Stand up and Entertain With Me

Posted on November 10, 2015 by magicrat_larry

What most people cannot keep up with is the pace of entertainment. When you get into game development on your own as an indie game developer you have to become an entertainer. If you do not entertain at a high pace you basically go unnoticed and are simply a programmer. There are many programmers in the world, be something better, something more.

I call it the pace of entertainment. You have to be willing to do things at a pace that isn’t just on the weekends or when your favorite TV show isn’t on. It’s called sacrifice learn to love it. If you do not, you will just be a programmer. Why is being an indie game developer so high paced you ask? It isn’t if you don’t mind failing. You can just be a programmer and code a game that doesn’t sell. That is your choice. You can also entertain daily, if not hourly, and begin to reap rewards of sales later on.

I know it is not all about money, but do you like working at that grocery store, that bank, that oil change place? Probably not. Make it your life’s mission to entertain while coding your game. Blog about things, post on twitter even when there is nothing to sell. Don’t just wait until the last minute and hope for the best or lean on another to carry something forward. Be the one person that makes your dream come true, if you do not you will die without ever seeing it happen.

If you want to be a real indie game developer, not just a programmer of games, entertain at the pace of entertainment. Stop saying you are busy, stop being the same guy or girl as yesterday and make it happen. Start today, I know you think you are not entertaining, or this stuff is not my thing. Trust me, I hate doing it too, get over it. Stand up and entertain with me.

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Proof of Concept (POC) Everything

Posted on November 4, 2015 by magicrat_larry

There is a good quote that always strikes me and I believe it is a good call to action for POCs.

Our approach to making games is to find the fun first and then use the technology to enhance the fun

-Sid Meier

If you just start coding your game from idea and start throwing stuff in you are not necessarily finding the fun first. What I like to do is to figure out a cool concept, as few neat sounding game-play elements and code up some quick little programs to show off those game-play elements.

The key here is speed. Do not spend time designing an awesome architecture. Do not spend time making sure it is pretty. Get the game-play in to your own hands and see if you still think it is fun. For example, for Violent Sol Worlds we started off with the idea we wanted a top-down shooter. So I started to create a POC of a guy shooting.

This POC at first looked terrible, with borrowed graphics but I could walk around and shoot one immobile cow. It turned out that it was fun to shoot an walk around, but the addition of blood from the cow made it more fun. The feedback was the true start of fun. At that point I thought the cow was detracting from the fun because it was an innocent cow. What would it be like to shoot something that moved, and shoot stuff like a building etc?

So I quickly threw in a wall and animated a bug creature I had been drawing. It was a lot more fun to shoot something moving. But the feedback was all wrong now for the bugs. They would need to die. So I coded in hit points and had them disappear when it hit 0. This still broke the experience and the fun.

When I added blood and body parts from the bugs being shot and killed it changed the world. It turned from something that I would launch and stop in seconds to something I found myself playing for minutes and it was just a POC.

You see without the POC I would not have noticed so many subtle things that make the action game-play fun. It is about moving around and shooting, but it was more about what you were shooting and how it felt to shoot them than anything else. This process did not take weeks, it took hours and the learning experience it was, was worth every minute. It changes designs, it effects decisions, and best of all it’s a quick process and adds value.

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Are you Not Entertained?

Posted on October 2, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I have a theory. If you are going to make a game, you should entertain from day 1. Not just when the game is released.

What does this theory do for me? I strive to release content daily that entertains, helps, and energizes people. If you realize that game development is entertainment then things like marketing and game design become one and the same. If you are dull and drab in your development of the game chances are that will show in the game itself. If you move in a direction of entertaining game development you will inject a life into your game that will be felt while playing it.

This also helps you create a community. It drives me to write blogs, to tweet about our progress. If you give yourself the need to have the development cycle be just as fun as playing the game itself it is highly motivating to you and your fans.

I always tell myself – Always be entertaining

You’ve played games that feel dead inside, and you’ve played games that feel like they were made with love. My theory is that the energy that the developers had trickles in to the product and without a feeling of entertainment during the development cycles there is just no life to the product. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. Worst case here is that it makes the hard work more enjoyable and keeps me motivated.

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