Hello Ya’ll!

I’m coming out of the woodwork to announce a new game from Sokay, Cheddar Beach: Episode 0. In a strange turn of events, this new game is in the style of a visual novel. Meaning that it’s a story-based game, with a lot less interaction than an action game like Thugjacker. Cheddar Beach: Episode 0 is coming this Spring and planned for release on PC (Steam) and mobile (Android and iPhone/iPad).

I started working on Cheddar Beach about a year ago. The plan was to come up with something that I could potentially finish just by myself. For years, I’d been wanting to experiment more with telling stories in games. With each Sokay project, I’ve tended to approach the gameplay and story together. We may start with an idea sparked by the story and the world that we imagine, and sometimes we start with the gameplay first and build a story around that.

With Cheddar Beach, I wanted to figure out if we could make a game based around a story. The story is the gameplay. Could that be interesting in and of itself? Growing up, action games were just about all there was to play on the NES. The games that got more complicated than that (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest), just weren’t for me! Mostly because they didn’t make any SENSE to me (I could barely read), but also, menus are boring! I want to control an actual character, move them around the screen and have them attack when I press a button!

Over time, I grew out of my comfort zone. Secret of Mana was an action game that introduced me to leveling and experience points. Chrono Trigger introduced me to why the story in the game can be the “icing on the cake,” and made it worth learning how to navigate a menu-based RPG battle system. Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid showed me stories that I could enjoy, without even playing the game firsthand.

Cheddar Beach is not only a new genre for us, but a new game engine. For this project I dove into the Godot Game Engine to get a feel for development with it. On my first impression, it reminded me of what it ‘felt’ like to develop games in Flash. Back then, it felt quick to jump in and experiment with ideas. The editor is lightweight and worked well across Windows and OSX platforms, so it got my attention. It’s free and the exporters for different platforms (html, Windows, iOS, Android) seemed to work well also. So I gave it a shot.

We are planning on releasing Cheddar Beach: Episode 0 in Spring 2024. It will be available on PC by way of Steam. Also, for mobile on Android and iOS.

Currently, the game is playable from start to finish, but we’re testing and polishing things. The plan is to continue development of Cheddar Beach: Episode 0 after launch to polish, add new features, and implement feedback. The goal is to keep this rolling until we can develop and release an Episode 1, which would be the “actual” start of the story.

Stay tuned!

A few weeks ago I attended the Unity LA Meetup OUYA talk. There was a talk and lengthy Q&A with some people from OUYA. The event cleared up a lot of questions I had about the project.

Representing OUYA on stage was Raffi Bagdasarian, who left product development at Sony to join the OUYA team. He explained that OUYA was originally known as Boxer8. He also brought on the Unity plug-in developer Tim over Skype to talk about some technical aspects of the Unity integration.

Developers can sign up for the OUYA developer program for free at http://devs.ouya.tv . There you can download the SDK, view the actively updating documentation, and lurk in the forums. They’re still ironing out the upload process so you’re not able to upload to the OUYA online store yet.

Ouya Unity LA Meetup
Unity LA Meetup (photo courtesy of the Meetup page!)

And now some bullet points:

  • The console will be running Android 4.1 Jellybean.
  • The SDK consists of in-app purchase and controller APIs.
  • Games are required to be free to play, but features can be unlocked with in-app purchases. This apparently is also a method to curb piracy.
  • There’s the typical 70% (developer) / 30% (provider) split.
  • They’re focusing on app discovery for the OUYA store, aiming to organize the shops by more detailed metrics than “highest grossing” or “most downloads.” Using metrics such as most played, longest played, etc.
  • Approval process will have guidelines — not total free for all. Initially they’ll be reviewing every game manually. Eventually they’ll work peer review into the process, similar to Xbox Indie Games.
  • As far as the style guide, they were working on prepping an official one. But in the meantime, feel free to use OUYA name and branding as long as you’re not presenting yourself as sanctioned officially by OUYA. Also, it’s supposed to be spelled in all caps! haha 🙂
  • There won’t be a content rating system like ESRB, but they’re planning something similar to Google Play.
  • Online matchmaking, achievements, Xbox Live features, etc. Not at launch, but planned for eventual release. Until then, feel free to roll your own systems.

More Stuff, Etc…

  • With only 8 gigs of built in storage, game sizes should be developed with that in mind. They’re working out what the hard limits should be as some games currently in development are a few gigs.
  • They recommended tools like the Unity asset store’s APK Splitter, to give a quick initial download from the store and load in assets as needed during the game.
  • They’re looking into cloud storage. At the time they were apparently debating it.
  • Looking into system level integration of Facebook and Twitter. I’m assuming for viral sharing games, and another metric for surfacing content.
  • Developers won’t be restricted from accessing websites from within games, should be able to pull any kind of data.
  • No access to Android Google Play store from within OUYA.
  • They’re open to accepting apps that are outside of games, like video players, etc.
  • No vibration with controller, mouse + keyboard are allowed.
  • They’ll have store analytics available to developers at launch, supposed to be better than Apple’s minimal dataset.
  • Piracy – since every game is free to play, they’re relying on in-app purchases API calls to unlock things.

