Six months to catch up on! Righto, here we go:

Hectic Jam October 2015

Ok, I'll admit it. Going to hectic jam the weekend before leaving for GDC was probably a bad plan. Not only was our Broken Dolls development in crunch time, but we'd been so fervent in our development that it felt like the previous hectic jam had never ended. I found myself drained, exhausted, and unenthusiastic at that jam. Combine that with a game idea that, while creative and fun, had a programming structure that didn't divide well between the two coders, we didn't end up with a working title. That was quite a downer for me, but at least I've found where my limit is. I know how hard to push, and I learned a good lesson: Play to your strengths. In a team of artists, don't make a text adventure. In a team with no audio guy, don't make a music game. Simples.

Shanghai and Broken Dolls

When we won the tickets to GDC, we planned the next two months feverishly, bought the plane tickets, worked on the game and generally panicked like headless chickens. Long story short, China was great fun, so was the holiday I took afterwards, GDC was a cool experience but not a whole lot of publisher interest. On the plus side, I have about 40 business cards for people who do everything from project management to Russian and Chinese localisation. That game has been put on the backburner for now, because for Broken Dolls to be all that it needs to be, it's going to take more time and work than we can afford right now.

GameFounders

While in Shanghai I was informed about this incredible foundation by Andrew, a big player from it. Basically you apply for a place there as a team, and if you're accepted you go to Malaysia for three months, living expenses paid, and you're taught how to run a game development company by industry professionals. That sounded incredible, so I assembled a team of my best, we went back to Agony, gave it some polish, and used it (and a design document to explain the end product) as our entry. The rest of this story comes later...

Regular Work

My business has been doing alright, I'm maintaining my $90 rate and it seems amicable, maybe I'll try pushing it up again later and see what happens. I've started another project with a previous client that's very hush-hush, but I'm really excited about it and it's a rare opportunity. I also finished my upgrades of Totome, a mobile game that Javed Sterritt at Good Blood Games hired me to modify. He's probably the nicest, brightest person I've ever spoken to. So yeah, a damn good client to have.

Global Game Jam 2016

This was my eighth jam, and hot damn this was one hell of a Jam. I decided that I needed to expand my circle of tried and proven developers, so I assembled an all-new team of 6. 6 is the maximum allowed amount of people on a team, and has a reputation for descending into a clusterfuck. Add to that that 4 members of the team had never been to a game jam before, and that our game included two diversifier challenges, we were cranking the speakers to 11. The theme this time was Ritual, and so when we got back to the room to brainstorm, I gently but firmly patted down the obvious ideas. People summoning spirits, human sacrifice, dancing around a campfire, and the daily rituals like getting ready in the morning. Those aren't bad ideas or bad games at all, but since they're a low-hanging fruit it's usually better to try to think of something more convoluted. After a surprisingly short time we came up with our game, I.S.A.B.E.L.

Check out this time-lapse video I made!

On either the first or second night, something that impacted me quite hard happened. We had come up with an interface for the game which looked like this:

But after building the beginnings of the console, I realised that this wouldn't do. The console window was too short, as the player really needed to be able to read the previous text and we hadn't worked out how to do a scrollbar yet. I asked someone about it, and it turned out that the map window only existed because of a miscommunication of how the levels worked - the map was redundant. So I killed two birds and made came up with this instead:

More vertical room for text, font looked like the right size, still a nice big camera window. I loved it. I took it down to our 2D artist and, very excitedly, explained to them the situation and my new idea. They said "Yeah, but now it's very dull, its all just text and screen." I came back with something like "Well it makes sense and it's the only idea I could come up with" and they started changing it.

I went back to my workspace, and it slowly crept up my spine and into my brain what I'd done. I was the leader of this group, and I'd just steamrolled the 2D artist into doing things my way despite me knowing jack shit about 2D aesthetics. I felt bad, because, dear reader, how many times has a leader or boss of some kind done this exact thing to you? Told you how to do your own business? I've had it happen to me too, and man did I feel bad. But I was also conflicted, because despite the shittiness of what I'd just done, I couldn't crack entirely. That console window needed to be taller. After a bit of pacing and thinking, I went back to the 2D artist and apologised. I said they needed to tell me that if I push a bad idea about something I don't know about, they should hit me. I feel like I cleared things up, because I could feel their morale come back alongside mine, and being the genius that they are, the 2D artist came up with this:

