Tag Archives: All Heroes Die

Updates on… Project Quigley?

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Hello, all five blog readers!  I’m way overdue on an update, so:

  • I’m in the pre-production phase for Macguffin Games’ next project, which for now we’ll call Project Quigly.  It’s not quite a direct successor to All Heroes Die, but it incorporates a couple of the elements I really liked about it – namely heredity and the AI-picked game events.  As well as a couple other smaller things.
  • The design is proceeding slowly right now, in large part because life is busy, in small part because XCOM: Enemy Unknown is an incredibly compelling game.
  • I’m looking at creating the game in Unity, and it is definitely a top-down tile based map setup.  I recently found David Gervais’ collection of creative commons tile art for his Angband variant, and I’m likely going to use some of that for the prototype versions.  That art will be swapped out further down the road.

One lesson I learned from AHD’s development is to really nail my design vision, the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics of it, and to get lots of feedback on it.  I’ve gotten a first round of feedback from my good friend Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games, and have other folks lined up to poke holes in it once I’m set.

A big issue with doing this while employed full-time and being the father of two is – as you might guess – carving out time to work on it.  So far, I’ve tried working in the evenings on it.  While that can work, there are a lot of things that can get in the way there.  If my son doesn’t fall asleep for an extra forty minutes, it can cut my working time down a great deal.  Summoning the will and focus to work at eight, nine, or ten at night can also be daunting.

I’m going to try a new plan of attack, starting next week: get my ass up at the crack of dawn, and work then.  The chance of interruptions is a lot lower, once I’ve sucked down some coffee I’m likely to be as focused as I’ll get, and it’s nicely bounded by my needing to get to work.  We’ll see how it goes.

I hope you’re all doing well, and I’ll be posting more updates as I go.

Not quite dead yet…

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… but not quite living in the same way.

In essence, Macguffin as it was previously – a four-person full time team of developers – is no more.  But after looking at ways to wind things down, and taking some time to evaluate what I want to do with my spare time once I have a job, I’ve decided to keep Macguffin around for my future gaming projects.

One of the big things I’ve learned in doing the past three or so years of game development is that I really do love creating games, doing the coding and game design.  Since shutting things down and starting to look for a job, I’ve begun coding and designing again on my own – and I’ve been having a blast.  Regardless of where I land I fully plan to keep working on games and blogging about it.  Who knows, perhaps I’ll even have something for the market someday.

Right now I do not have plans to return directly to All Heroes Die.  I say this for Therlun’s benefit (I know you’re out there!).  The two big problems with AHD are the limitations of BlitzMax, and the sheer scope of the endeavor.  Neither of those gets solved by me working on it nights.  The most likely path forward is that at some point I do a game inspired by chunks of AHD, or redo the game with a slimmed down design in another language.

In the meantime, I’ve been working in Unity using C#, and may have some upcoming posts about how that’s  been.  It’s also near time for the IGDA to begin its elections, and if I can get some help, I plan to cover the candidates again.  More on that shortly.

Suspending Work on All Heroes Die, The New Project

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It is with very mixed feelings that I announce we are suspending development on All Heroes Die.

The quick summary is that AHD is a huge game, and we are nowhere near done.  With the resources and time we have, it’s also one that currently can’t support the company.  Graham and I have both been working without drawing any pay for our entire time on the project, and we’re at the point where we can’t continue doing that.

We very much want to return to it when we can, but we don’t know when that will be.  Right now, we’re just going to take things one step at a time.  We still believe in AHD, and we want the finished game to see the light of day.

This isn’t the end of the road for Macguffin Games, either.  In fact, the reason we’re halting development is so we can work on another game – this one in the Social Media space.  I’m sure some of you will be disappointed to learn that; I understand.  We think there is an opportunity to make great games there, make enough money to live, and to do it in a reasonable time frame.  Our creative goal with this new game is to make something that we can be proud of, something unlike most of the offerings out there.  We’ve begun prototyping the design and art direction, and we are all extremely excited by it.  We hope you will be, as well – more details will follow as things shape up.

Thank you so very much to everyone that has supported us for the wild ride that has been All Heroes Die.  I started development on it  just a bit over 2 years ago, teaching myself how to code, alone in our guest bedroom.  Since then, I’ve met literally hundreds of people whose support, enthusiasm, and good will made it possible to keep going.  Two people in particular must be mentioned: my wife Anya, without whose support (both emotional and financial) this never would have happened, and Graham Sternberg, the man who created most of the AHD setting, most of the art, and who talked me off the ledge on more occasions that I’d like to admit.  I’d also like to mention Heather Wilson, Mike Faulk, and Phil Krzeminski for their work on game events, game events, and art respectively; thank you folks for all your excellent work.

Finally, thank you to all of the wonderful people in the Boston Indies community; because of them, I seriously believe that Boston is the best place in the world for someone to be an indie developer.

EDIT: When I originally published this, I forgot to mention, we are planning two more builds for now – one to fix a number of bugs that came up in the last build, and another with Warfare in it.  The first will happen sometime in the short term – the next several weeks – and the Warfare one some time before or around fall.  I’d like to give a better estimate, but it all depends on how everything else is going.

