Gamedev

Let Me Tell You Where to Go – ViolentSol.com

Posted on by magicrat_larry

Don’t get me wrong there are many places I would like to tell many people to go, but ViolentSol.com just launched.  What is it you ask?  It’s the web site for the game I am a part of.  We are proudly moving forward with a site dedicated to it.  You can see a nice little blurb about our team, and get a great description of our game.

We started off thinking our IndieDB site was good enough.  But, we rethought that and created our own cool little place on the internet.  I hope you enjoy it and please do comment about the game and the team.  We are a very interactive team once you give us a try.  Anything you want to know about the game or our team we will freely share.

Enjoy the site and I am going to go get back to working on the game.  It is nearly 6am.  🙂

Life Is Hard

Posted on by magicrat_larry

I’m writing this during the middle of the day.  Why you ask?  Because life is hard.  See I had to change my daily schedule due to the difficult nature of life.  It happens.  I get it.  What I hate the most is when this stuff makes people truly believe that the world is almost too hard to succeed in.

There are two types of people that think life is hard.  The first is the “Life is so hard, I can hardly stand it” person and the second is the “Normally life is easy, but I make my life more difficult because I interact with the world” person.  I am the second person.  If I wanted to I could lay back and have a simple life.  I have a good job, a great family and I generally enjoy everything about my days.

I personally hate that, oo life is good, feeling and always push myself, and the world to the next level and feel satisfied doing it.  So The other people, sit around waiting for an excuse to explain why they do not do anything other than what they do today.  I hate that.  Don’t be one of those people, please!

Do something that is hard.  Make life hard.  I took my normal life and said I need to do more with it.  So I started fitting more and more in and now it is bursting at the seems.  Not because life is hard, but because I choose the difficulty level.  I choose to be a game developer chasing a dream after work.  I choose to play with my child whenever I can.  I choose to get up early and sleep less.  I choose how difficult my life is and my life is hard and I love it.

Select Difficulty level

What’s Your Game Development Dream?

Posted on by magicrat_larry

I had a nice conversation of Twitter yesterday with @berit_anderson, yeah I’m calling you out.  In that conversation I was asked the following questions, “What is my gamedev dream?”, and “What would be an ideal setup for you?”  Let me attack each one of those this morning.

What is my gamedev Dream?

Well to begin with, it is on my bucket list, actually the final item on it, to create a game and sell it to at least one person I do not know.  Sounds dumb, but it’s a dream.  Starting with that I think it has evolved from there.  I am a computer programmer by trade, so I spend my days coding to save companies money.  It’s not terrible, it is kind of fun usually.  In the end though I am working for companies and providing value to an entity that is not a living breathing person, so I am changing the lives of people through proxy of the company I happen to be coding for.

What I believe games are is a means for me to directly change peoples lives without a proxy.  In games people feel emotions, and generally get happier.  What a better way to spend the last portion of my career, fulfilling my bucket list and making the world a happier place, one game at a time.

What is my ideal setup?

I have already done business before, so I really don’t want to do it again.  What I want is my current job to turn into game development.  I work for an amazing company OST and they have showed interest in creating games after Aaron, my partner in crime, and I told them “They have a game development company, they just don’t know it yet.”

So Ideally, we work for OST full-time on games.  Right now we are in the attempt to prove to them that we are not nuts, that there is money in it, and we are the right people to attract that money by making great games.

Conclusion

I want to make games, to make peoples lives better.  I do not want to be the accountant of a games company.  I want to concentrate on making high quality games that people will enjoy for years.  So I work my butt off trying to make that happen, daily.

If you have not seem our project on IndieDB yet, here is my shameless plug – Violent Sol – Worlds

worlds

One of Those Days

Posted on by magicrat_larry

I got up late today, and everything is taking a lot longer than it normally feels it does.  So this will be a shorter one today I am sorry.

The past week has been fun though.  We finally got the game announcement out the front door.  Our hope is we can have some validation of the idea through a few means.  Once we get validation then we will pour ever ounce of energy into it and knock it out.  If you are interested in the game pleas do go check out one of these places and leave us feedback.

