Make Mac Games

GBGames has some commentary on Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert’s review of the movie, “Silent Hill” and statements that games are not art.

I have not seen nor played “Silent Hill”, but I have seen and played “Doom” and watched “Resident Evil” (which I quite liked).

I find Ebert’s comments quite silly, actually. Games don’t make great movies, not because of art, subject matter, or anthying else other than who makes the movie.

Movies are made from screenplays by hundreds, if not thousands of people. The screenplay and the storyboards are the blueprints for the film. The filmmakers are the artists and craftsman. The game is just the inspiration for the screenplay and storyboards.

The reason “Doom” wasn’t a good movie is not becuase it was based on a video game, it’s because the screenplay was terrible, the direction was uninspired, and the acting was second-rate at best and the story was completely unoriginal.

But, it certainly was not worse (art or otherwise) than movies that were not based on games, such as any of the “Nightmare on Elmstreet” sequals.

Now, as to whether a game can be art. Again, this is silly as well. As GB states, art is in the eye of the beholder. While I didn’t personally enjoy “Myst” as a game, I thought the game itself was very artistic, if not down right beautiful. I remember the first time I played “Balder’s Gate”. I was blown away by the artwork making up the world in that game. Certainly, if you took the map “artwork” by itself you can’t deny that that’s art. Background music? Art. Storyline and narrative? Sounds like a book or screenplay. Again, art.

Now how about the reverse. If movies are art, then the “Star Wars” movies are certainly considered some of the most popular works of art ever. What about the scores of “Star Wars” games released by Lucas Arts? Art?

What if Orsen Wells decided to base a movie on a game? I bet it would be just a tad bit better received by Roger Ebert.

A new book has just been published that hopes to help indie game developers in the area of business that most of us struggle with. Besides the actual game design and development, marketing is the most important aspect of reaching success as an indie game developer.

No matter how good your game is, if no one knows about it, your sales will suffer.

Joseph Lieberman of VGSmart specializes in indie game marketing and has taken his expertise and compiled it into one volume. The Indie Developer’s Guide to Selling Games is available in paperback ($34.95) and PDF (27.95).

Jeff Vogel, Spiderweb Softare (Avernum, Geneforge), shares more wisdom from his 10+ years of indie game development in View From the Bottom: Part 3. This time he discusses his experience with trying to innovate.

The new version of Bullfrog featuring Intel Mac support has been released.

Changes in this update:

• New: Universal binary support for both PowerPC (ppc) and Intel (i386)
• New: graphics scoreboard
• New: Bullfrog Theme Song
• New: Improved Horsefly AI
• New: Improved Bee AI
• New: “Check for Updates” menu item
• New: Title Splash Screen
• New: Player can now enter their name for high scores
• New: Player name is persisted
• New: Options Menu items
• New: Options preferences are now persisted
• Fixed: drawing of frog mouth/tongue on help screen in the wrong place
• Fixed: Increased bug points
• Fixed: high score column layouts to support bigger scores
• Fixed: Occasional invalid animation frame error
• Fixed: Mosquito Sound FX Does Not Mute
• Fixed: Ticking doesn’t stop at end of round
• Fixed: Butterfly spawn area so they always spawn on screen
• Fixed: Removed the “Vote Now” main menu item
• Fixed: Removed the “Don’t Forget to Vote” text on credits screen

Download the full Bullfrog game for free!

GBGames has a nice introduction to object oriented design for game development.

GB does a nice job of summarizing some basic concepts that can be incredibly powerful for simplifying your object model as well as future-proofing your design.

I’ve used these techniques extensively for application development in my day job as a C# developer. As GB mentions, it’s very easy and tempting to fall into the deep class design mode, but if you can resist and take the time to turn your classes sideways, your classes will grow in power and flexibility right before your eyes.

Thanks to GB’s reminder, I’ll now remember to use these techniques in my games.

All coding for the next Bullfrog release is done. I’ve been testing it on my two PPC machines. My primary development box, a Dual 2.0GHz G5 PowerMac and an 800MHz G4 Titanium PowerBook.

What I need is someone with an Intel Mac to help make sure the Universal Binary build works on their machine.

This shouldn’t take very much of your time. I just need someone to launch the game and check all the screens and run through the game play a few times to ensure everything is working normally.

Since the game is free, I can’t really offer a free registered version. Instead I can offer you glorious fame by adding your name to the game credits as a beta tester.

If you are willing to participate, please contact me directly at jtrainer [at] outerlevel.com.

Peter Cohen of MacWorld Magazine writes in his The Game Room column: Support original Mac game developers.

It’s nice to see MacWorld push this point of view. I hope it helps.

For the past year or so I’ve been organically growing my RSS feed collection with a focus towards what other indie game developers have to say. My collection has grown to a pretty good size including game industry veterans and stalwarts to first-time designers and rookies.

There is a lot to read, and many to learn from. Here is a list my favorite writers from my current feed collection and why I regularly follow them (not in any particular order).

