Triptych

This year I commit to posting here at least once a week, with something at least moderatly interesting, and like my friend Kevin, I’ve got a “word” for this year – which is DO! Meaning, no more planning, reading, etc. Getting to something DONE is my primary goal for the year. As much as possible. So I’m working on a number of projects, and getting em done is my #1 goal.

I just completed the newbie beginner’s tutorial at EffectGames. I’m really impressed with all the work they have put into this site, the tech, and the documentation. Check it out here: (my clone)

I just wanted to offer you another welcome to 2010 and let that sink in for a while. We are in the “future” for virtually every other human being that’s been on this planet. Where are the flying cars? The transporters? They are already here, just not widespread yet…

Awakening is an interesting faith-based RPG in the same spirit as Aveyond and Eternal Eden. I’ve always wanted to find out about the people behind the games I play, so I’ve started things off by doing a short email “interview” with Rebecca from Exodus Studios. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did talking to her! Be sure to download the game, it’s free!

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Well, in addition to being a hardcore gamer, I also draw manga (comic books), and I tinker with computers and design websites. I think of myself as being a creative person, and I try to show that in my games and stories.
I am a follower of Christ, first and foremost, because without Him, I would not have discovered these talents.

What got you interested in making games?
I’ve loved videogames since I was old enough to hold a controller. Those were the days of Atari and NES (ah, the good ol’ days!). I was also fortunate to be exposed to computers at a young age. I started making very simple text-based program ‘games’ using QBASIC, which was my first programming language I learned in middle school. Since then, I’ve always tried to expand my knowledge of different programming languages and learning how to make games with them. Every game I’ve played, I try to study carefully and learn what works and what doesn’t. I think being a game developer is a way of life. You’re constantly learning something new each day.

Why did you make this game in particular?
Awakening, while somewhat a new addition, is one of many stories I’ve had in my head for so long, but just couldn’t figure out how to put it on paper, whether writing it or drawing it out. The large story arc behind Awakening story just isn’t something I can tell in one game.
Additionally, I wanted to use Awakening to ‘test the waters’ for Christian games, essentially. The Christian game industry is very small, as you may or may not know. I’m the type of person that likes being different for a change. Christian games are essentially seen as a ‘different’ kind of game in the secular gaming world, but that’s ok! I kind of like being in a class all by myself

What challenges did you encounter? Unexpected benefits?
My greatest challenge was patience and staying focused. It’s very hard to work on a game all by yourself. Additionally, this project was not something I was able to work on full-time, which was something I really wanted to do. My dream one day is to develop games for a living, because it’s something I enjoy. I would work on projects 24/7 if I could!

What made you decide to create an RPG rather than some other genre?
RPGs have always been my favorite genre. My favorite games that have given me the greatest inspiration have been the Dragon Quest and Breath of Fire series. RPGs allow you the flexibility to really tell your story the way you want it, unlike other genres. I felt that Awakening would be a more appropriate game as an RPG because of the amount of information and depth that the story has as a whole.

Why did you choose to use RPG Maker for your game?
I’ve always loved RPG Maker. It’s a really fun and super-easy engine to use. Anyone with little to no game programming experience can use it and make a game out of it. In my case, I wanted to make a game within a certain amount of time, and I was already familiar with RPG Maker, so it all worked out best in the end.

What kind of feedback have you received?
I’ve received a variety of feedback about Awakening, most were positive. People seemed very interested in the characters, which I would like to introduce more in future games. I had very little negative feedback about the game, and those that I did receive were very constructive and helpful. I like to take all feedback seriously and learn from my successes as well as my mistakes.

If you could change something about this game, what would it be?
Perhaps the graphics aspect. As much as I love the SNES/16-bit style graphics that RPG Maker has, I would like to eventually take the graphics to the next step for this game in particular. I think the Guardian’s Wing Chronicles (which is what Awakening is a part of) would be more appropriate as a 3D RPG.

How important is developing a community of fans around your games?
I think it’s extremely important! As an indie developer, word of mouth and a good fanbase is the best advertising. I would like to see more people become more aware of family-friendly and faith-based games, especially.