We'd had the problem of not being able to see enough in the scene, and the 2D artist had managed to crack it, along with keeping the console vertical size and keeping it interesting with the 3rd window. (In the game so far, the 3rd window is a face but it doesn't quite work yet). I'm really glad about how this turned out, and I learned how easy it is to steamroll. I'm a loud, bouncy guy and I get enthusiastic easily. It's odd, the idea of steamrolling implies strength and unwavering force, but it's actually much more difficult to NOT steamroll. I feel like this is a distinction between a 'Boss' and a 'Leader'. A boss would be happy he got his way. To be a leader is to keep in the front of your mind that your ideas aren't special or the best because you had them, and to respect the proficiencies of your team. It's why "I have no idea" is one of my favourite things to say as a leader - I lead by not leading. I get the best out of my team by stepping back and letting my team do things their way, using light touches and learning from them. I only push what I know better than anyone else on the team, and on this particular team, that was next to nothing. (the other coder was way better than me, I'm hella jelly).

Another thing I learned in this Jam was Git. Now, I know i'm going to catch some flak for this from the community, but I don't trust git. Git is a type of cloud storage that involves syncing, and if iTunes has taught me anything, it's "The cloud and syncing means you'll lose all your data from time to time". My iPod nano wiped its music off just before a long car trip one too many times as a child and now I have a paranoia of git and everything like it. When we used tortiseSVN on some other jams it always seemed to cause way more problems than it should, and simple thumbdrives have never, ever let me down.

THAT SAID once I pushed and committed and pulled and whatever other unhelpful words enough I kinda got the hang of it. Just don't ever press the wrong button or you'll fuck up everything and you'll have to call "the git dude" of your team.

Still, we came out the other side with a game that we were all goddamn proud of. Despite all the cool mechanics and extras that we wanted to fit in but couldn't, what we had made us happy.

Download it here for windows or here for mac.

But that didn't stop me from spending the next four days at home improving it before I put it up on this website! Which leads me to:

The Great First-Week-Of-February Cyclone

Between the 2nd and the 4th of February, an unbelievable amount of stuff happened. Firstly, GGJ2016 had just happened that weekend and instead of cooling off on the Monday like I normally do, I spent all day working on ISABEL. That, and my cousin had introduced me to some guy on linkedin doing some thing to do with some aspect of VR. I had wanted to implement as many things as we'd wanted but didn't have time for, including Stuart's music transition system and making the last level actually completable. Earlier that day I'd received the specs for the next milestone of the hush-hush project I mentioned before, so there was another thing to do. I'd continued to crash through the game until Tuesday around midnight, until I got an email. Our GameFounders application had been rejected. They'd suggested that we work on the game for a few more months and try again next time, but unfortunately that GameFounders application was my designers last ditch chance he'd given himself at the industry, and has now resigned game design to the status of hobby, focussing his efforts instead into acting. If I apply next time, it will have to be with a newly shuffled team, and possibly a different game. That bit of sad news took the wind out of my sails and I went to bed, but not before getting a skype from my Canadian client about NeoDash. Seven months after development was completed, he'd uploaded the game to the Android store. I am now, finally, after 4-5 years of making games, a published game developer. Even though it wasn't published under my name due to small hole in the contract and a dumb assumption of mine that I'll never make again, still counts!

The meeting with the linkedin guy was the next morning, so I got up and dressed and started walking over, and figured I should probably google the guy. I had no idea what this meeting was, a job interview or a meet and greet or just a "hey, you two have similar interests, you should talk!" type deal.

Holy crap. I'm glad I didn't really know who or what that meeting was before I got there or I would have been much MUCH more nervous about screwing up! I'm not sure how much I should say here, but the long and short of it is there's a possibility that I'll be working with Gamification! THAT'S MY DREAM! MY DREAM IS A 20 MINUTE WALK EAST AAH. *ahem* Luckily, GameFounders had rejected me not 12 hours earlier, so I knew I was free in the foreseeable future. But also, since I wasn't going to Malaysia, I had 1 month to find a new house.

And that's where I'm up to right now. I'm house hunting at the same time as I'm developing an exciting secret project and awaiting a call from the Gamification people. Life is good.

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