Archive for the 'independent' Category
July 15th, 2008 by torncanvas
We’ve posted an article previously about free music on the Internet Archive. But I’ve recently found something else: music you can use in your games through a collection on the Internet Archive called Open Source Audio.
Much of this is music, and it’s licensed for some sort of free usage, depending on the licensing terms selected by the artist who uploaded the work. Most entries use various Creative Commons licenses, and some of them can be used commercially in your games.
If you’re looking for music for games, there seems to be 3 general directions you can go: custom music created by professional musicians (most work in the tv/film industry), stock music created by professional musicians, and recorded music created by musicians (often times amateurs doing it for fun). In the first two cases, someone is making music specifically for a purpose, and that purpose is either decided by you or the musician, respectively.
However, in the last case, the musician is just making the music he/she/they wants to make, and then recording it. This sometimes results in more expressive or artistic music, which can do a great job of influencing a game with the same goal. I think the music in the Open Source Audio collection tends to fit this third case, and best of all, it’s free! Check it out here: Internet Archive Open Source Audio.
March 12th, 2008 by aeiowu
Mike, Josh and I(Greg) scuttled down to Ankeny for a developer meetup that the DSMGG held at a local gaming place Cyber Ops Gaming Center. I got there a little late, but everyone’s projects were really cool and the whole tone of the place was really exciting. I suppose anytime you get a bunch of passionate, smart people in closed quarters together we start feeding off each other.
Like I said, I got in a little late, but I was able to catch the last half of David Duke’s presentation on his sweet trajectory shooter prototype, Mini-World Wars. It was super simple, but those can be the best prototypes. I keep seeing a bunch of these gravity-body mechanics coming out post Mario Galaxy, and it’s really interesting to see the influence that’s had. It’s definitely a good thing. David’s prototype was sweet because not only did it involve mass-based physics but also took into account the mass of the orbiting moon, which affected me in my trousers as well 
We all want to play ASAP!
Later we were lucky enough to run a few play testing sessions with the guys that were able to stay longer. It was certainly an interesting experience, it being our first run through of the game with other people. I would say overall, while it wasn’t what I hoped for, we uncovered a few new bugs, some UI issues, and a consensus amongst the room about the villagers. We’ve got a fair bit of work ahead of us, but that’s good, we’ve built the stone now it’s time to shave it down to a pretty marble dino. Hopefully the next time we play test we’ll be to focus more on the fun and intricacies of the gameplay itself.
It was great to get some of that inspiration last night. Sometimes living in Iowa you feel a little isolated from the “happenings” of game development, and while there’s TIGSource and RPS and so on, there’s no substitute for real human interaction with developers. Just the slightest bit of someone else’s project, or hearing about real development issues others are facing can help a great deal. We all left pretty wide-eyed and ready to plug in for another go ’round.
March 10th, 2008 by aeiowu
Mike and I have been chipping away at a little weekend side project of ours for a month or so. He’s got a prototype up and running, and while the swimming mechanic is similar to PP:AFAA, we’ve added some cool new stuff that I think will be pretty compelling gameplay wise. Basically it’s a very simple deathworm-like, where you command the likes of a studious Boto (amazon river dolphin) and fight the evil river-polluting humans on their way to refineries and such. With the aid of schools of flesh-starved pirahnas, you summon the power of the riverbed to take on impossible odds.
I’ve mainly been working on the logo, (this is actually a school project, so the logo was our first assignment) but have started in on the rough art style to help me finish the logo. It’s pretty close to done, hopefully we’ll have an alpha posted up here pretty soon.
March 5th, 2008 by torncanvas
A friend of Greg’s just linked this to him: “My Paper Mind,” an animation of paper stencil cut-outs, using a technique referred to as “Stratastencil.” The interesting thing is that the stencils are layered on top of each other, and photographed and lit such that the previous frames are visible behind the current one, receding into space and shadow. The effect is mesmerizing. Visit Javan Ivey’s My Paper Mind page to view the video.
