll also have a fruit theme, which practically guarantees success, right?!? The artist who created the logo you see will be doing all the art for the game, and I’ve been really happy and excited about what he’s come up with so far.

Astute readers will note that I’ve created a new blog category for this post. I’m anticipating there will be other posts down the road about the business and how I’m doing. I’m actually torn about whether I should register an LLC for my freelance work or just “wing it”. Consensus seems to be that I should do the LLC. I’m going to try and get some advice from people who probably know a lot more about this kind of thing than I do, and if that’s you, feel free to chime in via comments or email or wherever. Thanks for reading!

Everything is a Remix

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I’ve often gotten down on myself because I feel my primary form of creativity is taking things that I like from different sources and combining them. I’ve even gone so far as to talk about “combinatorial creativity” as an abstract concept (though I’m not sure I’ve done so in writing anywhere before today – I should look).

Anyway, today I stumbled onto the series of short films called Everything is a Remix, which (after having only watched the first two of four) I would (nonetheless) highly recommend.

I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that literally EVERYTHING is a remix, but I do think most forms of modern media are heavily inspired by (and often remixes of) existing art of some kind. Obviously, my games are no exception. I want to talk more about this idea, and “combinatorial creativity”, but I’ll leave that for a future post.

Professional Game Development Development

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Minnesota Mobile Game Developer Group

So after much discussion yesterday, I finally took initiative, and decided to make an idea a reality that I’ve had for a while now: starting a local meetup for mobile game developers. I set up a google group today, and spammed a bunch of local mailing lists I’m on, including our local IGDA chapter, Mobile Twin Cities, and the Cocoaheads of MN. My co-worker Breon, who is going to be a co-organizer, posted it over at the MN Android Developers Group, and the TC GTUG (Google Technology Users Group). I even have a pending event listing at tech.mn.

We’re obviously casting a wide net, so I hope everyone who might be interested in it gets to hear about it.

Game Camp

But a monthly user group isn’t the only thing we’ve got in the works! I recently stumbled onto the website for Game Camp, a bar camp style conference for game design. Here’s what the website says it’s about:

GameCamp gatherings are for the people who are building that world. It’s for the designers, coders, artists, writers, thinkers and, above all, the players who are making the 21st century the century of the game. GameCamp is about more than making games: it’s about playing them, thinking about them and how they affect our lives for good or for ill.

In the immortal words of Liz Lemon, “I want to go to there.”

We are in the VERY early stages of planning, but right now we’re
thinking this should happen in October of 2012 sometime.

National Game Development Month

And finally, there was one other game development community effort I discovered this week. I have no organizational stake in NaGaDeMo, (or National Game Development Month), but as a 3-time NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) alum, I know how powerful these shared experiences can be. And since I’m already working on a number of games, I don’t think it’ll be that great a stretch to start and finish a new one in the month of June.

I’ll definitely be posting more on at least some of these topics in the future. Here is the post about our first Mobile Gamedev Meetup next Tuesday, where you can find the eventbrite link and read about where and when exactly we’re going to be meeting.

What kickstarter could teach Apple about app discovery

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A few weeks ago, Kickstarter fairly quietly launched the ability to “follow” other Kickstarter users. I can’t find a blog post to link to, though the feature is mentioned in their “This week in kickstarter” post just before they had their 3rd anniversary post. I’m fairly certain I noticed it, but didn’t think much of it until they called out the “friend finder” they had also created (with some kind of notification in the site’s header).

The long and the short of it is that I linked-up my facebook account and now receive an email when certain of my friends back a project on kickstarter. So far, sometimes this is just noise, but sometimes, as with the AmplifiEar project a couple of days ago, I find a new project that a friend is backing that I’ve never even heard about.

Obviously, the conclusion here is that I want this feature for the app store. Apple already put “social” into iTunes with Ping, and I’m a bit worried that they’re going to say that experiment failed, and not carry it forward into the app store. On the other hand, they bought Chomp recently, presumably acknowledging that they have a problem with app discovery.

Maybe the correct place for this type of thing is in Game Center, where we already have game recommendations. (Although there is no indication why those games are recommended.) Of course we also have a friends list there. You can even see what games they own, and the ones they’ve played most recently! Why not add the option to get notified when they actually buy these games? Ideally, I want this in email form, because I’m not going to remember to open up the Game Center app with any real regularity. (And a push notification is just silly, for this, I think.)

