F2P - The go-to market plan for Magnificent Bastards around the world

It's a popular topic for people to slander Free 2 Play games. As an indie game developer myself I feel like I should be on the up side of the F2P debacle, but I really can't decide...

For starters, F2P is a veritable shortcut to riches for small indies (like me) working for their first break (like me). Mobile customers don't seem to view F2P as a bad thing, and since that is a logical market on which to release a small indie game I feel like presenting a F2P game to them will have minimal repercussions. So why does my gut tell me no?

BrokenFolx - sexual discrimination discussion in games

This is a tricky subject to talk about. Inevitably whenever a straight guy voices an opinion about sexuality someone is along shortly to yell at him. This post will offend some, but read it to the end. I'm not a bigot. I simply don't see gender roles/sexuality as a reason to discriminate. I don't see a reason to react to it at all. On that note I am going to dive straight on into:

Misinterpretation

I played Brokenfolx recently, a small game about sexual discrimination made by Arielle Grimes. I guess it succeeded in its mission, because it got me thinking. It's a game where you are presented four examples of stressful situations from a queer persons life. Three of the four options were legit. Abuse from the family for coming out, the internal turmoil that gay people feel about themselves and the general lack of acceptance they feel in society. The fourth one struck me as pure misinterpretation. It involves a 'chat' between a gay employee (the protagonist) and a 'boss'. The subject of the chat is that the employee isn't pulling their weight. The protagonists response to this allegation is immediate upset and "you just hate me because I'm gay". This is the part that slapped me in the face.

Blend textures to add subtle wear and tear

I want to talk about tiles. Tiles are a nice texture to use because they have a lot of innate detail. They have grout, which provides opportunities for nice normal maps and variations in phong/envmap specularity, they can have cracks on them which looks cool, and the tiles themselves can have cool designs or just alternating colours. The problem with tiles though is that this inherent detail is misinterpreted for ease of use. As nice as it is to slap a tile texture down and give yourself a pat on the back as you sip you freshly prepared congratulatory cognac on the rocks, it's not at all that simple - as usual, como siempre.

Tiles are actually a pain in the ass to lay down in real life. I tiled my toilet and bathroom once. It was horrible. You have to cut here, lay there, measure this, and it's all such work. This experience led me to look at game tiles in a different light. No longer can I drop a tile texture down, rotate it 45 degrees and think no one will look twice.

Simple hallways aren't at all simple

Gameplay in DA is poised to be liquified awesome, as are the environments. Looking at some professionally made maps helps put your own environment art in perspective. I have taken a screenshot of a simple random hallway in CS:GO and analyzed why it is the standard people expect in modern games. I thought it would be nice to point out what makes a simple scene awesome, and hopefully our loyal readers will gain a bit of an insight into how to look at an environment as more than just an environment. If you can quantify what makes something look good and then replicate that, you'll progress in your skill faster than the average noob

Here's a simple screenshot I took, and the resulting revelations:

Continuous Boogaloo and Hotspot Distribution: Map design principles for Double Action pt 3

As we have already seen, DA is all about continual, flowing movement through the environment. We have managed to tailor the environment to uninterrupted slides and dives, but what about the greater picture? The very layout of a map should allow our action heroes to continually run, dive and slide without hitting a wall or a dead end and having to recalibrate their path. My favourite way of ensuring this is to plan our map in terms of:

Overlapping circles of travel

When planning a map (which is something that needs to take place before starting) you should take into account the greater travel paths of our intrepid heroes. A simple way to think of this for now is three circles overlapping, like a ven diagram:

Doors: Map design principles for Double Action pt 2

Doors are a bit of an 'in joke' for game designers. For something so simple there are a million variables to consider. In DA we have a similar situaion. Considering what we already know about DA's gameplay mechanics, we find that we need to use doors in order to enhance the probability of an uninterrupted boogaloo, which is contrary to the very idea of a door: to stop people.

The Current State of Modding

Modding has gone through a few iterations, waxing and waning over the years, and I have been having conversations with some steam friends about it over the past few weeks so I think I'll do a post about it, to get my ideas down on "paper". As usual, I'm just rambling here but I know some people take their scene history to heart so take it with a grain o salt. Also for the sake of understanding this article I would like to define four camps in the games development biosphere. The two in modding are the scene - the mod creators - and the community - the mod consumers. In "the industry" there is the indies and the AAA.

ModelsForTheMasses post mortem

As some may know, I ran my own little freelance operation for the source community for almost two years. The goal starting out on this was to see if anyone thought my models were good enough to pay for, but that changed over the course of the project. I ended up using the service to get news about as many mods as I could, to get my art out amongst the community, to build a portfolio and mostly to provide fresh content to the stale source modding scene.

I consider this my first scrape with monetizing my hobby, and I learned a bit about freelancing and dealing with people over models in general. So I'll chat about it a bit here.

