Fun Ghost's Haunted Fun Factory

Spooky dev logs from beyond the grave by @dinosaursssssss

[fun-ghost]

Universal Paperclips

Frank Lantz’s Universal Paperclips is the latest minimal idle darling to capture the publics attention, and much like the games that came before it, its core is a clicker: you click a button, and a number goes up. You click more, and can eventually upgrade and automate your ability to click. And as in its predecesors Cookie Clicker and CandyBox the clicking is less a mechanic than it is a formality, a vestigial genre convention that serves primarily to draw a line to the origin of the species: Cow Clicker. Cow Clicker was made in 2010 by Atlantic contributor and Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost as a satire of the growing social game genre on Facebook, typified by Zynga titles like Farmville that are light on gameplay and instead hook players by giving them a (perhaps unearned) sense of accomplishment. Likewise, clickers (aka incremental games or idle games, depending on who you ask) are designed such that there is very little or no player skill required, and no way to lose. A few clicks to start, and you can sit back and watch as your net worth grows, and the numbers on screen grow so rapidly that often these games have to invent numbers to capture their magnitude. The clicking gives a hint of interactivity, but can almost always be ignored after just a few minutes of play. While it is the most direct interaction in them, clicking is a secondary trait of these games; and likewise, we can see that although they have mechanical similarities, Paperclips and Cow Clickers' most direct relation is in how they use incremental gameplay mechanics as a tool for examining players motivations and their effects.

Some spoilers for Universal Paperclips follow.

Paperclips seems at once to be both an extremely well made and innovative example of the genre, and an ethical examination of the mechanics of such games. Or really, less of an examination than an open question: very little is directly communicated to the player during the game until its final moments, but players who take the time to read the resources they're expending will note that you win at Paperclips by consuming all matter in the universe and converting it into paperclips. Interestingly, we see similar themes in 2013's Cookie Clicker. As your cookie empire grows, your lust for baked goods eventually consumes all aspects of culture, and eventually creates a race of nightmarish cookie consuming grandmas. So while it offers the satisfaction of seeing numbers go up, Paperclips also invites the question of whether it's truly a good thing to blindly indulge in these sorts of skinner boxes.

The likely origin of Paperclips' theme comes from the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who in his book Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence suggests similarly problematic issues in designing manufacturing AI. In the book, Mr. Bostrom discusses the potential ramifications of creating such an AI:

"This could result, to return to the earlier example, in a superintelligence whose top goal is the manufacturing of paperclips, with the consequence that it starts transforming first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities. More subtly, it could result in a superintelligence realizing a state of affairs that we might now judge as desirable but which in fact turns out to be a false utopia, in which things essential to human flourishing have been irreversibly lost." - Nick Bostrom, Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence (https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html)

In Universal Paperclips, players take on the role of that AI, and by willfully ignoring the fact that they're consuming all of Earth's matter to make paperclips, witness firsthand the accidentally-destructive power of such an optimization engine. What strikes me as most interesting about the game though is that as players we know that the motivations in Paperclips are NOT an abstract algorithm running on a server somewhere; what drives Paperclips is rational human players, who know the actions they're taking are destructive but continue to do it anyway because those are the rules of the game, and they want to win, and besides, it's quite satisfying seeing that number go up. So while one read of the game is that it's simply an illustration of Bostrom's paperclip maximizer, it also serves as a timely warning that humans are just as susceptible to the dangers presented by this desire to maximize values as an AI. Or, as demonstrated by the massive success of Cow Clicker, more susceptible, as each tick of the paperclip counter releases serotonin and drives us forward. Universal Paperclips is a potent warning of the dangers of unbounded capitalism, where we stop asking why we make a product and seek only to grow quarter over quarter, year over year, until there's nothing left to consume.

Chris Maire

10/15/2017

[fun-ghost]

Ghost Mortem VI

I think this’ll be my last ghost mortem post. I’ve covered most of the year at this point. All the interesting bits, anyway. You can read the rest here: http://fun-ghost.tumblr.com/tagged/ghostmortem

So today I’ll talk a bit about MILE-AGE.

Mile Age started as an top down open world game, modeled after space sims like Escape Velocity Nova and Freelancer. But with monster trucks. As you explored the ruined highways of the wasteland, you could speak to NPCs, trade goods, and buy upgrades for your car. It got fairly far along, but I realized that to fully build what I envisioned was a far bigger project than I could handle. One by one I stripped away systems and simplified until what was left was a mobile driving game that could be played one handed. Rather than firing weapons, you needed to steer through obstacles to crash enemies and weave through bullet-hell like fields of projectiles to survive.