1. A Shareware Life - Thomas Warfield, developer of “Pretty Good Solitaire” and “Pretty Good MahJongg” is one of those successful super hero indie developers. He’s been at it for a long time and has some very valuable insights on how others can succeed at the independent games business. If you like cats, you’ll enjoy his “Friday CatBlogging”.
2. Phil Steinmeyer - Phil recently broke away from his old company, PopTop Software, after having success with games such as Railroad Tycoon and Tropico. He left for the freedom and the green fields of the indie game world. In May, 2005 he started his new company Crayon Games and recently released his first product, the casual game “Bonnie’s Bookstore”. I like Phil’s writing because he brings the experience of working for a successful game studio to the world of indie game development.
3. GBGames - Gianfranco Berardi has a comfortable writing style and is not afraid to talk about his failures along with his successes. He’s new to business and the game industry, but he brings a ton of enthusiasm and a surprisingly mature point of view. He has frequent updates with very little of it off topic. GB provides great inspiration for me since he’s struggling through many of the same issues that I am as he tries to make his way into the game industry.
4. GameProducer.NET - A recent addition to my feed collection, but has quickly become one of my favorites. Juuso Hietalahti of Polycount Productions shares some great insights into the job of a game producer. But the most interesting stuff comes from his Sales Stats articles from around the indie game industry where he reveals the sales numbers behind recently released games. GameProducer.NET is updated regularly and usually worth the time spent visiting.
5. Joe Indie - David Michael, author of The Indie Game Developers Survival Guide and developer of Paintball NET, writes about the business side of indie game development. He has a pragmatic view of the indie game industry and shares some great advice.
6. Casual Game Design - William Willing covers, you guessed it, casual game design. There’s some good stuff on William’s site covering all kinds of topics related to getting the best out of your game designs.
7. Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Jay Barnson is another game industry veteran turned indie. His site has a good mix of industry commentary and shared wisdom from his experiences.

There are a bunch more that I subscribe to, but these are the ones that consistently have the best signal to noise ratio and that seem to provide information that directly speaks to me.

If you know of any other indie game developers out there that are sharing their experiences and wisdom, I’d love to hear about them.

Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel (Avernum, Geneforge) describes his
View From the Bottom of the game industry over on RPG Vault. Or what Joe Indie calls the “anti-Pavlina” view of game development.

What is the moral of this? The game industry is a highly competitive, scary place. It’s not hopeless, but it’s a tough road. And that’s a good place to start to describe the view from the bottom.

Also check out part two of Jeff’s series View From the Bottom #2:

Indie developers have a real purpose in this world. They make little niche products for markets too small for Activision. They make many new puzzle games for the casual audience. Or, at least, the same old puzzle game again and again. They rewrite Asteroids… because someone has to.

Looks like a series that is well worth following. Vogel has a long successful history in the indie game industry and probably knows what he’s talking about.

Update:
Psychochild responds to Vogel’s article with The Indie Problem…again:

So, let’s talk about the real problems with indie game development and why you don’t see innovation from them.

Let’s be honest here, there are some serious issues you have to deal with as an independent game developer. It would be wonderful if that old myth about “if you build it, they will come” were true. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

I’ve been steadily plugging away at my list of bugs and enhancements for the upcoming release and finally tackled one area that I had been avoiding: improving the AI of some of the bugs.

Most of the bugs had a pretty random set of behaviors depending on how close to the edge of the screen they were moving. But other than keeping them from getting stuck in a corner or wandering off screen, their decision trees were pretty simple.

1. “How long since the last time I turned?”
2. “Which direction do I turn this time?”

The only bug that had any intelligence to speak of was the feared mosquito. Since the whole purpose of the mosquito’s life is to harass the player and steal valuable time off the ticking clock, it needed to chase the frog and buzz him. So the mosquito’s decision tree looked something like the following:

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time during the contest to really give any of the other bugs any convincing artificial intelligence. I made a crude attempt at making the Horsefly flee the Bullfrog if it ever came too close, but I was unable to get it to work without the fly trapping itself in the extreme corners of the screen.

With this upcoming release, more of the bugs finally have some “intelligence” to them. I revisited the Horsefly code and was able to rewrite the AI code to give the fly some simple evasion behavior, but it’s now smart enough not to get trapped. Well, okay not quite smart, but it falls back on its random behavior if it gets too close to the edge of the screen. This completely eliminates the trapped fly problem.

With this small success, I also attacked the bee’s AI. In this case, I didn’t want to add any intelligence, but to cause the bee to go into a frenzy when approached by the frog. My approach was to simply increase the bee’s movement speed when the frog came near. This gives the illusion that the bee is agitated by the frog’s presence.

Granted, these changes aren’t rocket science but they do break up the repetitious pattern of random movement at constant speeds.

With these changes “in the can”, I’m down to four items left on my list. Hopefully, I’ll have the time to get these coded and tested in the next week.

The only real hurdle left is finding a way to test the Universal Binary so that I can include that as part of the release.