Now obviously, if you’re a game developer, you’ll likely think “oo, I wanna make a game like that!” At least that’s what I thought. The easiest thing design-wise would be to copy the same visual effect, where the game world is a stencil, with previous frames in the background. It might take some graphics trickery to do the lighting such that it looks realistic. Or you could just make a sheet for every possible combination of object locations. Heh.
But what if you made a game based on the abstract concept of this, instead of the literal visual effect? What if you could see your previous actions in the distance, and that affected your current choices? What if you could go back to those frames to alter the current one? How could you design interesting gameplay by showing the past and the present at the same time? One draws parallels to something like Braid, but let’s think past that.
Imagine the space that exists from the front frame to the back frame. What happens if you collapse that space? What happens if you connect it, creating a 3-dimensional form from that space? How do you explore such a space?
I think exploring some of the later questions could lead to some interesting game ideas.
February 19th, 2008 by savethedinosaurs
Hey reader, we’re broadcasting deep within the bowels of the bay area. We made another podcast last night, hopefully we’ll have time to edit it and maybe make another one. There’s so much to talk about with the IGS, we tried to hold it in as best we could until we could talk about it “fresh” on the podcast. So in lieu of an edited podcast we give you this gem. Man, ever since I learned how to spell that, it’s been open season on “lieu.” It has surpassed “purview” and “ilk,” at least in written form.
THE ALMIGHTY INTUITION DEVCAST WORLD PREMIERE
On the night of day 0, I decided to search out a mysterious beep that seemed to emanate from Ted’s bag. Apparently Josh captured my safari on camera.
Turns out it wasn’t the bag, or even in the room, but outside somewhere. Next day, we posed for our book-nook picture at IGS.
Later… lunch. Where we learned a crafty new way to make a cube out of 6 business cards unbeknownst to us that it would destroy them.
Then sushi and talk with Tyler Streeter, our mutual friend from the VRAC. He does research on A.I. specific to the human brain. He’s the one in the 2nd picture on the left, blurried. He’s brilliant. And married… sorry ladies!
Oh yea, bonus picture. We found a guy with a ghillie suit laptop mod/cover thing. Anyway… pretty cool. Hope you liked the podcast. We really tried to cut it down to a reasonable length, and well try to get out a real one soon.
February 9th, 2008 by aeiowu
Mike’s parents were kind enough to bring us some developer rations on Thursday. None of us really eat very healthy in the office, except for Josh, who is all into flax seed. So here are our favorite bits of sustanence.
Daddy Ray’s Fig Bars. This is one of Josh’s staples, the rest of us still don’t know where he gets them, but we think they’re delicious.
2 lb. box of Pepperidge Farm Cheddar Goldfish - Whole grain if you can find it. This is a classic, and therefore manditory.
Sam’s Choice Mountain Trail Mix - recovered deep within the belly of the beast, these precious nuts, chocolates and raisins are tainted with corporate shame, but are oh so fortifying.
Gatorade lime Rain, 64 oz. - Possibly the finest drink to ever grace the Earth. I’m really the only one who drinks it. But we use the old bottles for water bottles now.
Red curry rice and beans. I’ve got a recipe on my site, it’s cheap and easy and can stretch a long ways over a large amount of rice. We have some form of it once or twice a week here at the office.
Oh yea, Nerf hoops are the new pilates…
February 8th, 2008 by aeiowu
Josh found this sweet music today while sifting through some dusty bookmarks of his. It’s freely distributed music (under the creative commons license) and would work for our game if we wanted it. Mostly it’s just kick-ass and old school, and we listened to it all day. Check it out. This one too. The recording label, Monotonik, has other cool compilations that have albums beyond the Amiga stuff.
Internet Archive rocks, it’s easy to forget about; but so is Mike, so we forgive you.
February 4th, 2008 by aeiowu
“Hey, we’re back!”
No, it’s not Dr. Katz, but instead a much drier, less-squiggly version here to bring you our next segment: way more recent stuff. We haven’t been showing as many pretties as we should, so above, I give you the very unofficial, unfinished Dinowaurs logo. It’ll probably resemble something like that above.