Here’s an early shot of the mobile version. At every store, you could stop and examine your surroundings, talk to station attendants, repair, buy upgrades, and get quests. In the final version, you can’t even stop at stores; you drive through them and items are automatically purchased. That non-stop driving is ultimately what I feel MILE-AGE is about; you’re always being pursued by enemies, always moving forwards, and it felt wrong to stop, pause the game, and take time to look around. This version also had an inkling of the original backstory I wrote, also cut: I wrote a short scrolling intro that explained how the earth had been ravaged by climate change, and humanity had been burned away, leaving only the sentient AI monster trucks that we used as transport just before the end to roam the streets.

In the end, I think my cuts worked out. What’s left is a unique little arcade game that feels pretty tight. My main regret from development is I think I listened to the wrong advice while playtesting; while there was plenty of good advice that worked out well, I should have stuck closer to the Flappypunk model, and kept the difficulty high and the rounds short. The best part of MILE-AGE is the close calls, weaving through bullets with no health left, and a less forgiving damage model would not only create more of those, but would create a faster feeling experience. As it is, games can drag on pretty long, which I think exposes the relatively small amount of content I was able to build out. It’s something I figured out relatively quickly, but I wasn’t confident enough in the design to stick with it when people said otherwise, and I think the final game suffered for it.

That lack of confidence goes back to something I said in Ghost Mortem I: a truly great game needs strong direction, and a design that embodies that direction in every aspect of itself. MILE-AGE was a meandering project that did eventually find that direction, but I never fully leaned into it. Did the game even need upgrades? Or were they a holdover from the original design document? As I put more distance between myself and the game, I suspect there was more that could have been cut out and refined. I’m happy with what I made, but I feel like there’s another, better game buried within it that just needs more time and testing to tease out.

An unexpected highlight of the year for me was demoing the game at a bunch of local events. I hadn’t really had any experience working a booth and it ended up being something I really enjoy. I showed MILE-AGE at about 6 local shows, from the fairly large Boston Festival of Indie Games to some smaller developer focused events, and I enjoyed standing around chatting at all of them. It’s super cheesy, but when I was down on the game and felt like a failure as a creator, hearing from other people who I’d never met how much they liked the game was enough to fuel me and keep me going. I doubt anyone who came to those events will find their way to this blog, but if they do, thank you for coming out and playing the game; it really meant a lot. I think standing behind those tables made me more confident in myself over the course of the year, not just in conversation, but as a developer who believes more in myself now.

Unfortunately, while people loved the game and were excited to buy and download it while standing at the booth with me, it never turned into extra sales. Over the course of the year I made less than two hundred dollars off MILE-AGE and Flapjack Flinger, which finances...maybe a week of development, if I kept it real lean. The positivity I’ve gotten from people who played the game, and the knowledge about myself and my abilities that I gained has made it worth it a hundred times over to me, but now it’s time to look towards other sources of revenue. To that end, I’ll be starting a job at GSN Games next week. Fun Ghost’s Haunted Fun Factory LLC will of course continue, and I’m continuing work on both a patch for MILE-AGE, and an untitled orbital first person shooter, which I’ll be announcing soon. While it’s been a complete financial failure, I love Fun Ghost with all my heart and I feel like I’ve only just established myself and the company, and it’s far too early to stop. Thanks for reading. 

Chris Maire

12/6/2015

[fun-ghost]

Ghost Mortem V

This’ll be my fifth Ghost Mortem post this week, looking at the past year of Fun Ghost’s Haunted Fun Factory development. You can see the rest of them here: http://fun-ghost.tumblr.com/tagged/ghostmortem

Today I wanna talk about game jams.

It’s only really in the past four years or so that jamming has become such a big part of development culture. Events like Global Game Jam and Ludum Dare had certainly existed before, but with the sudden availability of pro-level engines like Unreal and Unity, and thanks to websites like itch.io and gamejolt, it quickly became very easy for anyone to make a decent looking game and put it online for anyone to play. It is, to me, the perfect way to get into making games; there’s a low time commitment, other dedicated people around who are willing to help you learn, and it’s very low stakes. When you go into a game jam, your goal isn’t to make a living, or make something unbelievably cool, it’s to make anything that works. There’s no risk, expectations are low, so why not go for it and make your first game, right?

My first jam was the Candy Jam in January 2014, for which I made a little HTML5 game called Escape From the Candy Crusher. It was pretty simple, you just dodge back and forth and try not to get hit on the head by falling candy.

If you can climb over the walls of the Candy Crusher, you escape into an industrial lookin’ basement area where your score gets set to -1 and You Win. It wasn’t anything too complicated, but it opened my eyes to the idea of making small scale, low risk games. Barely anyone played Escape from the Candy Crusher, which I think made me less nervous about releasing more in the future.