Violent Sol – Worlds Forums –

Game Features

Dev Forums

 Violent Sol – Worlds Home –

OST Games Studio

Violent Sol – Worlds

I’m sorry this post is not more witty and interesting but it is kind of an off day.

How to be Better Than a Wild Monkey

Posted on by magicrat_larry

So, I am the king of saying things that make people cringe so here it goes, making a game is easy and takes just a small amount of talent.  BOOM!  Yup, just about anyone can throw down a game, game jams are a huge example of that.  Don’t get me wrong, people who code games are some of the best programmers out there and anyone in business should hire them as coders.  When it comes to problem solving a game programmer is tops, but it’s not that hard to make games.

Easy

So why isn’t there 5 billion different people throwing games out like wild monkeys?  There are, the key is that you have never seen most of them.  Yup, WILD MONKEYS!  Truthfully, people throw down games like nobodies business, but hardly any of them take on the roles they need to from day one to get it out the door better than a wild monkey could.

How to be better than a wild monkey

Step 1:  On your first day, define something and market it.

Step 2:  On every other day, define more things and market them.

Step 3:  When you hit problems market those too.

Step 4:  When you take a break market that.

Step 5:  When you mow your lawn market that.

Step 6:  When you take a nap, market that.

Get the picture?  Nobody buys games from an indie development studio.  They buy the people behind it.  Be alive, be engaged, be you, and tell everyone about it.  Others are out there that believe in your dream so give them the information, from ground zero, on how it is you are perusing that dream.  Market everything you do.  Even if you don’t have a game idea yet, market the process to get one.  Really, sooner or later you will be finished with something and find yourself in a sea of wild monkeys and wish you did.

Sea_Monkeys

Our Game Project – Top down, survival, Action, Shooter with vehicles, crafting, and an AI overlord.

Posted on by magicrat_larry

We are so close to explaining our title and unleashing it on the world.  We have been painstakingly putting together the feature list and starting to commit to what we will develop for the title.  It is fun, but it is a process I cannot wait to be done with.

I wanna tell you that our game vehicles are amazing physics modeled action joys to drive, and our character runs around and shoots laser guns at enemies.  I want to tell you that We will have an AI overlord that will continually keep your game interesting.  I want to tell you that you will be able to do all of this with your friends.  There is so much I want to tell you, but can’t.

NewSplat

Well, the truth is all of this is speculation and rumor, but it would be cool if I could tell you.  What if I could tell you tht you could craft weapons, cars, and possibly even planes?  What if I could tell you about the game and start to get you fired up?  That would be awesome wouldn’t it?

handle barrelgun

I wish I could tell you something about it, but I hope you will stay tuned to hear more from me about it in the future.  I wish I could say building too.

House

Take care.

Twitter, the Best Mobile Game Ever!

Posted on by magicrat_larry

I’ve said it to many people and I get the same response of laughter every time.  “Twitter is the funnest mobile game ever! ”  Why does everybody laugh?  To me it is really true, Twitter is a very addictive and fun mobile game.

Why do I call Twitter a game?  I think it has all the elements of a game.  It has a large open world to explore, multiplayer, goals, rewards, and even disappointments.  Twitter takes the game to the next level, where Facebook just touched the surface.  Twitter made it fast paced, exciting, and very interactive in nearly real-time.  Twitter turned the social networking experiment into a very huge Social MMO where everyone is attempting to contact everyone else and get as many interactions as possible in like 8 minutes or less, how exhilarating.

Let’s take all the game-play elements and explain them.

Open World

Twitter is a massive world, you can sit there and search many different areas of it and see nearly endless content that is quick, and entertaining.  You can find anything and not have to read for hours, but just 140 characters at a time, or even just look at pictures.  So this world is vast, diverse, and tailors to many kinds of peoples mindsets for gaming.

Goals

Twitter is very much goal oriented.  You are motivated to create content, and try new things to reach the rewards that we detail in the next section.  It is highly likely that you will end up putting a lot more thought into your 140 characters than you ever imagined.

