To India!

Hello, readers!

I've got a few announcements. First and foremost, development on Buried Alive is going to slow down a tad, as I'm about to board a plane to visit family in India within a few days. Add that to the typical Thanksgiving holiday shenanigans, and it's definitely bound to be a fairly busy time. But I do plan on charging full steam ahead with the intent of finishing Buried Alive and getting it ready for testing within about 5-6 weeks.

In other news, Project 87 is slated for release in Japan through Japanese Indie distributor Playism. We're still working through the translation process (which has proved to be somewhat tedious), but it's coming along great. They have a very efficient and hard-working crew who have been really helpful so far.

I'll keep posting updates pretty regularly from India, so stay tuned for more Buried Alive!

Putting a Team Together

It's been a strange couple of weeks. I finished my final exams from the first quarter of my MBA classes, and then I sent an email to the dean announcing that I was withdrawing from the MBA program. As I progressed through that first quarter, it struck me that I was putting the cart before the horse.

My goal is to make games. But not just by myself; I want to be a part of the industry, working on big projects. In order to successfully do that, I need a much more honed set of skills. I need to become familiar with more programming languages, understand the tools of the trade, and learn about what it takes to make a game as a part of a larger team. If I get my MBA now, I'll graduate in 1.5 years, degree in hand, without any more game development knowledge than I started with. And what good is an MBA in the game development world if I don't know how to make games on a professional level?

So I withdrew from the program; it's time to resume my own self-education process. I'm now spending my days working through learning C# and learning to craft games within the Unity3D engine. Progress is slow because these things are so alien to me, but it's still progress. In the meantime, I am putting a team together for the next big project. Until now, I have been running solo on all aspects of game development except for the music side. But I have some big ideas, and I know that I wouldn't be able to do them justice if I attempted to run solo forever. So it's time to build up a talented crew to make it happen.

The big project I'm building a team for will play like a top-down dungeon crawler, set in a Sci-Fi theme, with heavy emphasis on co-op and versus multiplayer gameplay. At its core will be a robust crafting system which will produce all of the items in the game. I'm still banging out all the details of how everything fits together, but it is taking shape very quickly.

If you want to join the project, I'm looking for:

• Unity3D Programmer (C#, Java, or Boo)
• Visual Effects Designer
• 2D Artist/Texture Artist
• 3D Modeler
• 3D Animator

This will be a commercial game, so there will be monetary rewards for successfully completing it. I'm not overly concerned with how much experience you have in making games; all that matters at this point is your talent in your specialty and your passion for making games. The rest will fall into place, and our team will learn and grow together as we build our game.

If you are interested in one of the above positions and have the chops to crank out high-quality work in that position, shoot me an email:

seth.coster@stozstudios.com

Bigger, Faster, Stronger

Hey, readers! My posts have been a bit more sparse this month due to "crunch time" for Project 87. I'm going to be submitting it to the Indie Games Festival, and I need to finish it soon to allow enough time for my team of elite testers to get their hands on it!

In other news, Project 87 will probably be my last Game Maker game for a while. Game maker has been a great tool to teach me the fundamentals of building games, but at the same time, it is fairly limited in what it can do. It has 3D capabilities, but they're quite weak and require a lot of workarounds to do basic things (lighting, for example). Also, I realize that I have been using Game Maker for almost a year now, and I have grown increasingly more comfortable using it. So much so, in fact, that I have almost gotten bored with using it simply because there are no more challenges. If I want to make any gameplay mechanic (in 2D), I can. While this is an exciting prospect, I have to acknowledge that although my Game Maker skills have come a long way, my skills in other, more practical game development areas are lacking. If I'm comfortable, I'm not learning. I need to get out of my bubble and teach myself something new.

So it's time to move into uncharted territory: Unity. Unity has built-in 3D support and a physics engine, and it beautifully handles all kinds of crazy things that I don't even understand yet. And it can create games for almost any platform! To use Unity, I'll have to learn C#, which is going to take a fair amount of work.

The plan from here on out, then, is to finish Project 87 in Game Maker, submit it to the Indie Games Festival, and then dive headfirst into learning C#. I recognize that C# is going to be way more complicated than what I've been dealing with, but I fully intend to plow through it and start using Unity within a month after I start learning C#.

As a side note: Skybrawler is not scrapped -- I will be rebuilding it in Unity. This will allow for much better gameplay and graphics in the long run and will be well worth the transition.

Wish me luck!

BACTERIUM now available!

Get those nutrients, little fella!