It wasn’t long after that release that I started digging into Unity, and found myself hungrily participating in jams about once a month. As a relatively new developer, I had years worth of ideas kicking around that I finally had an outlet for. I made an AAAAaaaAAAAaaaa style endless faller, 3D space tower defense, a side scrolling paper surfing game, a gravity-centric multiplayer FPS, and more. Every game was an opportunity to explore a new idea and implement a new system and turn the raw images in my head into rendered polygons.

The lack of commitment is what makes jams invaluable to me. For years I’d been thinking about a 3D tower defense game where you build towers on planets, and have to worry about moons and orbit while building defenses. And one Ludum Dare, I built it out and tried it: http://maximum-extreme.com/antimatter/. It was an idea I’d been kicking around for a long time, and it turned out not to be a huge deal of fun. But, I learned that less in 2 days, and along the way I made some basic models (the first time I’d implemented my own 3D work in a game) and got a really good look at what exactly makes tower defense interesting and what the challenges in making a good TD game. For the first time, I was really tackling design problems and had a pressing need to solve them realistically. Designs that looked good in my head or on paper suddenly needed to be implemented in a matter of days, and I learned quickly how to scope well and design around limitations. This time experimenting on week long projects laid the foundations for me to really become a game developer and gave me the confidence to strike out on my own. There are definitely aspects of making a commercial game that are vastly different than working on jams and prototypes, but I think that ability to scope down and work towards a deadline is absolutely crucial to be a professional developer.

So naturally, when I ran my own jam, I tried to align it with that philosophy as best I could. The Wizard Jam was the Idle Thumbs community game jam, held in April 2015, and I did my best to make it as inclusive to people of all skill levels as possible, and really tried to provide resources for participants to make getting into development as easy as possible. Of all the things I did this year, wiz jam was the one that I think I’m proudest of; obviously, releasing my own work was satisfying, but being able to pass my love of making games onto a crowd of new developers and seeing the incredibly cool work they did really touched me. I’m proud to think that no matter what happens with my own work, I created an opportunity for other folks who might not have done so otherwise to get into making games. Running a jam was another opportunity to try something new and see how it went, another skill explored, and while I don’t see myself as an organizer or a producer career-wise, I’m always glad for a chance to try it out something new, risk free.

Chris Maire

12/4/2015

You can play some of my jam games here : http://dinosaursssssss.itch.io/

[fun-ghost]

Ghost Mortem IV

This’ll be my fourth Ghost Mortem post this week, looking at the past year of Fun Ghost’s Haunted Fun Factory development. You can see the rest of them here: http://fun-ghost.tumblr.com/tagged/ghostmortem

My post yesterday was a uh little...overwrought, lets say. So, for a little palette cleanser today I’m mostly gonna post some pictures. Design sketches, screenshots, etc.

Here’s one year of Fun Ghost’s Haunted Fun Factory LLC in pictures.

The original Fun Ghost.

And the new logo.

Surfenstein assets. I drew on paper, ripped the drawings out, then scanned them.

I made a few revisions of the combo system but was never happy with how it played. I think this was the second one; it auto-generated a series of movements you needed to do while in the air to earn a jump and continue to combo.

Flapjack Flinger unlock/high score flow, vs final look: 

Initial vs final Char select UI

MILE-AGE doodles + name ideas. Yo, naming stuff is REALLY HARD. Don’t judge.

I think I sketched this on a bus in San Francisco and taped it into my notebook later. The original Monster prototype (which became MILE-AGE) was an open world Escape Velocity Nova type game, but with monster trucks. This was the first time I really considered mobile, and thought about switching to dodging/driving rather than shooting. “basically a car-chase roguelike”

Demoing MILE-AGE at the Boston Festival of Indie Games

Slightly better booth shot. That’s a 32″ TV on its side, attached to a shelf with wire. There are two dowels jammed into the shelf to hold it upright. Video is piped from iPhone to Macbook via Quicktime screen recording, then out to the TV with HDMI.

I was gonna include a .gif of my new game but Tumblr doesn’t support animated gifs apparently? What the hell kinda weak-ass blog platform is this? Anyway, hope you enjoyed that.

Chris Maire

12/3/2015

[fun-ghost]

Ghost Mortem III

Every day this week I’m postin’ about my first year of development. Here’s yesterdays (which in turn has a link to the first one).

Today I’m gonna talk a little about what you could loosely call my business plan. This post will probably have the fewest relevant pictures, so here’s my business card:

I got the fancy spot gloss, so the letters and logo are reflect-y. Neato!

