Posts Tagged ‘Dev Blog’
First Glimpse of the New Game’s Art
Friday, July 16th, 2010
Have a great weekend, everyone!
A couple tidbits on the new game…
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
(And yes, it’s for Facebook.)
Suspending Work on All Heroes Die, The New Project
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
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
Monday, May 17th, 2010
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.
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
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
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.
Dev Blog: State of the Game Update
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
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!).
AHD Beta v.5993.1 is up!
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
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!
Quick PAX Update
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
I’m finally back at home for the first time since Friday morning. Since my phone was made some time in the stone age, I have no internet capability with it – and I’ve mostly been talking my butt off about the game to people at our booth on the expo floor. So, sorry for the lack of updates!
PAX has been amazing. So far my experience with people seeing the game has been really, really positive – people seem to understand the stage we’re at in development, and a lot of people have really been excited about what we’re trying to do with the game.
Tomorrow is the final day of PAX, and I’ll be doing the booth again for the whole day. Monday I’ll start going through all my email and chilling out a little bit from our big push – Tuesday the team will be back at work, and we’ll start getting more info out to all of you about the game, better instructions, our schedule on releasing updates, and things like that.
Thank you so much to all the people who have supported us, showed interest, and bought the game. This weekend was an amazing validation that the concept we’ve had is something that resonates with people, and that this ridiculously ambitious pipe dream is indeed actually becoming a reality. It means more to me personally than I can really explain.
Now we just need to continue to execute on the promise of All Heroes Die. We have a duty to all you folks who showed us in $5 bills. We’re going to honor it.
Follow our Development on Twitter
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
In lieu of the incredibly overdue posts I need to make about the game’s setting and mechanics, I give you this placeholder post!
We’ve created the AllHeroesDie account on Twitter. On it, Whitney (code!), Graham (art and game event writing!) and I (design, biz, etc!) are documenting our dev tasks in entertaining 140 character bursts. Come on by and say hi. We’re also looking for people to ask us specific questions about the game, to further spur me to get off my arse and write the belated blog posts.
So please, join the party. Hilarity will ensue.
Dev Blog: State of the Game & The Five Dollar Beta
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
This is the first of several dev blog posts we’ll be doing as we head in to PAX; this first one focuses on our release strategy for All Heroes Die. Our further posts later this week will start to delve into the specifics of gameplay.
Right now, we’re working hard to get ready for our “$5 Beta” at PAX East. I’ve been asked a lot about exactly what the $5 Beta is, and wanted to take a few minutes to explain it.
What I call the $5 Beta is a release strategy that has been used by a number of smaller / indie studios, as well as by many other products in other industries. With it, you are looking to release your game in a very rough form; in some ways, the rougher the better. It’s a very Web 2.0 philosophy: ship early and often. Get your game into the hands of the people who will play it, and then use their feedback to develop it further. It’s a strategy that I first saw used by TaleWorlds’ for Mount and Blade, and also is being used by the gorgeous indie MMO Love. The indie devs Wolfire are also doing something similar with their game Overgrowth.
There are some advantages and disadvantages to this strategy…
Pros
- Start getting real feedback on your game.
- Start building your game’s community.
- Get some actual cash flow!
- Reduce the risk of continued investment in the game by gauging the market’s interest.
Cons
- It feels somewhat like that dream where you show up to school with no clothes on, and are just waiting for everyone to notice. (You know that dream, right? Right?)
- You risk forming poor first impressions. These may be hard to break, especially for media folks who look at tons of games all the time.
- You are increasing your workload with an added component of community interaction and community management.
- You’re now seriously on the hook to deliver to your fans.
Overall, we feel that this strategy is a great one to take for first-time game makers like ourselves – to us, all the cons I’ve listed are overcome by the first pro point – real feedback. The amount of time and energy you put in to a game means that you’re going to have blinders on regarding your gameplay and UI – you’re eating and breathing this thing, and you most likely long ago made your peace with dozens of issues that will completely vex your players. Getting honest feedback on these things is paramount.
Personally, I’m quite interested to see how this strategy turns out for us, and I’ll definitely be blogging our results. All Heroes Die is a curious mix of old-school and new-school, in terms of its technology and business model. On the one hand, we’re using an installed .exe that people download – very close to the shareware model that was pioneered by Apogee and ID in the early 90’s. On the other hand, we realize that our success is tied on almost every level to having a robust and engaged online community – something that brings us a lot closer to the social games of today.