Chris and I attended the IGDA LA Chapter’s July meeting for a panel discussion titled “Running a Small Development Studio: Perils, Pitfalls & Promise.” I was interested in checking out the event because it was a relevant topic and I’ve yet to attend any of the LA Chapter meetings. I’ve been an IGDA member on 2 separate occasions but failed to see value in the membership since there were never any meetings. This year they’ve restarted and are having meetings the 2nd Thursday of every month.

The talk was excellent. The speakers gave a good idea of some of the challenges of getting a company started and keeping it rolling.

The speakers were:

John Beck CEO, WayForward Technologies (A Boy and His Blob, Where the Wild Things Are, Space Chimps)

Jenova Chen Creative Director, thatgamecompany (Flower, flOw, Cloud, Journey)

Tian Mu CEO, Co-Founder, Naked Sky Entertainment, Inc. (Star Trek DAC, RoboBlitz, RoboHordes)

Jesse Vigil Founder, Partner, Psychic Bunny (Codename Games, Lead Balloon)

After the talk, it transformed into a mixer. It was good chit-chatting with some of the homies and the regulars. Met and re-met a couple people we saw at the USC Global Game Jam. I had a good chat with the homies Nite and Deon, who worked on Lulu Cao’s thesis project, SomeDay.

This IGDA-LA event is every 2nd Thursday. It hasn’t been updated for a while, but you can try the website for info about the next one. If they keep having meetings of this caliber, I’ll have to renew my membership.

Oh yeah, baby. I came up. Won this wonderful game at the raffle.

So we’re done with that Indiecade submission nonsense. It served as a good goal for us, rushing toward the finish line. But in the end, it was just a checkpoint — a milestone — since there is still so much more to be done.

I’m happy that all of 3 games in the project are hooked into each other through the game scenario and most of the art assets are completed. We now have an even clearer idea of how the project is working so it makes the refinement process go much faster.

To the left are some game assets from the car game. I drew these cars in Adobe Illustrator, and made a few color variations. I’ve determined 11 variations aren’t enough so I’ll draw a few more and make additional colors to break up the visual monotony.

Since the last post, I’ve added Cryptic Circuitry’s music and sound effects to the game. It sounds great and it’s becoming more obvious what sounds are missing now. We need to take another pass at the sound now that it’s in. The sound is always the time consuming part that I spend little time at the end on. With the energy Cryptic’s putting into the sound design, I want to make sure it all works smoothly.

As far as the Sokay war with Chris Rock goes, I declare myself winning. As he is too much of a wusscake to post any news on his game. He claims his time “working on it” is much more valuable than posting on a blog. Pssh!

Two guys playing with the Kinect at E3 2010

That’s right. Sokay is at E3 and nobody else will give you the breaking story on the games YOU want to play! Anyway, I’ll let you know how it went. For me, Nintendo was the show, so I’ll start with the other guys.
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Roger Ebert recently published an article reiterating his claim that games are not art. This was in response to a TED talk given by USC student Kellee Santiago.

I’d have liked to see Santiago take Ebert down a notch with a strong argument, but she came off as many of the ‘game school generation’ do: all talk and born to sell out (e.g. using marketability as evidence of artistry). I assume this is because graduates would rather not alienate the industry or general populace with their ideas, but the need to maintain a friendly facade dilutes the message too much for my taste. For that reason, I’d also have liked to see Ebert take Santiago down a notch, until he stopped making sense.

One of Ebert’s key failings is that his actual views on art remain a mystery and for that reason, I hope to convey my perspective through my discussion of Santiago and Ebert. I welcome attack.
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Here’s a bit of artwork I drew for the Donut game’s intro animation. It’s roughly animated so my man Cryptic Circuity can lay down some tunes for it while I tend to other areas of the project. My current focus right now is the top-down driving portion of the game. I should be showing bits of that part soon.

Chris has been touring Europe for the past couple weeks so don’t think the war is over. He’s just been readying the quiet before the storm. I’ve managed to gain some ground on him without having to sabotage his project, but his game was just about ready for a demo release even before he left. Regardless, both of our games are looking top-notch and I look forward to revealing more.

Peace.

Some boards from the Donut game’s intro

I’ve been hustlin’ on the Donut game. In the past month I’ve been busting out on the collision for the car segment and the intro animation for the game.

I’ve been working with the other members of the team — Ricky, David and Cyptic Circuity — to organize our tasks. Ricky’s doing most of the game’s character art and animation, primarily the Car segment and the Donut segment. David’s doing animation for a Fight segment — he did LUV Tank’s in-game animation. Cryptic Circuitry is doing the sound, as he did with Sammy Samurai.