The Plan

Going solo was something I’d been thinking about long before I got laid off; while I certainly enjoyed working at Turbine, there were a few specific aspects of the job that really upset me. I won’t go into detail, but for some time before I was let go I’d been thinking about the best approach. I figured I could make it about a year on my savings, and wanted to make sure that at the end of that year I’d have gained something tangible. Of course, the pie in the sky goal was to be a self sustaining business, but I never expected that to be a reality so I basically planned to fail.

The main thing I wanted was to have a game published on Google Play and the App Store. While this obviously isn’t true for every person, I anecdotally find that most professional developers have an immediate respect for folks who are able to ship a complete game and see it through. I think it’s partly a means of seeing that a person has the dedication to the craft see a project through, no matter what bullshit they have to deal with (and there will be some), but it also provides a clearer vision of what that person is capable of than a prototype. In a released game you can really see what the creator thinks is important, exactly how they chose to spend their money and time (and just as importantly, how they didn’t) and have a real discussion about what works, rather than a hand-wavey “yeah, I’ll fix that later.” Those decisions about what’s important in a game define what makes that game unique to its creator, and in turn reveal what the creator values in their games.

So with one year, I planned for three releases. A one month mobile game, a three month mobile game, and a 6 month Steam/PC release. I didn’t expect to finish the PC game, but figured that after 6 months I’d be in good enough shape that I could start demoing it and get a greenlight/early access campaign going. This plan was specifically designed so that I wouldn’t waste a year building out an unfinished game. No matter what, in 365 days, I’d have a shipped solo title on my resume that I could use to get a job (assuming I wasn’t profitable). And more importantly to me, I’d be able to say I was an independent game developer and believe it beyond a shadow of doubt.

The Reality

If you read my last two posts, you know some of how it went: the one-month Surfenstein was abandoned after two-months, followed by Flapjack Flinger, completed in just about a month (really about 6 weeks, including a needed patch), at which point I began work on my 3rd game. Suffice to say, it was wildly out of scope and took a long time to reign in. In total the project lasted about 4 months, a month longer than I planned, and with post-release support, it was closer to 5.

With a summer vacation and a couple game jams, this put me in about September. I was about 3 months behind my initial schedule, and had made less than two hundred dollars total from my 2 releases. That meant I was somewhere around twenty thousand dollars in the red. I started looking for contract work (which fell through), started my first 3D game prototype (ditched after a month), and began looking for permanent work.

Here’s some sketches from that 3D project, which was a first person space idle game. There’s still some things I quite like about it, but it needs a lot of work.

As I reflect on the year, I’ve been thinking about what I would do differently. I think there are basically two alternate paths that I could have taken, given my abilities; one safer, and one...well, wildly unsafe.

The safe route would have been to immediately look for contract development work. Using my Unity prototypes and AAA development experience, I could have started combing contract game development and engineering postings, and tried to find work to sustain the company from day one, while working on my own titles on the side. This is the approach I see most of the resilient indies I know take, and it’s almost definitely the right one if you have employees you need to provide for, or a family to feed, and you also want to stay independent. There are challenges with this route too, for sure; the biggest one being that you need to hustle and network and do business, which I don’t think I can. But at the end of the day making other peoples game is just more sustainable than making your own, and I think it’s by far the most reliable path to independence.

The other path is the one I often advise people against: the passion project, the magnum opus, the game you spend three years on and run out of money, that probably never makes it to release. In a world where anyone can download Game Maker or Unity, maybe the best way to get noticed is to go for broke and make something unlike any other game you’ve seen before. This is where I see games like Minecraft and Braid and Fez; games that have something amazing and utterly unique that makes them stand out against the sea of competent pixel art platformers and zombie shooters. Games that drain their creators of money and time, and nearly fail a dozen times, but come out anyway and change the meaning of what a game is for everyone who plays them, and mark their creators as luminaries in the industry for the rest of their lives. But for every one of these that triumphs, for every one that really succeeds and makes the rest of us wish we could just quit our day jobs and make something even half as good, there are hundreds of flops, thousands of abandoned projects, a million ambitious design documents.

As the year draws to a close, I keep asking myself if I should have gone all in on something really crazy. Those are the games I feel like I most admire, so when I look back I sometimes wish I’d tried. But I don’t think I was a good enough developer when I started, because frankly, almost no one is, and I don’t think I am now either. But despite my occasional regrets, I introduce myself to people as an indie developer and they believe me, and so do I, and for now that feels like a step in the right direction.

Chris Maire

12/2/2015

[fun-ghost]

Ghost Mortem II

This’ll be my second post about Fun Ghost’s Haunted Fun Factory LLC year one. The first post is here.

