Tag Archives: Dev Blog

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.

Announcing Mustache Mercenaries!

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(Hello, folks coming from Facebook!  We’ll be live in the next couple days – in the meantime, please Like the game on Facebook and join our mailing list!)

We’re extremely pleased to announce the new Macguffin Game, Mustache Mercenaries.

Mustache Mercenaries is a turn-based game of robots.  Robots powered by steam!  Robots fighting each other!  Robots with pilots!  Pilots like… Laura Ingalls Wilder?

Well, yes.  In fact, Laura has been interrupted one too many times by people that want her to keep crops from withering and to build general stores, and she’s had it up to here.  I’d stand back if I were you.

Mustache Mercenaries is what happens when you decide that what the Little House on the Prairie needed was steam-powered legs and the ability to thrash someone with a mailbox.  It’s what happens when The Emancipator doesn’t refer to Abe Lincoln, but instead to his handy axe.  Said axe happens to be inscribed with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that might just be coincidence.

At launch, we’ll have the main single player component of Mustache Mercenaries live – a series of campaigns where you can play Laura Ingalls Wilder, Abraham Lincoln, J.P. Morgan, and Harriet Tubman as they pilot their giant robots through old-timey America.  John Wilkes Booth doesn’t stand a chance.

And once we get done with the initial launch, we’re going to be working full time on adding new features and new content into the game at an astounding clip.  We’ve just scratched the surface of what we want to accomplish with the game – we are planning new modes of combat, expansions to the functionality of your lab (Oh – yes, you have a lab.  It’s where Mr. Brain hangs out for the most part.), new mech parts you can purchase or find in fights, and a pile of other stuff.  We also plan to bring you folks into the loop – we want your suggestions on what pilots and features you want next, and anything else you want to tell us.

We’ll be launching the beta of Mustache Mercenaries some time in the next week.  We won’t be publicizing it at first – we want a little time to make sure everything is working right – but if you’d like to know when it goes live, please join our mailing list.  Once we’ve worked out the kinks, we’ll also be publicizing it as widely as our thin little indie pocketbooks will let us.  We’ll be counting on you folks to help us spread the word.  Please also feel free to Like the game on Facebook!

Our goal here is to make a Facebook game that doesn’t suck…  something with substance.  Silly substance, but substance none the less.   Welcome along for what we hope will be an awesome ride.

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.