I’ve had an idea of what I’ve wanted for the intro for the game for a long time but I had been conflicted on how I could get the story across without it being too drawn out. As an introduction to the game, I didn’t want the intro animation overshadow the game itself. I also don’t want to devote too much time to it when I have a game to make! I want something that basically says “Here’s your character. Here’s your scenario. Now play!”

I think of my games as interactive animations so I’ll continue to explore this balance. I haven’t made an animation like this in a while but I’m having fun so I may grow accustomed to it.

The new site.

It seems I’m making one major site update a year, haha. This update has what I wanted to do with the redesign last year but didn’t get around to doing it. The major new content is each game having a subsection with images, a description and links.

Turned out to be trickier than I anticipated. I’ve been wanting to make the whole site XML based but since I don’t plan on updating it frequently I decided to go with a quick & dirty Flash route. I added SWFAddress to handle deeplinking for the site last year, but with subsections it becomes more useful. I also fixed a bug involving the back button not firing an update event (solution: make sure the SWF has an ‘id’ within the embed code). I’m also using a modified version of Lightbox for the pop-up images — I found it here (he’s got broken links and stuff so it’s hard to find).

So check it out at Sokay.net.

Play The Dream Machine at www.thedreammachine.se

I had contacted Anders Gustafsson, creator of Gateway II, and he gave me a preview of the first chapter of his latest game — The Dream Machine by Cockroach Inc.

I had played the demo before and while it was presented well, I didn’t know what to think of it. It was so short that it felt like it was over before it ever began. But after playing through the first chapter, I can now rest my worries. I can’t wait to play the rest!

First off the game is well written. While Gateway had some dialogue, its story was mostly told visually through the animation of the characters. In The Dream Machine, the characters have some great dialogue, which I find believable. The game start with your character, Victor, just moving into an apartment with his girlfriend. You get a good feel for their relationship through their talking. The game has dialogue branches which allow you to respond in a more serious or joking manner if you wish. It helped me to believe in the characters — okay, Game Creator, you’ve got my attention.

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Some artwork I digitally painted for my Donut game

So I’ve been hard at work on this Sokay stuff but nothing much is ready to show yet. For the past month I’ve been cracking away at a new version of Sokay.net . It’s a bit of a subtle update, but I’m giving each game a profile page. I’m aiming to launch it with the release of Christopher J. Rock’s game, Rush Hour. He finished it a while ago and tried to find a sponsor but ended up starting work on a new game. He’s decided to release Rush Hour as a Sokay game, I’m proud to present it. You can read about it in Chris’ post about it.

I’ve been heavy in the art and interface of the Donut game, on and off for the past few months. I’ve finished most of the menu interface. I’m glad that’s together. Next I’m going to finish up the introduction game. The Donut game is essentially 3 mini-games tied together through a scenario. So far I have 2 of the 3 engines in prototype forms, practically alpha. A lot of the final artwork is in, but the gameplay’s missing a lot of features. I develop games heavily with the artwork in mind, so I tend to do more of the artwork upfront, which is the reverse of what many developers would recommend. I think they’re probably just more programmer oriented, rather than visually.

Here’s a sketch I drew for the game. Most of the art starts off like this.

So we continue, one step at a time. I look forward to showing ya’ll another game. It’s what I live for.

Peace.

Indiecade 2010 is a comin! Deadline for submission: June 1, 2010

I read about Indiecade accepting submissions for the 2010 game festival on Gamasutra. If  you read this blog, you might know that we went to last year’s Indiecade and had a good time. I told Chris and he’s down for action! He wants to submit his upcoming game. I think it’s unannounced…

I see this as a threat. He may be my friend, something of an ally, but I will never let him make me look like a chump by outclassing me at Indiecade. Never!

So I now announce that we are at War.

This ain’t no East Coast/West Coast thing. We’re both representing Los Angeles, no problem there. Nobody’s getting killed. This war is more of an arbitrary goal to provoke motivation, sorta like Obama’s car MPG requirements for 2016.

Chris’ game is looking great. It’s a physics based puzzle game, he’s doing all the art and coding as well. In addition, there will be some procedurally generated music. This guy is nuts, but it works. A demo for it is coming soon.

I’ve been forever working on my Donut game. It’s looking great but I’ve been neglecting it because I’ve been doing long hours on a game I’m doing for my day job. And I’ve been working on an update to the Sokay.net site. When things get back on track, I’m gonna knock it out.