Continue Reading…

[Partial repost from our Tigsource DevLog]

ANNOUNCING — DONUT GET! for Android Has Been Released!

Download it for FREE at:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sokay.DonutGet


Last week I spent some time prototyping our next game in Unity. Of the block matching puzzle game variety.

This week I jumped back to focusing on Donut Get! iPad version and finishing up where I left off with the in app purchasing. I was running into a problem of it just crashing when a purchase started so I had to do a bit of optimizing to prevent that. So far so good, as now I can at least get it to work!


In app purchase screen to remove ads.


Thank you screen!

The textures for the sprite animation is eating up a ton of memory. I’ve tried to keep the cop animation sharp and crisp but I’ve had to bring down the res a bit to accommodate all the lower-end devices it keeps crashing. 🙁 So for now, I’m trying to stop crashing Android phone! haha

Later I hope to do some research to switch between spritesheets based on the memory available on the device. Not quite sure if that’s possible/reasonable yet.

Donut Get! Android is available on Google Play so check it out if you can. Let me know how it works for you!

iPhone version available soon!

The OG Flash version still at http://www.sokay.net/play/donut-get

Thanks for reading.

Peace!

Showing some games again this week at the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk!

SOKAY PLAY 4

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY, 2012
FROM LIKE 8PM – MIDNIGHT

During the Downtown LA Art Walk

@ The Medallion
334 S. Main St Unit#334-5012
Los Angeles, 90013

The Indiecade game festival is going on this weekend in Los Angeles, California! It takes place October 8-9. We didn’t even bother to submit anything this year due to a complete lack of response that we received last year. The show does make for a good environment to meet up with other developers and see what interesting things are going on.

Looking forward to it!

IGDA Los Angeles

The title of the talk was ‘Writing Games: Tall Tales of Triumph and Terror’ and it was held last Thursday at the Writers’ Guild of America, West headquarters in Los Angeles. It went alright, with some discussion of what it’s like to be a game writer, the new and growing position of game writers within the WGA (which allows game writers to join according to lower standards than film or television writers), and lots of nods to Uncharted 2 and Half-Life.

Everything pretty much went as I expected, but I found it very unfortunate that we did not see a discussion of the art or craft of game writing. We only really heard about the differences in work environment and technicalities. For example, it was generally agreed that game development involves far less clearly defined roles than filmmaking, so a writer can expect to play some role in game design and should expect the game designer to play a role in writing. A script writer should also expect his usual 125 page script to shoot up to around 800 pages for a game, since games are longer and a player may only experience a fraction of a game’s writing in a single play through. We did not, however, hear about anyone’s ideas on game writing, how a game is structured, approach, how they use the game to convey meaning or feelings. At one point it was mentioned that while in film it is said that a writer should ‘show’ and not ‘tell,’ in games a writer should ‘do’ and not ‘tell,’ but that was the extent of artistic discussion.

I stood up for the Q and A at the end and asked about the difference between games with mute protagonists and those with talkative protagonists, citing Half-Life and Uncharted and asking how each writer felt about the different approaches to game writing. This, I thought, was a question they could bite into. Surely one of these guys struggled at one time or another with the contradiction of a game’s protagonist being both a unique character and being played by the player, or at the very least, thought it was interesting, thought something could be done with that. Right? One of the writers reiterated that Uncharted 2 and Half-Life were both great games and simply said sometimes you go the one direction with a mute, and other times you go with the yapper. Nobody else had anything to say. So that was my shot. Oh well.

Anyway, I had a good time, especially talking to some of the writers over cokes. I even met a flash developer by the name of Tamar Curry. Seemed like a cool dude.

This is my second IGDA meeting and I recommend checking them out, especially if you want to meet some local LA game developers. Students and indie devs show up in addition to folks from some of the larger companies, so it’s a good bunch.

-Christopher J. Rock

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.

Kinect

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.
Continue Reading…


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.

Last December Chris tried peer pressuring me into doing this Global Game Jam nonsense.

“Come on Bryson, you wanna be cool don’t you?” -Christopher J. Rock

While I always feel obligated to elevate my coolness, I resisted. At the time I wasn’t interested because I felt that I needed to give love to my elusive Donut project. As January 29th approached I realized that the Game Jam is something I needed to do. After attending the Game Developer’s Conference and Indicade it’s become ever-so apparent to me that connecting with others within the same community builds deep bonds. And it dawned on me.

Independent game developers need a spot where we can kick it. A spot where we belong. Where we don’t have to get all dressed up and be Hollywood.

Something similar to a Thugz Mansion, but for game developers. Global Game Jam is our Thugz Mansion.

Continue Reading…