BACTERIUM is now unleashed upon you! I have made available a playable demo with the first five challenges unlocked, and if you like what you see, you can buy the full version for $4.99 via PayPal or Google Checkout at this link.

Project 87: INITIATE

Big news today! First, Goat Milk has landed at the #2 top rated platformer slot -- for all time -- at the YoYoGames site. To get that slot, it had to beat out over 11,000 other games. On the one hand, I'm pretty pumped about this, since I only spent a single weekend building it. It's the first game that I've really "unleashed" on the public, so its success gives me a lot of hope for my next project, which will take way more than just a weekend to create.

Speaking of my next project, here's a first-glimpse screenshot of one of the early levels:

Click image to enlarge.

The game is called Project 87. Without giving too much away, I'll just say that it's a puzzle platformer which blends elements of Portal and VVVVVV. In Project 87, you play a small robot that is being subjected to a series of logical challenges while some overseeing figure is observing your progress (for reasons I won't yet disclose).

Bottom line: Project 87 will melt your brain into a puddle.

GravPLAT!

MY FACE IS SHOWN! Also, I'm prototyping a gravity platformer.

Bacterium Publishing & Teaching Through Games

Bacterium is essentially finished. Rather than have a simple sandbox game, I opted to put in a tutorial, a sandbox mode, and 15 challenge stages where the player can try to accomplish certain goals with his/her bacteria. For example, the player may have to infect 30 enemy bacteria with a virus simultaneously, or obtain a population that's triple the enemy's population.

Now that those things are all in place, I've reached out to YoYoGames Publishing to see about getting this bad boy delivered on the iPhone and iPad. I've designed the game with those platforms in mind, so it has scrolling via dragging and an intuitive one-button interface. I'm hoping YoYo will be as happy with Bacterium as I am!

As I've spent the past week developing Bacterium, the core principle behind the game really struck me as something powerful that I should try to take advantage of in the future. That is: the game teaches the player about a real-world phenomenon without the player fully realizing that they are learning.

For example, in Bacterium, you control a population of bacteria that are competing with one another and with enemy bacteria for resources. If a bacteria doesn't acquire resources in time, it dies. The slower/weaker bacteria tend to reach the resources last, and they then die more easily, so in the long run, the population tends to become faster and stronger. This is the basic model of evolution through natural selection. It also happens to make for a really interesting game mechanic, and it, along with the general behavior of bacteria, make up the core of the game Bacterium.

So the player, who is literally playing around with different elements of the evolutionary process, may not fully realize what it is she is doing at the time. But if she were to then pick up a book or attend a class to learn more in-depth about evolution, she would have an intuitive understanding of how it works burned into the back of her mind because she played Bacterium.

Games are perfect for this kind of teaching, because they allow us to interact with working systems in motion and see how all the parts fit together. We can't get that depth of understanding from a diagram or reading a passage in a textbook. Now that Bacterium is near completion, my brain is bursting (figuratively) with ideas on what game project to pursue next. There are so many extremely complicated real-world phenomena that people greatly misunderstand -- but would be easy to understand in game form -- that I could easily spend my entire life teaching people how the world works through turning the world into a game. This idea goes beyond the old educational games like "Math Blaster" -- which were essentially animated worksheets.

It's a pretty damned exciting concept, to say the least. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed here so you can see what the next project will be!

BACTERIUM!

Nearing completion. Enjoy!

I'm finishing up a tutorial and will be putting together a bunch of challenges. Hoping to submit it for publishing on iPad and iPhone. And PC, if I can find a good way to distribute it. Woohoo!

Wisconsin!

I'm off to Wisconsin for the weekend! Upon my return, I'll have some info about our next game project, which is an RTS-style game in which you command an army of bacteria to conquer a drop of liquid. Very exciting. The goal is to have the bacteria and their various mechanisms be realistic models for real-world bacteria. In essence, it's an evolution simulator.

Check back early next week!

Lanturn Trailer!

Lanturn development is nearing completion, and we're making final tweaks and tests to ensure it's ready for release. In the meantime, feast your eyeballs on the promotional trailer!

A Short Break

Hey, readers! I have some slightly bad news which is the result of one awesome chunk of good news.

The bad news: I'm taking a short break from Skybrawler. By "short" I mean another week or two. As a result, I won't have a Friday video blog up to showcase anything this week. That means you're going to have to read!

