Friday, November 19, 2010

Kickstarter Postmortem (a.k.a. FAIL)

First off, I would really like to thank all 9 guys that pitched in to my Kickstarter project.  + 5 Karma all around for you awesome people.

I set the Kickstarter goal at the crazy high amount of $5000.  I knew it wasn't going to make that, but I was curious to see if the Unity3d community would get behind me at all.  And they really didn't.  But I can't blame this on anyone other than myself really.  I didn't push it at all, probably because I don't like asking/begging for help, and on top of that, the money wasn't really able to be spent the way I wanted to.

Kickstarter is very very strict on what you spend the earned money on.  I was actually needing the money most to fund a game competition I wanted to run to get Games onto We Are Battle.  That killed my project I believe, because why does a successful Developer need 5000 dollars to start a website?  And what would 5000 dollars really go towards?  Exactly.

Also, to be successful on Kickstarter you have to have great rewards.  Yeah, my rewards were totally lacking.  But unfortunately I've seen that most Digital Projects on Kickstarter die a sad death.  Especially video games.  The only games that are really funded I've noticed are board games,  because then you typically receive a thing in the mail.  

Thanks again to the awesome guys that ponied up,  and showed that they believed in the project.

Good night, and good luck.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Action as opposed to complaining



Recently, I launched a beta of my first real Unity game:  Twitter Of The Dead.  What surprised me the most about the experience was the lack of real support for Unity games.  But then just as I was about to give up, I was sent this shining ray of light on Twitter:  Unity Blog link.

Long story short,  I didn't read the comments on that Unity blog link and received this from Kongregate:

At this point we do not support Unity3D games on our site, so I'm afraid we can't approve it. 
Yeah, that was a bummer.  Especially since I had been playing the game on Kongregate's site for the previous 2 days, and had optimized my game to fit in their iFrame system (I'm not bitter really).  This left me with very few options.  Yes, there are a couple of Unity portals online, but the bigger ones (which are still tiny in comparison to their Flash-centric siblings) tend to be backed by a game studio.  I'm talking about blurst.com and musegames.com,  I didn't really apply to either, just due to my game not really fitting their format.  Which brings me to my new Kickstarter project.



Introducing WeAreBattle.

Instead of being a defeatist, I'm going to make the game Portal that I would like to post games to.  Also I've wanted to setup an XBox Live Audio Chat system for Unity for a while now, and this will help me allow to do that.  I'm tired of game portals being more about the website, and not really focusing on the quality of games, and their game developers needs.

Check out my kickstarter project here, and maybe if you feel the same way I do, we can make a freakin' cool place for games,  and help get you game devs more in touch with the people playing your games.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Welcome to Multiplayer Game Development, also known as Hell.



If you have tried to look up First Person Shooter "AAA" Multiplayer Programming you've probably found very little on the subject.  While I understand why the big game development houses keep that information under wraps. . . it still sucks none the less.  So, I've decided to help out a little bit.

Here are the few resources that I have found on the web, and please feel free to add any blogs/articles/books that you know of in the comments.  We're all in this together.

http://jobemakar.blogspot.com/2009/06/actionscript-for-multiplayer-games-and.html

http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/networked-physics/

http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/

http://unreal.epicgames.com/Network.htm

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking

Good night, and good luck.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Flash updating Twitter Status the easy way, right?

Twitter has a super easy way of updating twitter statuses via URL, but the awesome Wez Crozier and I came across some issues.  But first to how you do this:

var url:String = "http://twitter.com/home?status=";

First note:  do not try www.twitter.com, because it will not work.  Your escaped items (mainly Hashtags # == %23) will not be unescaped for you.  Props to Wez for that one.

Here's some awesome RegEx code Wez figured out for me too (I suck at RegEx):

var textToPostToTwitter:String = postText.text;
var input:String = url+textToPostToTwitter;
var output:String = input.replace(new RegExp(/\s/g), "+");
output = output.replace(new RegExp(/\#/g), "%23");

Something that I figured out because I was trying to be lazy and sneaky was that you have to replace the whole String.  I mean you can't just replace the String you want as the status and do a url + input.replace(new RegExp(/\s/g), "+");.  

So, I hope that helps some of you guys not fall into the trap we did.  And thanks again Wez, you rock.

Follow Wez at:  twitter.com/obwez

And use Grant Skinner's awesome RegExr.

Monday, June 21, 2010

The Ryndem Sound Engine




Wow, it's been a while now since I've updated my blog.  With so much going on, who has time to write?

With all the game stuff I've been doing lately in my free time, I've been finding an incredible lack of good Audio tools for Game Devs.  The only one I found that was worth a damn was  Fmod, which is amazingly powerful, but also very expensive to license for the Casual game peeps.

So, I decided to make my own Unity3d/Flash Sound Engine and it's called Ryndem.  I also took a little bit of a different approach.  While it's a sound mixing program like Fmod is, it also is a smart system that you can use to drive the gameplay itself.

It will also have a super simple Hierarchical State Machine incorporated into it, so you can map out the mix/gameplay elements.  This will be useful for Rhythm games, and just keeping everything in a beautiful sync.  I'm still working on the UI, but I have a few in game music mixes here:

www.soundcloud.com/Ryndem

And you can follow the project at:  www.twitter.com/Ryndem