Rewards

It will tell you in real-time when somebody noticed you and the part of the world you are creating.  They can favorite you, which is like telling you that you rock.  They can retweet you, which is like broadcasting your content to their part of the world.  The holy grail though, is the follower.  If they follow you your empire grows in power and strength.

Multiplayer

It is social, every bit of the world was created by another person.  So every interaction you have in that world rewards another player, or disappoints them.  There is not single player mode on Twitter.  You cannot help but reward anotehr player with either a good interaction or a terrible one.  You choose what you do to them and how.  You can follow others, or gain a following yourself.

Disappointments

Twitter has its highs and its downs.  This makes for a great story, not a conventional one, but a great one none the less.  Followers bring you great joy.  But the negative comments from some can hurt you.  The posts that get no interaction what so ever really are a downer.  Plus the dreaded unfollow.  Oh man there is nothing worse than somebody leaving your tribe of followers.

Conclusion

When using Twitter make sure you see it for what it is.  It truly is one of the greatest games created of all time.  It is pure, simple, and genius.  Play it and enjoy.  Join me @magicrat_larry

Your Idea Is Awesome, Right?

Posted on by magicrat_larry

Is my idea awesome?  How do you get the answer to that question?  Who has that answer?  That is what I am trying to figure out.  Your game idea is always awesome to you.  So you don’t have the answer.  The answer has to be with your potential consumer, at least that is my initial thought.

So how do we ask them these questions?  Kickstarter seems like a nice place to ask that question, but it is based in money.  That could be good, or it could be bad.  It seems like this question is outside the scope of cash.  Is my idea awesome, usually does correlate directly to a sale though.

Is there another way to ask if the idea is awesome besides Kickstarter?  Places on the net like tigsource could help.  Maybe even Indie DB. But, how do you go about asking that question?  Do you just throw a bunch of content out there and see if anyone likes it, or randomly posts about it?  Or, do you come right out and ask the question, do you like this idea?

So many questions, but they need to be answered quickly and early in order to not waste a lot of time on a game that is not wanted.  We have a lot of work cut out for us to figure this out.  Anyone have any suggestions?

Life is Hard, Let’s Make It Worse!

Posted on by magicrat_larry

My Twitter bio (@magicrat_larry) has a line in it – “If your life is easy, you are doing it wrong.”

I live that way.  I don’t go out and find trouble or anything, but the fact is if you are getting no resistance from anything you are not doing anything at all.  You can go through every day the exact same as, you did before, and have an easy life, but in the end, you will have done nothing at all.

I want to live everyday pushing it to the limits.  I want to go to sleep knowing that I could not have done more.  Life is not long, life is meant to be a quick ride.  What ride are you riding?  Are you riding the largest roller coaster in the world, or are you watch others ride it?

Jump on, Jump in, live life.  If you have a dream, make it happen.  If you want to do something, do it.  Don’t sit on the couch, or lay in bed resting.  Get it all done.  Games aren’t going to make themselves.

Problem Solve, To the Extreme

Posted on by magicrat_larry

I do something nearly constantly every day that I think is just normal.  But, it occurred to me that maybe everyone else does not do this, or maybe they do, I don’t know.  I take stuff to an extreme to help put the reality into perspective.  What does that mean?  Do I go get a dirt bike and launch myself off ramps to understand game balance?  Nope.

What I do is this, if I have a simple thing like health of an enemy, what should it be?  Say it is 50 now, and he feels too weak.  If I just add 10 would that help?  how about 20 would that help?  this could go on for a long time, but I am searching for a cap where he is just right.  Instead of doing that, my first step is always to do something like this, what if it was 50,000,000 would that help?

What did I just do?  You say 50,000,000 is probably always too high.  Probably always too high isn’t good enough for me.  How about 50,000,000,000 would that help?  Now we are talking, the odds of that not being too high are very slim.  So what does this do to our thinking?  Now we have a range.  somewhere between 50 and 50,000,000,000 is the correct answer.  Now you can binary search for it at a faster pace than just trying to get it right by guessing.

I do this in every problem I am trying to solve, from business, to game development.  Try it out, take a situation to an extreme, then usually the correct answer is simple to find.

EXTREME!!!!  I had to yell it once.  🙂