Today I’m gonna talk about Flapjack Flinger.

In December 2014 I flew from Boston to LA to visit family, then from LA to Vancouver to visit a friend. I’d just been laid off, and having jumped right into working on Surfenstein and creating the LLC I hadn’t really taken a break, so a little vacation felt right. In Vancouver we’d be going to a holiday party that had a gift swap, and I thought it’d be fun to try and make a little game that I’d make one copy of to give away, then destroy the source code.

My mom had an early flight, and to save on cab fare I figured I would ride with her then bum around LAX for about 5 hours. I ordered breakfast, got a few mimosas, and sketched out a Christmas themed version of Tapper, the 80s arcade game about serving beer.

In the first version, you played as the Fun Ghost of Christmas Past and served mugs of hot chocolate to people. It tied deeper into A Christmas Carol by using Ignorance and Want as resources; failing to serve customers increased your Ignorance, and wasting drinks increased Want. Whenever either reached a certain point, you lost. From the sketch you can see I also considered having mugs thrown at a chosen direction (rather than straight down lanes) in order to ricochet them off patrons. 

I started coding in the restaurant, and by the time I got on my flight, I had the base Tapper gameplay working. I wasn’t happy with the art or particularly thrilled with the gameplay, so I decided against giving it as a gift, but I continued working on it and building touch controls throughout my trip.

When my vacation ended and I returned home, I decided that I needed to get something released as soon as possible. After spending nearly two months on a failed project I wanted to see if I could get something done in one. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do completely original mechanics, so I stuck with Tapper. The original title was ‘Syrup Tapper,’ and you were tapping trees to get their syrup, which you poured onto pancakes and served. I decided that having “Tapper” in the name of a game where your primary input is swiping was probably a bad call, and changed the name to Flapjack Flinger. I based the game around the bear chef Flappy Jack in, I guess, homage to Flappy Bird and to Flappypunk, a term coined by Harmonix creative director Matt Boch to describe the fast-paced, high difficulty mobile games coming out in Flappy Birds wake.

It was around this time that my apartment got broken into, and my iPad and Macbook were both stolen. Fortunately this meant I could focus on Android, which made the one month timeline possible. If I’d had to deal with App Store requirements and leaderboards and building all my in-app purchases to work on both iOS and Android I seriously doubt I would have finished in 4 weeks.

Part of the reason dealing with IAP and leaderboards was so frustrating was the tools I had chosen. I was trying to stretch my severance and savings out for a year, so I elected to use the open source Soomla toolkit for IAP and the free Google Play Games plugin for leaderboards on both platforms. This ended up being a huge mistake. Had I just spent the money to buy a more production ready product like Prime31 (as I did later) this would have been a breeze. Instead, I wasted hours fighting with Soomla to get it to build correctly, and by the time I finished the Android version was left with a game that broke the Apple App Store terms of service due to extremely shoddy authentication in the GPG plugin. 

In the end this frustration was one of the blessings of this project. By the time I finished, I had learned a LOT about developing for mobile, and I was far more prepared when I went into my second release. I’ve heard again and again that you should start small when jumping into development, and for me this game completely validated that belief. Going into game 2, I had my art pipeline figured out, I knew how achievements and leaderboards were set up, I had my developer accounts created and ready to go, and I knew that next time I would just spend the damn money on an IAP plugin and save myself a week of frustration. I’d expended all my fuck ups on a one month project, and knew at least some of how to avoid them in my next game.

I put the game out in early February 2015. I didn’t expect to make any money, which is good because I made all of $0.18 on ad revenue. But I considered it a success. Sure it was simple, but it was scoped just right: in one month, I’d built out unlockable characters, a day/night cycle, in-app purchases, in-game currency, and multiple abilities. And the game was pretty fun! The timing mechanic on serving pancakes was satisfying, and the art came out well for my first foray into pixel art. After the defeat of my first project, I needed a win for myself and Flapjack Flinger nailed it.

Chris Maire

12/1/2015

Flapjack Flinger is free on Android. I do still want to do an iOS version some day, but I have no idea when I’ll get to it.

[fun-ghost]

Ghost Mortem I

It’s been just over a year since first creating the company, so every day this week, I’m gonna post some sketches and chitchat about Fun Ghost’s Haunted Fun Factory LLC. Today I’m gonna talk a bit about Surfenstein.