Simplicity in design - friend or enemy?

I have a real soft spot for simple designs - minimalist if you will. The thing I love most about modelling and coding for games is the way the restrictions of the medium force you to omit information, and the way you can construct your design so that the omissions of this information don't detract from the user experience, but add to it. Kind of like when people listen to music to "hear the notes they don't play".

This impressionistic approach to design, wether that be for websites, games or a simple logo, can be a double edged sword. On one hand it means that there is less production work to bring your design to life since there is essentally less information to display, but it also requires a lot of thought and planning to go into the early design stages and sometimes during testing it can all fall down catastrophically. So is simplistic design better or worse than the traditional information spam approach?

Finding an ideal directory structure

My recent forays into coding have left me with some pretty confusing directory structures. I tend to break up my directories thusly: (I'm talking about web dev for the time being)

[myProj] - project
    [scr] - scripts
        [php and javascript files that store functionality]
    [mod] - modules
        [php scripts that will be include()d and rendered on the page]
    [img] - images
        [pictures and such]
    [css] - style
        [css files]

An avid onlooker would notice that where I can, I name my folders a three letter abbreviation of their full name. This is because I am lazy.

The benefits of going to "work"

I work a job on a week on week off roster, which affords me the luxury of working fulltime on my models/games every second week. I treat this as an opportunity to "dip my toe" into the work-at-home-as-a-desperate-indie-dev lifestyle that I am clutching at strings to obtain. The problem is finding the line between leisure mentality and work mentality.

When working round the year and having only the weekends and after work to model, I would have to smash out my models at top speed just to keep up. This attitude translated fantastically to working with lots of time, oh man did I get some shit done, but lately I have noticed that with plenty of time to spare, I have more time to waste. It's hard to admit, but there are real downsides to fulltime home work, and subsequent upsides to what I call "work work".

The difference between Source and UDK communities

As my legions of avid fans and readers may be aware, I have started to fiddle with UDK. A big part of working in an engine is the support you get from its community. For Source I have been predominantly lurking and sometimes posting on Interlopers.net and I have found the community to be open, honest and violently dedicated to mod/game dev. Since using UDK I have been lurking in the WIP section of the Epic Games forums. The community there is quite different.

Breaks vs burnouts

I have recently taken

Somewhat of a compulsory break from all things art related. I went to Vanuatu with my girlfriend! It was my first overseas trip. Without boring the readers with an analogous diatribe of my personal exploits and adventures (of which many were had), it will suffice to say that I had a good time.

All awesome and no skill

I have heaps of pictures

In my head that look awesome. Amazing accomplishments of artistic grandeur. Unfortunately my hands don't share the vision. I have pieces of art meticulously planned but I just don't have the wacom skillz to make them a reality.

Or so I have convinced myself

Recently I have had projects that require more marathon work than I am used to. I have been working on my current model for almost 180 hours spread over the last month. And it has taught me quite a lot about how liquid a piece of art actually is. I used to (and by used to I mean had done up until the model before this one) be scared of changing anything for fear of ruining what I had so far. In some cases this has definitely been the outcome, but a well planned ctrl+s has saved my skin.

Don't blame it on the boogie.

I tend to get a lot of work done

But not a lot of projects finished. I think this is a pretty common habitual mishap for young artists. The projects I have followed to total completion are usually a product of a few days of hammering away excitedly and having ideas pouring out my ears. I have created a few websites, a few paintings and a lot of models this way. It's a pretty effective workflow because the ideas are all fresh in my mind, the skills are polished up and the time taken is minimal. I can easily smash out a heap of small props, a couple of medium scale projects, or a few highrollers in the space of a few days.

But what about when I can't afford the hard and fast approach?

Sometimes the weekend comes to an end and my mega explodey starburst funtime model of awesomeness didn't quite make it to completion. I go to work and come back to an easel of half finished strokes and a muse that has taken off in her lightspeed warpdrive spaceship in a direction exactly opposite to mine.

What do I do now? This is often the make or break point for budding artists. I've lost the groove and subsequently blamed it on the boogie. I think this is the point that weeds out the successful modellers from the happy ragtime blendernewbies permanents (not that there is anything wrong with blendernewbies, but people should only really be there for two years at the MOST). It's around this stage that my mentality needs to change from fast and hard to slow and steady. I need to re-analyse my creation, externalise my internal criticism and objectify my actions. Yeah that's a lot of flashy catchwords but they're about as succinct as I can be.

Re-analysing my creation

When I started my happy go funbang model of solidified amazing I had ideas bubbling from my eyeballs. Now I'm all out. The ideas may still be there, but they aren't as awesome and achievable anymore. I don't really have a strong direction to work towards. I need to look at my art so far and decide what I want to do with it. Come up with an overall goal for the final product. Sometimes it's monumental. That's fine. I strongly urge everyone to set their goals beyond their skills. Arnie never got massive from lifting comfortable weights.