What do you think drives a person to want to create games?
I think what drives a person is the desire to make something better. However sometimes, they don’t realize the amount of work and effort it takes to really make a game. It’s a lot harder than it looks!

How have you integrated your faith/beliefs into this game?
Awakening draws upon the concepts of the book of Galatians in the Holy Bible. One of the key concepts that I really liked was how one must set aside the old ways and habits of living in the flesh and embrace the new ways of living more Christ-like. Sometimes people are not so easily able to do this, as the main character found himself in the beginning, however, with a little guidance and understanding, his eyes were open to the truth.

Can you talk a little about the storyline?
You are Kessal, a young man who had been brought to the church at a young age to serve a god he knew little about (he was told only what was needed). However, one day, he is given a chance to learn about his new duties — one that would require him to make a choice, of after so long of remaining in a sheltered life.

What kind of message did you want to convey with this game?
I wanted to convey a similar message that the book of Galatians taught, and at the same time not being a ‘preachy’ Christian game, as this game was aimed for both Christians and non-Christians. There are many people who might be able to relate to Kessal’s problems, and thus learn about the trials he had to go through in the end.

What are your plans for future games?
My plan for the Guardian’s Wing chronicles is to continue with a new story and introduce new characters. There are many characters in the Guardian’s Wing universe, which can’t be all introduced in one game.

Do you have any advice for beginning game developers?
If you have a story to tell, then tell it. Don’t let anything stop you. Create a game that you, yourself would like to play, and do not worry about trying to impress everyone, or else the game will never be finished. Like everything else, there will be people who will like your games, and those who will not. Learn from both the positive and the negative feedback, and don’t just settle on one. The only way to grow is by learning from your successes as well as your failures.

I’m keenly interested in developing games, and RPG’s are my favorite type of game by far. I’ve been struck by the “stickyness” of a game called Castle Age. I also recently wrote an article about just going for it and create a game – get it working and just iterate on it like crazy. I’ve also been interested in web-based games and learning YUI. Also (take a deep breath) I’ve wanted to build something on GitHub. So, let’s mix all this together to get : The RPG Machine!

The RPG Machine is a project to create a fun, web-based rpg where you play primarily by filling and emptying progress bars It may sound boring, but I hope to include several suprises along the way.

Here is a link to the current demo: RPG Machine.
Here is a link to the project on GitHub: RPG Machine.

So, some interesting bits: The progress meter is actually YUI2 wrapped inside YUI3 via an extension from the YUIGallery called the YUI Wrapper.

This project is completely open. If you have ideas or suggestions to improve it, please fork the code and send me patches! I’ll be continuing to make this game more and more fun and interesting on a weekly basis. If you have ideas about how it might be improved, please feel free to add comments here or in the GitHub comments.

I’ve never written a blog post like this before, with those catchy “x steps to [insert topic here]” which are meant to be consumed like mental crackers in little bite-sized snippets. However I’ve been running into a repeating series of stories, thoughts, and other suggestions that have led me to believe that it is a useful practice to not only read articles like this to keep you “inspired” but also to write them as well.

So, here is my simple 5 steps to a successful side project:

Step 1: Get it working (keep it working)

If you have an idea for something cool, you need to get it to a working state as quickly as possible. What this means is you dont worry about architecture, clean code, or spending hours tweaking that 2D renderer or that AJAX request call. You get it WORKING. Tear away anything and everything that stands in the way of your core idea showing up on the screen. Forget pretty graphics, or for writers forget spell checking and formatting. The key here is to take it out of your brain and on the screen as quickly as possible. If your idea cannot be realized in a few days of throwing code together (or writing a few paragraphs – if you are writing) then look again at the idea. What aspect of it is core? What can you do to distill the idea down into something very simple? This is a critical step. Dont fix anything or rewrite things. Just get it into code or words.

Step 2: Get it out there

I’m sure you are thinking “what? you just told me to write my code as crappy and fast as possible to get it working, and now you want me to show it to someone else?”. YES! Each of these steps are intended to help you separate the really good ideas from the bad ones. If you could not get the idea working in a few days, then it’s not worth your time right now. If you are to embarrassed to show your project to someone else (perhaps even just a small group of trusted friends) then perhaps you are more concerned about your coding style than your idea, and you might consider just going to pick up some contract work instead where you can take someone else’s idea and write pretty code. Still with me?