While I was working at Turbine, I did a lot of game jams. The first one I did was the Candy Jam, which was a response to King (publishers of Candy Crush) suing app developers who used ‘Candy’ in their game titles. I don’t know exactly what it was that got me riled up, but I made a little HTML5 game for it. I think a half dozen people played it, but it felt so good to finally just make a game and put it out there and not worry about the consequences. After that I jammed furiously. I think the following year, I made a game a month, while working full-time as a programmer. I started spending a lot of time on the Idle Thumbs game development forums, where Gritfish posted about the Public Domain jam.

I actually hated reading Frankenstein in high school, and honestly I’m a classless buffoon so most of the classical literature that fell into the public domain bored me to tears. But I needed to make games, so I came up with Surfenstein, a game about Frankensteins monster escaping his creator in the frozen north on a surfboard.

It was pretty decent; there was a good gag up front, and the hand-drawn art actually looked fantastic and unique. It got an decent response from other jammers, so 6 months later when I got laid off it seemed like a good candidate for my first solo release. 

After about 2 years of messing with Unity and getting (I think) pretty good at it, I figured my jam games would easily transition into commercial titles. It’s not totally untrue; if you look at a lot of the Flappy Bird-a-likes, they could almost certainly be made in a week or less. I’d never tried building mobile games before, so it went slow for technical reasons, but ultimately my problem was that I didn’t know what the game was really about. 

I think to make a great game, something that stands out above the thousands upon thousands of good games, you need direction. Guiding principles to inform every aspect of its design, that tie together the visual art, the mechanics, the interface, the music. Everything. I see this discipline in Desert Golfing with its unflinching dedication to minimalism, in Threes’ soothing curves, in the jarring but unbelievably tight smash cuts of 30 Flights of Loving, but I don’t have the patience or the confidence to tease that out of an idea and follow through on it without doubt. And I certainly don’t have the wide swathe of skills needed to fully embed those principles in every aspect of a game. 

So, in late December after about 2 months, I stopped working on Surfenstein (by then called ‘Monster Wave’). It looked good, you could pull off some fun tricks, and the iPad controls felt unique, but like its namesake, it was pieces stitched together without purpose. The design was meandering and loose, it wasn’t fun, and it didn’t go anywhere, so I put it aside. Some people told me I was smart to put it aside if it really wasn’t working. There’s truth in that, but looking back now I was too impatient to figure out how to make it work. Some day I’d like to finish Surfenstein, but I need to decide what it’s about first.

Chris Maire

11/30/2015

You can play the original Public Domain jam version of the game here, if you’d like: http://dinosaursssssss.itch.io/surfenstein Note that since posting it, Chrome and I believe the other major browsers have blocked the Unity Web Player by default, so you might have to poke around to figure it out.

[fun-ghost]

9/17

I posted on TIGSource about my experience demoing at BFIG (and a bit about Bit Fest).

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=48031.msg1179447#msg1179447

TIG is a weird site. I feel like with cool people like Derek Yu and Notch having hyped it a bit, it’s become sorta flooded with people hoping for exposure. The community doesn’t feel cohesive to me. I donno. It feels like it’s waaaay stilted towards people posting about their own work vs people looking at each others. There’s a lot of really cool stuff on there but it’s jut flooded with stuff. I only started looking at it recently so I kind of wonder how long it’s been like that.

Anyway. Put out another MILE-AGE patch today (7-10 days until it’ll be on iOS). Couple good little fixes, couple things that are still semi-broken. 

Game 3 is looking good though. It’s starting to feel like a possible Actual Project.

[fun-ghost]

8/5/2015

Well MILE-AGE is out on iOS and Android now. I’ve made somewhere around 50 bucks in sales as of this post, unemployment was cut off ‘cause according to the state I can’t search for work and put 40 hours a week into making games, and savings + severance is running low. I got into the Boston Festival of Indie Games which is good at least, since it’s a decent sized show and I made the cut over at least half the submissions (probably more, I don’t know how many were submitted in round 1). I imagine I’ll get some sales out of it but I somehow doubt it’ll be enough to cover the application fee and whatever I need to spend on a booth. It’ll feel great though to finally be showing my own work at a (at least somewhat) legit event.

So, unsure about what exactly to do right now, I’m pressing on until September. I’ll be poking at some specific jobs and trying to find some contract work, but my main focus is still gonna be MILE-AGE and Game 3 which I can maybe get onto Steam for green light before I’m completely out of money. After BFIG I’ll start the work search For Real and start looking outside the industry. The longer I keep at this, the more I think that I’d really be fine with any engineering gig as long as it also affords me the time, money, and non-non-competes to continue with Fun Ghost. Obviously working in games is more fun, and without a doubt the best way to keep learning, so that’d be nice, but I refuse to be put back in a situation where my creative output is legally owned by my employed and those gigs seem surprisingly rare. Maybe I ought to just head west like every single other person I know? I donno yet.