While I’m requesting Game Center features. (Don’t get me started.) I sure wish I could embed my Game Center profile in this blog post. (I’ll just include a screenshot here instead.)

App Release: Fez Translator

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Here’s the description for my latest app in the app store, the fez translator:

******** SPOILER ALERT ********

This is a fan-made app to help with the translation tasks that take place in the game Fez for the Xbox. If you want to figure it all out for yourself, read no further!

Essentially, this is meant to help with the task of translating the various glyphs found in Fez. I found it useful, maybe you will too!

I’ll fully admit that the idea was not mine, (my co-worker @breon gets that dubious honor) but all the implementation choices and decisions around those were mine. I basically spent about 2 hours on this app. The first hour was creating pretty much everything but the delete and back buttons, and then the second hour (a day or two later) was spent implementing the back and delete buttons, and submitting to the app store.

I hope some folks like it. I spent a few hours playing fez with it in my hand. It sure beats trying to do the translations in my head (with nothing but an image to reference in my photos application).

Man the Player

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Here’s an interesting quote from Masters of Doom, by David Kushner:

…Plato said, “Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.” In the fifties, the anthropologist Johan Huizinga wrote that “play…is a significant function…which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,” Man the Player. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that “a society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton…Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or actions of any culture…The games of a people reveal a great deal about them…[They] are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives.”

I didn’t want to lose track of this.

App Store Submission Process using Unity or UDK

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I responded to a mobile twin cities thread about developing for iPhone without owning a Mac with the assertion that you still needed a mac to submit to the app store with either Unity or the Unreal Development Kit. It bugged me that I hadn’t verified the information, so a couple of quick google searches later, and I confirmed that I had been correct. Both the unity submission process and submission process for the UDK require an apple machine at some point for code signing.

Ecstasy of Awesome

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I saw the movie Ecstacy Of Order: The Tetris Masters tonight, a documentary about the first “Classic Tetris World Championship” held in (I believe) 2010. Like Word Wars (2004, about Scrabble) and King of Kong (2007 about Donkey Kong) before it, we learn something about the lives of specific characters who take part in this tournament of experts, in this case expert game players of the classic (original) version of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Also like it’s spiritual predecessors, the documentary mostly succeeds because of the intriguing nature of those characters.

I can’t really recommend this movie highly enough. It far outstripped my expectations, (which admittedly were pretty low), and actually made me want to evangelize the movie, as well as, of course, go home and play some Tetris.

Pit Chess / Recent Addictions

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On Friday, my game designer friend Patrick alerted me to a post over at Play This Thing about Pit Chess. You can play Pit Chess on Kongregate, and it’s essentially a cross between chess and Drop 7. In case you’re not familiar, Drop 7 is a game where pieces with numbers drop from the top of the screen. You have to match up the numbers with positions on the gameboard to remove them from the board and score points. Pit Chess takes the pieces-drop-from-the-top mechanic and adds chess pieces and movement to the whole thing. Pieces drop whenever you make a move that doesn’t capture a pawn. As long as you continue to capture pawns, the screen empties, and you play cleanup for a while. When you inevitably run out of pawns to capture, you go back to capturing other pieces. The game emphasizes alternating between these two modes of gameplay by giving you a point multiplier that goes up as long as you capture pieces that aren’t pawns. There are Kongregate high score tables for highest multiplier, as well as highest scores in the two gameplay modes. I really dig this game, and sort of wish I’d thought of it. (It would have made a great Action Chess game mode!) Then again, I’ve got a lot of stuff I’ve worked on for ActionChess that hasn’t (yet!) seen the light of day.

I’m going to go back to playing fez now. I tweeted about this already, but there are Tetris shaped constellations in the night sky in Fez! I’m not even a fan of platform games usually, (although I played a fair bit of Mario III, and certainly Mario 64 back in the day), but Fez is just appealing to me on so many levels. I was pretty hyped up about it after seeing Renaud Bédard talk about the tech behind Fez at GDC earlier this year, and it’s definitely lived up to my high expectations so far. As an aside, we all have our indie developer crushes. One of mine is definitely Renaud. Check out this list of games he’s worked on!