onemanmmo.com

Achievement Unlocked: Sidetracked

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:18:16 PDT

I was off my game on Friday - completely wiped out, so rather than struggle on with collision detection, I decided to watch "Despicable Me" (which is awesome) and add achievements to Miranda. Looking for a feature set, I checked out achievements on Steam, Xbox and PS3 which are all pretty similar.

[The Achievements screen with placeholder art.]

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You SHOULD build your own MMO!

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:04:37 PDT

Whenever I tell someone in the games industry what I'm doing, they give me a look. A whole lot of information is packed in that expression: you're crazy, it's never going to work, try something easier, you're wasting your time. Non compos mentis.

This experience doesn't seem to be unique. A couple days ago Dave Toulouse said, "When you have no experience making games and you work on an MMO you avoid telling too many people what you are doing because nobody believe you can pull it off and many will make sure to discourage you from doing it."

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Cherry-Picking Avalanche

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:20:50 PDT

After spending so long on the patcher, I decided I wanted to cherry-pick a few small items off of the todo list this week, knock a bunch of 'em out and have a good sense of accomplishment. That was Monday.

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Full Indie Summit 2013

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:00:38 PDT

I attended the Full Indie Summit today along with 399 other indie developers at the Rio theatre in Vancouver. With a mere $10 admission for 12 talks ranging from 5 minutes to 30 and including snacks, it put those other big name developer conferences to shame.

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Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Write Patchers

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:40:38 PDT

I needed a way to deliver my game to players, but I have a fundamental problem: the game is really, really big. That means that it is completely impractical for players to download the whole thing in one go, it needs to have a streaming installer.

I did a lot of research on patching and installers over quite a few months. There are so, so many approaches you can take. Windows installer is a great tool, use it if you can. I tried really hard to find an existing solution, but I'm sad to say, I didn't find a solution that would suit my game.

The biggest roadblock to using an existing solution was that I have a lot of files. My test world has around 18,000 files and the full dataset will have many, many more. With that many files, a regular single-file self-installer would be gigantic.

You wouldn't believe how much work adding this one progress bar was!

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The Curtain Rises

Sun, 7 Apr 2013 12:11:34 PDT

I was listening to Chris Hecker's talk No One Knows About Your Game this week and he makes a good point. It is a big risk to not talk about what you're working on and then hope that your press strategy all comes together for the game's release. I haven't talked about my game because I don't like to talk about things that aren't done yet, but that changes today.

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Not So Humble Fail

Sat, 9 Mar 2013 14:33:06 PST

I was hugely disappointed when I learned that the developers of Natural Selection 2 lost $30,000 in credit card charge-back fees on 1,341 Steam keys bought fraudulently via the Humble Store. I had a bit of a warm spot in my heart for The Humble Bundle, but indie devs can't afford to take that kind of hit.

I don't know what sort of arrangement there is between The Humble Bundle guys and the developers, but The Humble Bundle is making good money, I'm really shocked that they haven't spent some of that money on effective fraud prevention.

When choosing a payment processing service for your game, don't just look at the discount rate, make sure you look at what they do to prevent fraud and read the service agreement carefully. Credit card fees can bankrupt you if you aren't careful.

An Audio Sequencer in 1648 Lines

Sat, 2 Mar 2013 02:05:08 PST

A while back I put together an audio system which I have been using to play music in the menus. While I had the ability to play any sort of sound, it was kind of inconvenient to use -- each sound had a handle that needed to be managed.

I needed something that would run the audio system and manage things for me. With the number of complaints I've heard from audio folks over the years about the general lack of attention to audio in games, I was surprised by the lack of solid information on what kinds of features you would want in an audio system. I looked around on the web, then went through all the Game Programming Gems books until I found Creating an Audio Scripting System. Quite a few of the ideas I implemented came from that article.

If you're an audio person and there's important stuff I'm missing, or if this is all just wrong, by all means tell me in the comments.

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Misc.

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:02:39 PST

So that last blog post was picked up by gamasutra.com which was pretty cool. It was tweeted to over 70,000 people, hit the front page of Gamasutra and stayed there for three days, was featured, and made their news feed. I got 15 comments, saw 22 new followers, traffic on the website was 8 times normal the first day (almost 25% of those iDevices!), and it has now settled at twice what it used to be.

Between checking out the comments and web stats, I've been working on a bunch of different things.

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A Day in the Life of a Game Programmer

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:50:25 PST

I saw this post on Gamasutra yesterday, and I thought "maybe people wonder what programmers do all day." So here it is.

8:12am Wake up.

8:26 Hug the family goodbye as they head out for the day. Cover head with blankets, not ready to get up yet.

9:02 Roll into the office. Check on onemanmmo.com, then Twitter. Gamestop says that 60% of the people it surveyed wouldn't buy a game console if it wouldn't play used games. Yeah sure.

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