Anyway, please buy the game. I’m told it’s pretty fun, and it really does mean a huge amount to know that folks are out there playing it.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mile-age/id998185826

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funghost.mileage

[idlethumbsblog]

Before you is a glimpse of Wizard Jam. What is Wizard Jam, you ask? It is two things: Wizard Jam is a two week long game jam, themed around Idle Thumbs episode titles, created and run by the Idle Forum community. Wizard Jam is also one of the most insane things I think we’ve ever seen.

The forums are only three days into the jam but what’s come out of it is already incredible! Do you want to contribute to Wizard Jam? Stop by the Team Building Thread to see if anyone is looking for help, or start your own game! 

Just want to browse? You can look around the Wizard Jam forums to see what’s going on in way more depth (many participants are running dev log threads which they’re keeping updated with in progress images and builds so you can follow along) but here is a quick tour of the images above, in order of left to right, top to bottom:

“Robot News” by dinosaursss, looks like a Paperboy-inspired game in which a BigDog delivers the news of humanity’s demise. (One of two Robot News-inspired games on the forums.)

“A Grave Ghost” by Twig. The contents of this game are as mysterious as the ghost in its title.

“The Legend of Big Bird’s Bones” by BigJKO, is also a mystery but involves many Idle Thumbs hosts, an explorable world with openable chests, and possibly the bones of a popular children’s mascot. (TBD)

The startup screen to “Shoot That Pizza” by RubixsQube (one of at least two “Shoot That Pizza” games being made!), a rhythm game about shooting or not shooting that pizza.

The “The Holo-Violator” mini-game within atte’s “Introduction To Video Games” game. Check out that Dot Gobbler art while you’re there too!

“(I Know You’re Having Fun But) I’m Still Working,” by a wooden leg named smith and Symbiotik, a visual novel about someone who just wants to get some work done. 

… the logo for Wizard Jam. Check out the official Wizard Jam thread!

“Pause Theme From BattleToads” by z_bill is also an unknown commodity, but you’ve got to love taking the sprites from BattleToads and deliberately misinterpreting them as other characters, following recent Reader Mail trends.

Fhnuzoag has taken The Wizard and Sports and combined them to create “WIZARD SPORTS,” an all-wizard game of soccer in which you can freeze time to enter a more tactical space where you can summon spells.

“Mayday Mayday - Cockpit Freakout” by hedgefield is one of a few “90s Cockpit Freakout” inspired games being worked on. 

This is just a small sample of what people are working on in there, and it admittedly skews towards the visual. There are TON of great looking Twine concepts, visual novels, and things so abstract or early-on that they don’t have any associated art yet. 

Wizard Jam is a two week jam so it runs until April 24, so there is plenty of time to join in, and plenty of time to watch and be excited! Though it’s headquartered at the Wizard Jam forums on the Idle Forums, you can also follow #WizardJam on Twitter, and find some more resources for starting your game at the Wizard Jam itch.io page.

[fun-ghost]

3/13/2015

Allright it’s been a while. Work on Mile Age is progressing slowly, I showed the game at a couple small local events and took feedback. I’m pushing the direction away from weapons and more towards dodging and good driving, and building weapons with area denial and placing traps in mind.

I went to PAX and helped out at the bitSmith games booth (showing off their game FranknJohn) which was awesome. 

Also I released this little port of the flash game Gimme Friction Baby https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funghost.fictionbaby

I think an iOS version of Flapjack Flinger is probably out. The mess of 3rd party billing/ad/leaderboard services I’m using has made building the project for iOS an incredible pain in the ass, and I don’t think it’d be worth the time to fix them. Lesson learned. So I’m trying to find an iOS dev kit now (and have a good lead on one) to start that process a LOT sooner for future games.

[fun-ghost]

2/16/2015

I've been working on the monster truck prototype for about a week now and it's coming together well. It was fun almost immediately, and adding more explosions and fun physics has made it really entertaining very quickly. In the current version, you can collect ammo/health/coins off the ground to upgrade your car and survive increasingly difficult enemy spawns. Every ~45 seconds a boss truck spawns to make things more difficult. You can upgrade your car with multiple turrets (single/double cannon, and burst fire versions), add armor piercing ammo to your bullets, and add armor to your vehicle.

Not bad for a weeks work! Obviously there's still a lot to do, but I'm very happy with my progress so far. Last week I also spent a lot of time in Manga Studio working on improving my drawing, and in particular, learning to work with vector drawing. I also made some preeeetty tight business cards.