Step 3: Listen to your community

Now that it’s out in the world, and you have people looking at it, actually LISTEN to what they have to say! Perhaps there’s some angle or aspect that you didn’t think of. Perhaps there’s an application for this idea that you overlooked. Be sure to set up some kind of forum or mailing list for the people whom you are sharing your idea/project with. Solicit feedback and read it all carefully.

Step 4: Iterate like Mad

Ok. Now you have a working project. You have gotten some feedback on how it works, and you probably have a list a mile long of the things you want to fix and change. You are now going into the most interesting phase of your project. You iterate on it like crazy. Every day, find something to change or fix. You have to keep steps 1, 2, and 3 going as well. Every iteration it should continue to work, it should be something you share with your community, and you should be getting feedback on every iteration. For a story this means that your revisions always result in a coherent story. For an app, it should always be “working”. No matter what! If you lose any of steps 1 through 3 then you have to stop here till you get them back. If you fail to do this, your idea/project will die.

Step 5: Open the Source

This one is probably the hardest to do of any steps you’ve run across so far. Why in the world would you want to take all your hard work, and essentially give it away for free? Someone’s going to steal your idea and do something really cool with it! Someone’s going to do it better! AAAAAAAH! It takes a radical shift in thinking to realize that not only is this something that may happen, it’s something you WANT to happen. You want to be the origin of GREAT IDEAS. You want folks coming to your GitHub and finding great stuff to work with. There are licenses to help protect your work – in terms of getting credit and all, but seriously if all you are looking for is to get credit for great coding, then once again go grab some contracting work and make a name for yourself there. Instead you will discover that your idea will grow and flourish in this new environment. You may have to give up a few sacred cows of ideas, but in the end you will discover that your project has a “life of its own” and will ultimately give you much more satisfaction than if you held it close to your chest and shared it with no one. You need to see this is a two way street. Once you begin to do this, and tell others to do the same, you will begin to discover other great projects that you may find inspiration from. Or you might be able to fix a bug in someone else’s code that has been vexing them for weeks. And they may do the same for you!

Each of these steps builds on the previous one. You have to keep them all at heart if you want your side project to be successful. You will discover that some projects die off, and others that you really didn’t expect to take off will flourish. This will help you learn how to direct your time and energy, because ultimately you are creating something that you want others to use, and if they feel like they can make an investment in your project and in you, they will stick around and become hard core fans.

I want to take these ideas to heart. Look at this article. Is there something missing? Should I have added a step? Do you have some good examples I can use? Let me know! I will update and revise it based on your feedback.

I challenged my writer friends on twitter to write a story based on a title “Seven Roses for the Princess”. I had an awesome twitter follower respond with this amazing story.

It’s stuff like this that reminds me why the internet is such an amazing place.

And BTW the inspiration for the title was that I saw a shirt that had a logo saying “Sevin Rosin” as some corporate logo whilst I waited in Taco Bell. Mind boggling.

I had a dream the other night where I encountered someone from the future. I’m not sure if they had come back to the past, or if I had somehow traveled 100 years into the future, but it was a very interesting encounter. Somehow I was able to know what she was thinking even while I was struggling to communicate with her. Let me try to explain. In this future, people seem to be melded completely with their social “software”. Instead of having a single set of experiences, she was almost in a “fractured” state. Part of her attention was on countless many things – playing some sort of interactive game with other people, expressing different personas to other people “online” at the same time, as well as her whole experience was somehow a “game”. What I mean by that was that every interaction she was having was going to result in some sort of status change for her. Either she was going to gain financially, socially, or acquire some virtual item. It was weird, almost as if you took Facebook and Twitter to their logical conclusion and they became part of her personality and constant interaction. Whatever aspect of this person that was in the “here and now” was somewhat puzzled by me, because I was not communicating with her on hundreds of different levels simultaneously. Meaning, small games – challenges – information queries, etc etc. Almost like she had all kinds of different “feelers” out via the internet and not meeting with any kind of response from me. There was not any sign of any sort of “rig” attached to her, but I somehow knew (this was a dream, after all) that she had some kind of cybernetic implant that allowed her to just think about someone or something and immediately connect with that person or “persona”.

