#tom kail

[pancaspe]

The Cabinet attends the opening night of 'Hamilton' at Victoria Palace Theatre on December 21, 2017 in London, England.

[Source: Zimbio]

[lowpolyworld]

The hardships of the part time indie

Howdy! Tom here. It's been wayyy too long since we let you know how development was progressing, so today I'll spill some thoughts on my recent experiences working on Biome between a full time job.

I can't recall who said this, but it's been stated that there are four main elements in life - work, family, friends, and passion. Now, pick any two.

I finished Uni a few months back, and since then I've been working full time as a game designer/developer in London, earning some cash to keep me going in my new flat, where I live with my girlfriend. Between work and family, I get about 2 hours each day on my commute of free time, in which I'm normally at work on Biome.

I've found that having a restricted timespan to work is incredibly focusing, especially without internet access, but 1-hour bursts aren't enough time to write any complex systems. Instead, it's a great time to refactor code, and add minor systems. These are things that might have been ignored without having such a working environment, so I'm grateful for that. I'm quite sure that the project is far more structurally sound than it was a few months back, although the price is that to onlookers, the game looks the same.

What I want to avoid, more than anything else, is letting the project die, or having it appear that we've stopped developing. Besides the lack of new content we've been able to provide lately, another problem is the time it takes to do marketing things, like tweet, share screenshots, and write blog posts like this one. Those two hours I mentioned earlier have had to cover all these elements on top of development. It's made me aware that unlike development, marketing is something that requires a daily time budget. You can stop developing a project for a while without any real repercussions, but if you halt the PR train, to outside viewers, the whole project seems to stop.

I'm well aware how many other devs are in the same position as me, and its given me a new found respect for indies. I've not got answers for you, but I do have a bit of advice.

First off - if you're at Uni, make the most of it. I can see how easy it would be to simply never develop games when you enter the real world, and its essential to develop your passion while you can.

Secondly - Plan your time. If you only have 30 minute bursts in which you can work, make sure you're working on something short and sweet that you can wrap up quickly.

Third - Don't sacrifice. If you're going to do a bad job, you might as well have never done it at all.

Forth - Never stop marketing. A long development time can be a blessing in disguise, in that it gives you more time to roll your snowball of an awareness campaign. But only if you don't stop.

That's all for now!

[lowpolyworld]

Tom’s list of advice for budding indie developers:

Make lots of things, and fail often. Related: do game jams (find them here: http://compohub.net/)

Make something unique. A platformer with feature X is not unique.

Be inspired by media outside of games.

Start marketing as early as possible.

Be enthusiastic, and put yourself forward. You’ll be remembered for being the insanely drunk guy or the pretentious twat infinitely more than the ordinary joe/josephine.

If you can afford to work for free, do it. (although try not to) Get as many work placements as you can. A full CV should land you a job, if you need one.

Don’t disregard games because they’re “evil” or “mainstream”. You don’t need to make them, but they are successful for a reason. Learn from them.

Go to events, and enter your game for festivals. A great resource for finding these is http://www.promoterapp.com/calendar. Use it.

If you are at University, don’t waste all of your time messing around with drugs/girls/studies. 50% is a very reasonable amount of time to waste on those things, and will hopefully give you some weird ideas for the games you spend the rest of your time making.

Make some fucking games. Seriously. Do it. Now.

[lowpolyworld]

Ian Bogost on Proteus

Around the same time that I started first envisioning Biome, I remember being massively inspired by Ian Bogost's three writings on Proteus. Reading them back, they're actually a little pretentious, but I guess I love that kinda thing. They're reminiscent of the stories in Invisible Cities, which he actually mentions, so I suspect he might have been reading it at the time (which is great, because that book was really good).

Anyway, have a read, and let us know what you think! We've just opened up replies on the blog.

http://www.bogost.com/writing/proteus.shtml

[lowpolyworld]

Rezzed, Day 2

Today's post is gonna be shorter - knackered! Today we thought we had the sharing stuff that was broken sorted; but obviously that was too much to ask. But we've got emailing working, so that's half the battle. Talked to a billion people, and some really memorable folk that got really excited about what we were doing! A lot of people really seemed to "get" it. In some cases, even more than we do! Almost everyone seemed to understand what was missing from the game before we explained it too, which is awesome! Did a few video interviews, including one with G4TV, which could be awesome! Totally didn't flub it (unlike the Sega one yesterday).

My legs ache so much.

Night all!

[lowpolyworld]

Rezzed, Day 1

Its been a crazy few sleep-deprived weeks, and today made it all worth it. We're still blown away with the work we've done - just 4 days ago we were terrified that the game wasn't ready, that nobody would get it, and that we'd over-promised the wonderful guys that let us show our game at EGX Rezzed, and that they'd never invite us anywhere again.