The good news: The Saint Louis Game Jam went so well that my team and I decided to push Lanturn to the next level. I've been working on it all week with a bit of help from the rest of the team, and we now have 23 levels (with seven more on the horizon), unlockable challenges, and some pretty insane gameplay. By some stroke of luck, one of my team members at the game jam was David Whatley, CEO of Simutronics. He also has his own indie studio, Critical Thought Games. Since he's been in the games industry for over 25 years and has all the know-how and the contacts, he's our main man when it comes to IP, distribution, and the general business side of things.

The game jam made me realize a few things. First, making games in a group is even more fun than making games on my own. I've been doing this by myself since around November, and while it has been a blast, the more tedious parts of game development can wear on me -- when I'm alone, that is. Over the weekend, it was a whole different story. I was completely energized by having a team of people helping with every aspect of the game -- special effects, artwork, and sound -- to the  point where I only slept for four hours on Friday night and it didn't phase me one bit. After the jam, I left at 8:00PM to start the 4.5 hour drive back to Iowa City. By the time I arrived, even though it was midnight, I had to force myself to get in bed and sleep because I was still so pumped.

Second, I discovered that I was able to learn way more in a group than I ever could by myself. I've been self-teaching every aspect of game design through reading various books and trial and error, but the one big problem  is that I have not been around anyone who understands this stuff. I've been living on an island, basically. So when I encounter some new problem that I need to solve, I have to do it from scratch because I have no point of reference and nobody to guide me down the right path, which puts me at a lot of dead ends and takes a lot of time. But over the weekend, I learned more about game design and development than I have learned over the entire summer. And it all had to do with being around people who knew about the things I'm trying to learn.

Both of these realizations have forced me to acknowledge that my number one goal right now should be to find a couple people to join up with and make more games. It makes the process so much smoother when people on the team can specialize and when I'm not doing everything alone. It also serves as a motivating factor. Have you ever gone to the gym by yourself? It's easy to shrug off workouts because nobody holds you accountable. The same thing applies to any activity -- when you are part of a team, the motivation of every person combines into a snowball effect for the team as a whole.

And last, after talking to David Whatley, I realized that I've been going about establishing myself as an indie developer completely backwards -- and it's the main reason why I'm taking a short break from Skybrawler. Skybrawler is a massive project. If I continue at this pace, doing everything but the music by myself, it'll take at least another three years to finish. And when it's all said and done, maybe it will sell, and maybe it won't. With a huge development time like that, and with such an uncertain payoff, Skybrawler could turn out to be a total disaster (financially). If it does, then I'll be at square one, which is that I'll have nothing to show for my game development career.

Instead, I should be spending a lot of time developing smaller games that are easier and faster to develop, with addictive and fun gameplay that can capture a wide audience. If I can crank out one of those each month and get it distributed, even if none of them sell well, I'll start to see a trickle of income. Over time, that will add up, and I can use that income to assemble a team to work on bigger projects like Skybrawler. In finance terms, this would be "diversifying my portfolio." As it stands, Skybrawler puts all of my eggs in one basket, and the future of that basket is uncertain.

So... Lanturn will be the first of those small games. I'll post more updates on it as we continue to refine the concept and as we get closer to distribution.

To say the least, this has been a life-changing week.

Quick Update: Video Blog, Game Jam

I just have a quick update for the day, since I've been running full blast all day. I got a ton of stuff implemented today; they were mostly housekeeping things that I've been meaning to do but haven't gotten around to. Now that the interface is almost totally finished, I can focus a bit more on the game's content.

For example, one of the big things I did today was go back and make "exploration" versions of all of the levels that currently exist. Once you complete a level, it would be weird if you could then go back and fight the bosses again or if the characters would say the same things. Instead, I want to create a sense of forward progress at all times, and I want to make it seem that the player's actions impact everything in the game world. So if you go through a level and rescue some alien buddies, when you return to that level, they should be safe and sound and no longer under attack. If you've killed a boss at that level, the boss should be dead when you return. And so forth.

I'd estimate that now, after about 2 months of 55-70 hour workweeks, Skybrawler is roughly 10% complete. Thankfully, the interface and core mechanics are shaping up, so from here on out it's mostly story writing, dialogue writing, level design, artwork, and generally just coasting -- with a few cinematics thrown in, of course. I have only a couple weeks of full-time development left for the summer, and then I'll be trying to squeeze it in on the weekends and in the evenings after MBA classes. I'm still planning to get 20+ hours of development in each week after mid-August.

Tomorrow I'll be starting Level 9: The Front Lines. It's a battlefield in the Searing Sands where the Stonefangs have set up barricades and have prevented the Dredgers from attacking them in their hollowed-out mountain, Dianttua. Captain Moore will be assisting the Dredgers in pushing through the front lines. I'll also be posting a brief video blog, but it will be fairly short since I'm leaving for the Saint Louis Game Jam at noon.