What struck me about this dream was that it seemed as if all the kinds of activity one does on the internet now – facebook chat, poking, playing net games, sharing virtual items, etc etc were no longer just these things you did while on the computer, they had become internalized and were as natural as breathing to this person. On one hand, her attention was divided amongst hundreds of different activities, but on the other it was more like an orchestra. She was a very peculiar person, because she was bemused by my lack of “online presence” as if I were some kind of barbarian, but on the other hand she was on different levels seeking ways to use this information to her advantage. She was in constant communication with other “personas” – I cant really call them people, because they were also fractional aspects of other online personalities. It was like seeing a person through a crystal – all kinds of sub images.

Anyway, apart from just the novel-ness of the dream, I wanted to blog about this to get you thinking about what we are all doing on the net on a daily basis. Do you ever feel less “real” when you are offline? Like you are somehow a bit less of “yourself”? Have you ever had to be offline for a day or more and you felt an almost physical need to be online? I wonder if this is something that will grow more and more real as the years progress and we become more dependent on technology, as well as the lines between ourselves and our tools blurs even more.

A few weeks ago (before all that turkey and stuffing, bluh) I posted about getting out there and creating a game. I spent a few minutes slapping together a little “hit the button to get points” page as a retarded example. My challenge to you was to take a few hours (24 max) and make something out of it. I got quite a few comments, trackbacks, etc. which is pretty awesome! Some brave soul actually took me up on the challenge, and here is the link to that. It is surprisingly addictive, and has inspired me to go further with the concept. But more on that later.

Today I wanted to give you a little more advice, since I seem to be so full of it lately (ha ha, I heard that – you back there with the Starbucks coffee). There are two applications that I want you to try out that will transform your work life as well as bring that dream game of yours closer to reality.

The first app is Evernote. It is basically a note-taking app on steroids that allows you to capture and search for stuff in your random day to day findings. This app works across many platforms and sync’s your notes between them. This is perfect for what I am proposing you try to do. Instead of diving down into coding on your game right away – take a few minutes every day (preferably in the mornings) and write down what you are thinking about that day. Make a list or two of the things you want to accomplish that day. Nothing official, nothing major. Just jot down a few things. Doing this in Evernote will allow you to automatically have them in chronological order, as well as completely searchable by its amazing search engine. The best part of this is that these notes can follow you wherever you go – even on your mobile phone. Get an idea for a game? Jot down a note or two on your laptop and flesh it out later on your desktop. The idea is that you begin to establish a habit of taking notes about your day, every day. Eventually you’ll discover that there was actually somthing cool you wrote about a few days ago, and that you want to recall it. Bam! It’s right there. You can even put code snippets in – although this is one place Evernote could use some improvement. You can also tag your notes, which is helpful when you want to browse around later. Another fabulous feature is the “clip screenshot” – which allows you to capture images and things into your notes. It’ll even OCR them for you for easy searching later.

The second app I want you to go get is Dropbox. Quite simply one of the most amazing apps you’ll ever have on your PC or Mac. It is a virtual drive that sync’s with their servers and any other machine that you want it to. The uses for this app are so many, however since you are creating games I want you to use this as your place to put random images, your code snippets, and even create a local GIT repository in a folder there, and it’ll sync it up with any other machines you have. It’s perfect as both a backup drive as well as additional space for things you want to keep around.

So, your homework for today (aww man!) is to go try out Evernote and Dropbox. Keep a daily notebook in there with what you are working on. Use Dropbox to store all your random game junk. Between these two apps you’ll have a mobile work environment that is very versatile and powerful.

I’m compiling a list of javascript “game” engines. If you know of such creatures — anything from svg tools, canvas renderers, 2d physics simulators, or full fledged game engines, please post a comment my way. I know of quite a few, but things are evolving so rapidly, I’m sure I’ve missed some. The reason behind this will become evident soon!