Design Changes
Throughout development we’ve tried to implement the agile attitude into our process. For those not hip, we’ve loosely interpreted the milestone system into what many would call a bastardization, but it’s been working. By staying loose about the design and not adhering to waterfall type milestones, we’ve allowed ourselves freedom to completely change the design of the game. Now this doesn’t come without a price, and it may kick us in the behind, but we think that this is the way to go in the web-games space. Iterate and push until we can convey the best version of our game’s high concept possible within the time-frame given. Credit Johnathan Blow’s recent speech on Conveyance and Pushing at the Nordic Game Jam.
Now onto the changes to Dinowaurs. Basically since hitting “alpha” we’ve decided that too much of the game goes on in the middle of the map in the very first encounter, ultimately leaving the other, stronger tiered villages to collapse given the upgraded weapons awarded to the player overtaking the first, and their fourth, village. To aid this, we’ve decided to change a number of things. This makes our third complete overhaul of the game’s mechanics, and each time we’ve done this, we feel better and more excited about where this game is going. Change is good. For our country too
- Resources - They’re back and they accumulate at a rate based on the amount of villages the player has (represented by “gold” or the like).
- Tiered Weapons - Tech tree for weapons is now based on the village the dinosaur is at, instead of the amount of villages taken.
- Village Tiers - Each construction site is intrinsic to it’s original tier level. No other level village can be built there.
- Ammo - Ammo is no longer unlimited, but tied to the resources and charged against the total value with each shot, at a value determined by the ammo type.
- Weapon Production - Weapons are purchased with resources (e.g. gold) when the player chooses to produce them.
- Upgradeable Village Guns - Villages can be equipped with more guns (or maybe upgraded existing guns) to propagate more of a defensive strategy.
- Shooting - Removing the pause after shooting a weapon. The shot can cost resources now, forcing the player to consider each shot carefully, and besides, it will speed up the game.
Also, we’ve been talking a lot about weapons since a great portion of the game’s fun factor relies on them…
Four basic weapon types, upgraded with tiers (keep controls/weapon properties fairly consistent throughout tiers)
- Trajectory - hold to power-up, let go to fire
- Strike - hold to choose spot along terrain, let go to fire/drop
- Deploy - launch from dino
- Jetpack - use trajectory control to “launch” the dino and then float down
- Special - One special weapon, chosen as a dino’s “special move” in the profile menu. This will be available via the third and final village tier.
Jetpacks!
Well, we were hesitant to add this feature, but quickly swayed after playing Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and noticing the community response to a casually-mentioned, fictional game “Jetpack Brontosaurus.” The monocled raptor screen shot and a few posts on the TIGSource forums convinced us that this feature would not be too intensive and would add a much needed, mobilizing function to gameplay. After thinking for a handful of milliseconds, Mike came up with a way to use our current system to power the jet pack, which should work just like any other trajectory based weapon. We are in the process of implementing this now, but we’re all excited to see our favorite Gov. Skittles, the stegosaurus, careen through the air dropping grenades o’er her enemy windmills!
Podcast
Lately we’ve found ourselves tossing some ideas around the ol’ water cooler (”What’s the scuttlebug?”) about Indie Dev podcasts, or lack thereof. All of us love listening to podcasts, mostly NPR and game industry stuff, but nothing that sates our thirst for independent game development.
Nothing official just yet, but we plan to cover the latest in indie dev news, indie games we’ve played and loved, and anything those topics might spawn. We like tangents, those were always our favorite teachers in high school. Not the circle kind, you know, the kind that go off on an unrelated subjects only to find themselves lost in a wood with no lesson plan to guide them.
We’ve recently recorded a dry-run podcast, testing how the recording setup works and getting our feet wet with talking like we know things. It’s harder than you may think, but in the safety of our own homes, the insurance policy of audacity’s editing power, and Mike’s sexy chocolate vocal chords, we’re going places. Maybe not fancy places, but places nonetheless.