It'd been about 2 weeks of solid crunchtime right after I finished up my dissertation for University. Lots of coffee, lots of sleepless nights. I slept for about 2 hours on Thursday night while Jon made final tweaks to the sky gradients (they look amazing - Jon, you rock). Got up early to pack my bags, printed off a few screenshots of the game for the booth, and headed straight to the train station. Spent a few hours setting up the booth and crashed at about 8. 

Today, me and my girlfriend (who's been amazing with helping us run the stall) met up with Joe (our amazing new artist) to finalize the booth, and make sure everything was working properly. Of course, it wasn't, but at the time we thought everything was great. Even had the time to play a few minutes of Fract OSC in the booth next to us.

- Rami's world (we think)

Biome's first ever player, by total chance, was Vlambeer's Rami Ismail, and he loved it! We've managed to quote him saying that the game was "Wonderful". He shared a rich lava world to the world with his twitter account - the single best thing we could have hoped for. We soon realized our worst fears - the sharing didn't work, and fixing it was beyond our grasp. Fortunately, we've been saving the screenshots to a memory stick, so we'll be releasing all the lost screenshots soon with the #findmybiome.

An unclaimed photo - they're all amazing. Let us know if you recognise one!

The rest of the day was fantastic. We managed to coerce Mike Bithell (the indie darling behind Thomas Was Alone) to make a world and share it with his (working) Twitter account, and within the hour we've got 10x the followers we had in the morning. Plenty of Youtube and press folk took a keen interest, so hopefully you'll be hearing more from them in the near future! We also managed to blag an interview with a team from Sega (which I flubbed repeatedly, but came out alright in the end) who were filming a Youtube short about indie devs at Rezzed.

We got back to the room at around 8, and I've been managing Twitter, sending out builds of the game and fixing bugs (happy to report that the sharing SEEMS fixed at that stage) all night. We've been documenting this whole affair, so you can look forward to a mini-documentary in the near future! Anyway, I'm heading to bed. Big day tomorrow! 

[lowpolyworld]

Verbs

Let's talk about doing things. Specifically, doing words. Ask any decent game designer what the essence of interaction is, and they'll tell you "verbs". At least, I really hope they would.

See, I don't really come from a games background - at University I study Interactive Media, and just happen to enjoy making games. The number one rule of interaction, as Chris Crawford will tell you (and you should listen), is action. What do users DO?

Biome is an experiment with verbs. There is only one input, tapping. The effects are broad, sweeping, and most importantly, context sensitive. The gameplay isn't about mastery of verbs, as you'll find in almost all games, rather about exploration of them. Just as a baby plays with stuff just to figure out what they do, and what they don't do, in Biome you play with the world to find out what is possible. And you set goals - can you move from Desert to Icecap? Can you find out how to spawn wolves? Should you interact with the mysterious icon? 

And its going to be really hard to make this a thing that not only works, but also is fun to play. But we're working on it.

- Tom

[tomkail]

Cars and interaction design

I want to talk about how the social interaction design in cars as a whole encourages and reinforces negative behaviour. I then offer a few stupid solutions. I should also mention that I don't drive, and don't really want to learn.

Journey's game design encourages friendship. This is fostered by the inability of players to shove each other, and restriction of communication that might allow for negative emotions. The only ways players can directly interact is by "chirping", which creates a pleasant sound which signals the other player (unintrusively), and grants the other player a boost to their ability to fly. Chirping back grants the other player the same boost, encouraging players to chirp together so that they can cross long distances quickly, aiding the primary objective of the game. 

Road vehicle design fosters alienation and hatred. "Players" can shove each other, which is always seen as negative, and cannot communicate save for the horn, which is designed to convey negative emotion, and fails to do so in a specific direction. Drivers can use headlights to suggest things, such as "you go first" or "warning, something is wrong with your car", but this language is vague and unhelpful, and at worst distracting. Because car to car communication is restricted, drivers cannot help each other in the primary goal of reaching a destination. As such, drivers are rude and selfish.

Many of these differences are enforced by reality - you can't disable rigidbodies on a car. However, the inability to reward each other means drivers have no reason to help each other out, and the lack of communication prevents them from even knowing what help might look like. With only negative language, negative behavior is bound to follow.

Here's how this might be remedied.

Make horn noises sound nicer. Perhaps provide several "tones" that communicate more than one emotion.

Make horn noises selectively, perhaps tapping into inbuilt speakers in cars.

Proximity sensors that encourage you to slow down if headed for collision.

I'm sure there are a billion possible solutions to fix the multitude of problems. We have the technology, gentlemen, now we just need to fix it.