The point of this step is to create a specific end goal so that I will have a better idea of when my project is complete, as well as how I am progressing in my workflow.

Externalising my Internal Criticism

This is a pretty simple concept, but can be elusive to get right. I see internal criticism as when I notice a colour is too saturated, or a quads' diagonal midline is running the wrong way. External criticism is when I post my work on a forum and get advice and opinions from community members. I find that providing my own external criticism helps to develop a style, since I am re-inferring my own opinion onto my own work.

By looking at my work as if it had been posted on a forum and I am telling Old Matey McForum Member what I think of it, I find lots of potential improvements and catch some prominent mistakes. I like to do this after any significant change, or a significant amount of insignificant changes.

Objectifying my Actions

It's about this point where I realise that I have just committed myself to the equivalent of painting the roof of the sistine chapel with my armpit hairs while blindfolded, concussed and covered in sandflies. But that's ok! Alan Turing never created the computer by studying 10th grade maths! I'm a big fan of setting small achievable goals and that is exactly what I do at this point. I'll look at what my creation is now and what I want it to be, and I'll break it down into steps. Ok so I know I want him to have a wrinkly ass forehead and big dimples, so I need to move some loops around. I know I want that bit to be shiny so I need to make a nice specular map. I'll break it down and down until I have something that I can do right now, and will only take half an hour at the most. The hardest step of any journey is always the first, and it seems that once I have started work, my muse comes a-knockin'. All of a sudden I need to fix this and improve that, which makes this look out of place so I correct the other to fix that and that improves this. And so on.

The point is that if I have a nice easy job to do I'll be more inclined to do it, and once I am wrist deep in a whizpop whoopee smileface sunray batch of liquefied goddamn, it's much easier, and way more fun, to tackle the more complicated problems.

By this stage

It's about 2 in the morning and I have roughly 5 hours till I have to be at work but I don't want to go to bed because my muse is starting to play with her spaceship keys in her pocket and I don't know if she'll be back again. So I crunch and go to work trashed and come home with less inspiration than the night before, then run through these steps and do it all again till my eyes are poking out on stalks and I look like a junkie who has been pilling for weeks.

And that's how I rediscover my groove and apologise to the boogie.

Strategies for outmanoeuvring your immobility

My biggest hurdle is myself

I have had days where I sit and stare at a blank blender screen from dawn till dusk. I have had months without a single finished piece of art. I kick myself constantly for being unproductive, and that self-kicking only serves to make me less productive, it's a negative positive feedback loop. I'm sure this is the main reason why I am not currently soaring through the skies on a magic carpet made from the shredded prints of a million amazing artwork pieces I have produced.

But I haven't had a day like that for months now and it is all thanks to me. I have successfully trained myself out of inaction and underproductivity. Well, almost. It's a constant battle that will never quite be won. But here are a few strategies that make the battle a whole lot easier.

Have you ever spent a day staring at a blank screen with a blank mind

Only to spent the entire night in bed, wide awake, ideas racing through your head, muses dancing jovially on your cerebellum? Damn right you have or you wouldn't have read all this crap. Strategy number one is to emulate that night-borne ideas rush. Find a quiet relaxing spot to sit and just let your mind run over your craft. Two of the most effective locations I have found are in nature parks (no shit, trees just make me want to model) and bed. If you happen to fall asleep that's ok, you'll wake up refreshed. And don't worry about how much time you're wasting away from your project, it's just time you would waste staring at your blank screen.

Strategy number two is to start on something small. I am easily scared by big projects, so I do a fast mini project first. For instance today I was making totem pole models and I got a little overwhelmed. There was a lot of design decisions and loops and mesh repeat points and I started to slow down a bit too much for my liking. I decided to make some vine models I had been meaning to make instead. After a few hours I had the vine models finished and looking good, which gave me the motivation to model my totem poles. Or at least, do two different concepts.

Strategy three is not so much a strategy as it is a lifestyle shift. Sleep is way underrated. I know, most programmers/modelers/textureartistes/computerdudes love to stay up late, smash coffee, pull all nighters for no apparent reason, hard resets, crunch volleys and the rest of them. But it's not a good way to go. Eight hours sleep and a well nourished bloodstream does amazing things for my art. I can make decisions faster, comprehend poorly written shorthanded tutorials better, self analyze more effectively, it's just me2point0 with a proper sleep regime.

Those are the main pillars of motivation

That I have found helped me shake my habitual inactivity. But you don't have to stop there. Whenever you have a good session, think back on what triggered it. I know that playing Red Dead Redemption makes me get a hard on for blender within half a stroke so I also use that sometimes. If you find what makes you want to produce, make a mental note of it.

By far the most effective though, is the first one. If you are having real trouble creating, stop trying to create. Daydreams are like burley for muses.