EDIT EDIT: I’m an IDIOT!  I didn’t thank Whitney.  This game would not have gotten 1/4 as far as it did without her, and it sure as hell never would have launched for PAX.  Her fantastic and awesome coding skills were all that got us to that first Beta build.  Whitney, thank you so much for you amazing work.

Dev Blog: Next Build and the Event System

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The Warfare build is progressing, but has been slowed somewhat by our current programming bottleneck.  Our programmer for All Heroes Die, Whitney, recently took a full-time day job.  She’s still working on the game, but at a much slower pace.  So, we’ve rejiggered our schedule slightly.  We had Whitney take a slight detour from Warfare to put in something Graham has been dying to see – a more robust secondary targeting system for game events.  This allowed Graham and the event writers to proceed with redoing some of our old events and adding some new ones while she continues to work on Warfare.

The new plan is that we will be putting a build out next Friday, May 28th, come hell or high water.  How much of the Warfare stuff it contains is still up in the air, but it will definitely have new art, new events, and a number of improvements based on the revamped targeting system.  We also found a really nasty inefficiency in our load sequence, and have lopped off 20 seconds of load time and 3/4 of our used memory (!!).

So, what is this targeting system, you ask?  In order to explain that, I’ll give you a really brief overview of how game events work in All Heroes Die.

A game event in AHD currently targets one of the heroes (the player controlled members of their noble house), and consists of text describing the situation one of your hero faces, a piece of our event art showing the scene, and several text choices for how to resolve things.  You might think of it as a computer-enabled choice in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where your choice is hooked up to the stats of your hero and everything else going on in the world.

An All Heroes Die game event.

Under the hood, we do a number of things in order to select what event will be run (I gave a more detailed explanation here in the forums).  One of the first ones is to make sure we have a valid target.  If an event requires that the hero we run it for has the trait, “Star-Blooded”, then we test all your heroes to see if one fits that bill.  If not, the event is discarded; if yes, we run it with that hero as the primary target.

But then, what do we do if you have more than one target in the event?  What if the game event is, say, between a parent (the hero) and their child?  Up until recently, we only did this kind of event very rarely.  It used a hacky implementation that only could deal with hard-coded targets.  This is thing we shifted Whitney over to working on – now we have a for reals system for secondary targets.

We’re really psyched about the possibilities here – this sort of further control allows targeting setups like:

  • An older hero and their young spouse.
  • A hero and their non-hero parent.
  • Two family members, neither of which are player controlled heroes.
  • A hero and their magically talented niece or nephew.  (to be more specific)
  • An intolerant hero and their mentally unstable family member.   (to be very specific!)

This system will eventually be expanded to tertiary and further out targets.

One of those scenarios above – two family members, neither of which you control – really excites us.  This allows us to have events that target two people around you, giving a better sense of the world not just revolving around your main characters.

So, this is where we’re headed.  We’d love your feedback and thoughts on what’s going on, either in the comments or the forums.  Thanks!

Dev Blog: The Grand Plan

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Yesterday, we were taken to task for our poor communication by Romtos in our forums.  He’s totally correct.  We didn’t say much of anything for a good week.

I apologized, and then for a good chunk of yesterday I was really bummed about the fact that we’d screwed that up and gotten quiet.  I mean, I know that one of our big advantages is that we can talk directly to our players.  How had we gotten to that spot?

In part, it was because I’d been busy on non-AHD stuff – for the most part boring stuff that I didn’t want to tweet about.  But I realized that another reason is that we haven’t made communication a priority.  One thing I know is that good communication isn’t just something you can layer on top of your company or team, it’s something that you need to imbed bone-deep into your culture.  So, I decided to get cracking on that.

Today I went into the Wave where we keep our Big Picture, did a quick clean-up, and just now posted it in the forums.  This is a high-level brain dump of what we’re trying to do with the game… our roadmap to v1.0.

The list isn’t perfect – in fact, I’m sure that it is deeply flawed.  It is probably already out of date, I know it is missing important items, and most of it won’t make sense to people outside the dev team.  But that’s why it was important to get it out there.  I think a large part of why I’m not saying more about the game is that I’m waiting for things to be perfect before talking about them – and that won’t work at all if we’re doing anything near open development.  It’s going to be messy.  So, here’s our current plan, in all its glory.

Please feel free to come by our forums and tell us what you think of it – we’d love your input.  We’ll be updating it regularly.


Macguffin Games Welcomes Joe Freemer to the Team

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I’d like to officially welcome designer Joe Freemer to the Macguffin Games team!

Joe is a great friend of mine from our days at Blue Fang Games, where we worked together on many zoo-related games.  He is bar-none one of the best and brightest designers I’ve ever worked with, and digs RPGs as much as I do, if not more.  I’m incredibly psyched to be working with him again.  For a while now Joe has been excited about All Heroes Die, and has offered me advice here and there… and every time I took that advice it made the game ten times better.