This week though, I'm going back to Flapjack Flinger for a few things. First off is a couple little bugfixes (that I've already finished today). Next I'll be implementing Google Play leaderboards (and possibly Save Games, as a way to combat the issue of character unlocks not persisting?). Once that's all taken care of an complete in the Android version, I'll start porting to iOS. My goal is to have all this work complete by next week so I can get into iOS cert ASAP but we'll see! It's all going to be incredibly boring work, the sort of thing I can't help but drag my feet on.

[fun-ghost]

I started prototyping the second game yesterday. I'm calling it a 'road-like'-like. It'll be a top down 2d, post-apocalyptic monster truck action RPG with permadeath (maybe optionally) and randomly generated levels. 

[fun-ghost]

2/6/2015

Well, clearly I was getting a little ahead of myself when I said I'd upload on Monday. I ran some tests and found a couple minor issues, fixed those, found a couple more, had someone else test, fixed what he found. Then I changed the icons at the last minute and added some little touches.

But I think it's ready now. I've done a full test and everything seems A-OK.

I think tomorrow I'll release my first game.

:)

[fun-ghost]

2/3/2015

I had originally planned on releasing yesterday, but I needed to take care of a few final things, like hooking my Google Wallet up and getting a PO Box, and also some last minute UI. I took care of all that today, and now there are just a cooouuuple things left. But the finish line is in sight!

What's Left (and my time estimates for them):

A tiny secret in if you unlock all the character. (1 hour)

Need to re-export all my button sprites at higher resolution (30 mins)

A small presskit() (1 - 2 hours, mostly to get good screenshots)

A nice big extended build verification test, running through every aspect of the game before pushing to production (1 - Infinite hours, depending on bugs)

So, if all goes well, I'll be putting the release build up on the Play store tomorrow night :)

[fun-ghost]

1/30/2015

Well, my goal has been to get this thing done by the 2nd and that's seeming like it *MIGHT* happen. I just implemented the first round of in app purchase code, and it will probably take me another full day to get it (and all the associated UI) where I'd like it. I'm using Soomla for all my billing, and the ease that I implemented it is making me consider also using their software for handling Google Play leaderboards. That may end up being something I do post-release though so I can get the purchase stuff where it needs to be before I get this out the door. Now that it seems like it'll be easy to implement, I'm gonna start showing ads every 15 minutes or so (still debating this number, but somewhere between 5 and 15 sounds right to me?) and sell a token to disable them. I don't really like it, but I don't think asking a dollar to disable them is unreasonable. This project has also been a bit of an experiment for me, and this is one more feature I've been curious to implement. For Game Two I'm gonna need to really rethink how I do mtx though; it's a project that's close to my heart, and while I don't care quite so much about the ethics of selling coins in Flapjack Flinger, I don't want Game Two to ever feel like another cheap mobile title.

Anyway, billing stuff was most of the day, between setting up accounts and actually writing code. Yawn. All the exciting work is done at this point I think, but there's no shortage of polish.

[fun-ghost]

1/23/2015 + 1/24/2015

I've been working on getting Google Play set up, which I think it is now, to do alpha testing through the store. I also threw an icon/banner/screenshots/description and whatnot up on the store page, and almost immediately got mail from Google saying it hit the spam filter and was gonna be deactivated in a week. Good stuff. I remember reading about this a while ago and not really thinking anything of it, but they apparently flag games as spam via an automated system, and don't give you any hint as to what part of the listing violates the Terms of Service. In fact, even if you ask a human via their customer service chat, they'll refuse to answer you. So I guess I'll be making small changes to the page and re-uploading it over and over until it passes? Truly a great system, worthy of the almighty G. 'Don't Be Evil'. Is it evil to deny people their only source of income with no explanation?

Nah, seems fine.

Anyway, ads are hooked up, and players get a small reward of in-game currency for watching one. I'm still debating if other ads are necessary; I'd like to give people the option to buy coins with money, and disable ads if they do, but as the clock ticks down we'll see what gets done. There's still a fair amount of work to do, and I'm shooting for a release date of Feb 2. 

So here's what's left:

Tutorial (!!!)

More skins / abilities (2 and 4 respectively are what I'm shooting for)

Music / Effects (in progress)

Balance (little too easy right now, then suddenly basically impossible around ~50 points)

Animation (skins needs a tiny animation. TINY.)

Play Store description / Press Kit / FunGhost.com update

A week should be no problem for that stuff. What I'm not sure about is whether I'll be able to polish it all as much as I'd like. I think I'll hit a quality bar I'm comfortable with, but Game Two is near to my heart, so it'll need to be held to a much higher standard.

This weekend is Global Game Jam so I'm out for a couple days and back to work on Monday.