In all, it has been a short but very productive week. Stay tuned for the video blog!

Friday video blog #5: Interface & Overlook Tundra!

Midweek Update: Alpha 0.0.3 tomorrow!

I'll be releasing the next build, Alpha 0.0.3, tomorrow. I've got tons of big changes coming, particularly with the interface. Here are some of the highlights:

• A new level, "Overlook Tundra," which is the last level of the Overlook Plateau.
• A much more easy-to-understand interface when it comes to taking damage, picking up health, and picking up resources.
• A pause button!
• A variable main menu screen, which changes based on how far you have gotten on your most progressed save.
• Punches cause less recoil, allowing you to avoid bouncing to your death much easier.
• Your punches become more powerful as you defeat more enemies. It is a small effect in the short-term but accumulates to a large effect over the entire game.
• You have a "combat rating" which is tied to your "combat score." Both of these things are based on your kills at each difficulty level and your overall deaths.
• The Daniels Industries shop now has prices. The prices are reduced depending on your combat rating.

And a bunch of other shenanigans. To see the full patch notes, check the forums. In other news, I've been shopping around for animators, and I very well may have found one! Always moving forward.

Testers: Keep an eye on your email either tonight or tomorrow for the next alpha build!

New Stoz Studios forums!

Got a discussion board up and running.

http://stozstudios.freeforums.org

Want to chat about Skybrawler stuff or game development stuff? Come on over and drop a post!

Friday Video Blog #4: The Hive, Interface changes, and more!

Enjoy the movie magic! Also, Stoz Studios is now on Twitter. Username: StozStudios. I think it's a pretty catchy username. FOLLOW IT.

Patch Notes!

Now that I've got a legion of alpha testers, it's time to start actually documenting the game's changes! You can get to the patch notes either through the link on the sidebar, or, if you are an alpha tester, you will be able to get to the patch notes through the game's main menu.

And if you're super lazy, here's the link right here:

https://docs.google.com/a/stozstudios.com/document/pub?id=1UPJ1wx4_epYjfC1-Pp4Qit1WZFWANEbcqaD4JO6mWVQ

Enjoy!

Dev Update

I'm a month into development for the summer, and I have just surpassed the point where I thought I'd be at the end of the summer. This is obviously great news, and I've learned a lot so far. In addition, I'll start sending the game out for alpha testing to my Kickstarter backers fairly soon.

I've also decided to make a few changes to the blog; namely, I'd like to make it more video focused than text-focused, since that's a much better way to showcase what's actually happening in the game, and I can ramble about how things are going while you see it in action.

Here's some stuff to watch for in upcoming videos:

• The character progression system -- getting new skills and getting stronger!
• Skill previews, including teleportation, bombs, energy pump, hydraulics, and more.
• Zone and level previews.
• BOSS FIGHTS!

There'll be some structural changes to the site as well, but stay tuned for the Friday video blog!

Daniels Industries Presents: The DI-PDP Pocket Turret [Model X-37.2B]!

DANIELS INDUSTRIES

is proud to present:

The DI-PDP Pocket Turret [Model X-37.2B]!

Perfect for dinner parties with your annoying neighbors!

Daniels Industries, maker of the famous DI-1.22GWEP5K Energy Pump and the Skybrawler Combat Suit, is proud to bring you our latest and greatest creation, the DI-PDP Pocket Turret [Model X-37.2B]! The PDP comes fully equipped with a self-generating ammunition chamber, capable of producing one face-exploding ball of energy every 2/3 of a second! Each of our lovingly crafted face-exploding energy balls comes complete with a homing device. It'll destroy your enemies!* Guaranteed, or your money back!**

ALL FOR THE LOW-LOW PRICE OF $143,997.98!

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

The PDP is fully upgradeable and customizable! If you would like YOUR PDP to shoot EVEN FASTER and EVEN HARDER, mail us a hefty quantity of steel scraps, hyper-explosive chemicals, bacon, and $400,000. We'll send you the parts you need to EXPLODINATE THE BADDERTONS!™

CALL NOW and receive a complementary apple, valued at $0.89.

THIS DEAL WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY!

Daniels Industries: We make things.™

* May also destroy your friends.

** Not a guarantee. We will not refund any money.

Blogger Down!

Blogger went down for the past 24 hours, and some of my recent posts were temporarily deleted. They'll be coming back shortly. I have one scheduled for this morning, so it should pop in any time!