Joe is coming onto the team to to help continue our push through Beta towards v1.0; the hope is that him jumping in on a lot of the design stuff will leave me more time to talk with our players, update the blog more often, and deal with the marketing and PR that will be so important to the game’s success.

Welcome, Joe!

Dev Blog: State of the Game Update

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As I’ve noted on Twitter, today is Communications Day.   So here is the second of two posts I’m doing today.  The first was a welcome to our new designer Joe Freemer; this one is an update on the state of the game & details on our next release.

Since PAX

Since PAX we’ve had a fantastic response to the Beta.  We got a good chunk of sales from that weekend and onwards, some great buzz, and a small legion of awesome beta testers!  These folks have been playing the game, reporting bugs, and giving us suggestions at a rate and quality level that far exceeded my expectations.  You folks are fantastic, thank you.  You can read their comments and thoughts in our forums.

Info on the Event Systems & Children

I need to do a full blog post on the All Heroes Die event system, but here’s a good chunk of information on how it works.  This system represents the core of the game – it’s how we handle storylines and plots.  We’ve designed it to be very open-ended; our goal is to allow content creators to take the game and turn the story around 180 degrees if they so choose.

I’ve also shed some light on how heroes spending time with their children works.  Essentially, the system is pretty opaque at this point – when we put it in, it was something of a “well we need SOMETHING here right now” moment.  It will be getting a heavy revision in the future, and we’d love your feedback on what that could end up looking like.

Next Build

Our next build is going to focus on the Warfare system.  Our current tentative date for that release is May 7th, but this depends heavily on some conversations Whitney and I will have this weekend about the coding tasks.  We’ve had a lot of this feature finished for a while, but we’ve never had the time to get it to a point where I was happy.

Rather than get into a long dissertation on what this will be, I’ll just describe it generally for now – we’ll follow it up with some visuals as soon as possible.

Warfare in in All Heroes Die is based in many ways off the system used in the indie cult-classic King of Dragon Pass.  Combat forces will consist of soldiers and their leader – for the player, that will be one of the heroes from their family.  The player will have knowledge of the tactical situation based on that hero’s skills – the better a hero is at certain things, the more information they can discern.  Once the player has selected tactics and a goal for the fight and hits “go”, we’ll figure out and present the results.  There are also several chances throughout the fight for game events to fire that can significantly alter the course of the battle – as well as for game events afterwards dealing with its aftermath.

We’ve intentionally kept the Warfare system a high-level affair, like many other things in All Heroes Die; it lets us tell the big story we want to tell without too much micromanagement and detail getting in the way.  The catch, of course, will be for us to keep the player’s choices interesting while doing that.  We’ll have more details as soon as we get a bit further into this build; if possible, I’m going to get a FRAPS video up or similar where we can show you what we have going on.

And finally, thanks again to everyone that has supported us by purchasing the Beta (still only $5!).

New Build This Friday

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Just a quick note – we’ve been hard at work and will have a new build up on Friday some time.  The list of changes will look something like this:

  • New portrait system – A hero’s portraits will now change from young to middle aged to old over time.  This is done based on the file names of the portrait files.
  • Explore revisions – We’ve made some tweaks and changes to explore.  Since we’re still nailing down how this will be for Friday, I’ll stay quiet on this one for now.  :)
  • New Events – We’ve done a series of events that will fire earlier on in the game, giving a bit more flavor to the early decisions the Nef Loviisans make in this new land.
  • Bug Fixes – Various.

AHD Beta v.5993.1 is up!

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Finally have what Graham keeps calling our “hotfix” build, v.5993.1, up on the site now (he plays a lot of World of Warcraft).  This is a small bug-fixing build that we mainly did to get a crash uncovered in .5993 where the game would implode after your second hero died.

Thanks very much for playing, folks!

Post-PAX Report – State of the Beta and Everything Else

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Been a bit of a crazy last week.  This is the first real chance I’ve had to blog about things – and I’ll have to do it quickly, since there are a bunch of threads from our players in the forums that I need to answer.  (Side note – being able to write the last sentence was incredibly exciting to me.)

In the interests of just getting this damn thing up, I’m going to just get the whole Beta and PAX story out in one post.  This might make it a bit long, we’ll see.

Given that, I’ll tell you the upshot right here:

  • PAX itself was an amazing validation of the game we’re trying to create.  We were received with open arms by lots of gamers that think this is an awesome idea.  Many have since shelled out an electronic Abraham Lincoln and snagged the beta!
  • The other non-game highlights of the week were that I was on NPR (around 25 minutes in) with Mike Dornbrook of Harmonix, and that I and other area devs Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games), Damián Isla (Moonshot Games), and Eitan Glinert (Fire Hose Games) were on a PAX Panel called, “Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees”, which apparently went over like gangbusters at the conference.
  • We intend to get our our first update this Friday, with a pile of bug fixes, at least one new piece of event art, and several new events.

Also – pics by fellow Boston Indies crony Mike Carriere.  There’s some of me later in the set.  I look like I’ve been awake for years.  Good times!

So, on with the show! Continue reading →