Random thoughts from my head
Slither is a 2.5D platformer made in Unity over 48 hours for Global Game Jam 2012. Players take control of a larva, progressing through its stages of life attempting to collect the pheromones that will allow it to move through the door at the end.
Controls:
A/D – Movement
W – Place new Egg
Space – Activate ability (Chomp/Climb/Fly)
Shift – Speed up time
Click on through to play the game
I don’t want to take too much time to talk about this right now, but over the past year I’ve seen a lot of attrition occur within our faculty. Somewhere around 80-90% of the faculty that were present on my first day a year and a half ago are no longer at the school anymore, and not all of it was voluntary. This really sucks for someone in my position who has to keep rebuilding relationships with new staff everytime we go through a change of personnel. It’s like growing a tomato plant, and just before you’re able to harvest those delicious tomatoes, an animal comes and rips up the entire plant and eats the tomato. Despite the really dumb analogy, that’s pretty much how it feels.
The reason I’m bringing this all up is because my adviser and main teacher during this final year of school is no longer there. I spent a good portion of Friday last week talking to him, and now I find out this morning he’s gone, just a few days later. This is the second time it’s happened to me when I got close to a teacher, and it’s extremely frustrating.
Clearly this kind of thing happens in the industry all the time; people come and go in positions all the time, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. The difference here I guess is that these people are highly influential in my ability to get jobs coming out of this school. Not having them there to recommend my work and everything is pretty debilitating. This also means that everything that he was overseeing in terms of my education, including things that he was tailoring for me, are now out the window. I hate for this to sound like a bitch-fest, but I just need to let out my…disappointment(?) with things. I’m not really sure if that’s the word I want to use here.
In other news, in addition to somehow maintaining my 4.0 all the way into my final semester, I also am now Student Government president. That kid of role comes with a completely different set of issues that I have to deal with. It also means I’m basically managing two different teams of people, my game studio group and now the representatives. This whole situation is giving me an opportunity to expand my ability set by forcing me to step back and rely on lieutenants to get 90% of the things I need done. So that’s the good in all of this. I’m just going to be extremely busy managing people over the next few months, and hopefully will have the time to get all my applications sent out.
Down below is a web version of our game Primordia. HUD elements are all adjusted, and it definitely looks better at a higher resolution. But we did want to show that we can get it up online.
Controls:
W/A/S/D – Movement
Q/E – Rotate Camera
Mouse – Aim
Left Click – Primary Fire
Right Click – Secondary Fire
Tab – Open Mod Console
Space – Use Health Kit
Click through to give it a shot. Current high score on Annihilation is around 250k
Preface:
The issues I bring up in this document are heavily slanted towards the production aspect of Game Studio 2 (GS2) and may or may not reflect the feelings of other members of my team. Because of this, several of my points are focused on direct actions I took that I feel resulted in either positive or negative results.
Things that worked:
1. Cross-Discipline Communication
When we sat down at the beginning of the semester I knew that the only way to get things done in an efficient manner was to get people talking to each other. I’ve had issues on previous teams where groups would segment themselves from the rest of the team to the point where people didn’t even know some of their team members’ names. If communication doesn’t flow well on teams, things tend to get delayed. This semester I set out with the intention of limiting segmentation in the group by setting meeting schedules that would solely rely on cross-discipline communication. This would mean we would rarely have only art sitting down, but instead art and design, or design and programming coming together. Preventing group segmentation was not the only reason for wanting to do this. An added benefit was keeping each group up to date with what was feasible or not by having a check in place with another discipline to vet ideas against. How often have games been overblown by designer scope? This check allows people to really understand the issues other team members are facing, streamlining the whole process eventually.
During EA’s latest conference call to investors it talked briefly about the kind of money it was making in the social game sphere. EA said the average money spent per paying user over the user’s entire lifetime (specifically in the Superstar lineup) was $56. That’s surprisingly a considerable amount of money, considering social games usually see player numbers in the tens of millions. Of course, EA’s definition of lifetime spending is currently unclear, so that value may be subject to change. Unfortunately, that figure doesn’t show how many users are actually paying, which would reveal the kind of money EA is really making on these games. Luckily, we can start to derive that amount using various information sources available.
A new study by Visa’s PlaySpan and VG Market Study came out showing that roughly one third of all players spend money on virtual games. That gives a rough number on how many players are willing to pay.
We can pull some revenue numbers out on these games. If we look specifically at the Superstar lineup of games (as that is what our $56 figure applies to), data collection website AppData shows roughly 3.8 million users for those games (Madden Superstars, Fifa Superstars, and World Series Superstars). If one third of those users are paying customers, it means 1.26 million users that are buying virtual goods.
Finally – by putting these numbers together we can see that EA is making roughly $70.56 million from the Superstars lineup. A good chunk of change to be sure, considering all three of those products probably cost less money and time to develop combined than a single AAA title.
How does that stack up against EA’s overall revenue though? Well, EA reported their yearly revenue at approximately $1 billion right now. That means the money coming from their social games only accounts for 7% of revenue. However, that figure represents lifetime revenues, not yearly, so 7% is still inflated.
Anyone still want to contradict Activision Publishing’s CEO and his statement regarding consoles maintaining their position as the driving factor behind the industry? I thought not.
A little over one year ago Google decided to invest nearly $100 million into Zynga, a company who, up until that point, had exclusively made games on Facebook, their competitor. Obviously Google knows Zynga is going places, and in the year since, it’s held true. Just a couple weeks ago Zynga filed their IPO, and it’s showing a much higher valuation that most had predicted. Estimates say the company could be looking at a $15-20 billion valuation. After spending 4 years conquering Facebook, it looks as though they’re being set up to dominate Google’s new social platform, Google+.
A few weeks ago Engadget uncovered code in Google+’s platform that made calls to an unannounced service called Google Games. Google isn’t going to release this platform without any games on it, and who better to get to lead off a social games platform than the largest social game developer? Google’s $100 million investment into the company almost seems like an introduction rather than an investment, and an opportunity for Zynga to have access to this platform for a year before any other developer knew of its existence.
But then why does this mean Zynga will beat their competitors on a brand new network? Because being first is what matters in the social game sphere. Zynga was the first company to fully utilize all of Facebook’s features to create virality within games by mastering Metcalfe’s Law. This, combined with sound game design, led to an explosion of users in the early days of the Facebook App platform. In the 3-4 years since then Zynga’s userbase has exploded to ~240 million users.
With Google standing behind them, Zynga is looking to do a repeat of their Facebook performance. They have the inside access to, and likely say, in what Google’s platform can do in regards to social interaction. By being with them every step of the way, they open themselves up to the opportunity to utilize the platforms full potential immediately at launch, whereas other developers will only get access to near launch, and will need to scramble to make up lost time. This leaves Zynga nearly unopposed in its launch on Google’s platform, allowing them to grab as many users as possible and has left little room for other games to make a stand.
Unfortunately for Google+’s userbase, it means that they won’t be avoiding the spam from Zynga for much longer. However the more unfortunate part is that users won’t have the opportunity to explore new games because Zynga’s will have the opportunity to take up the most valuable resource first, users. As usual though, there is always chances that another developer may take this opportunity to make a stand against Zynga, and I sincerely hope someone does. The question then becomes, how do you catch Google’s attention with such a giant looming over you?
Finally after months of the game being out, I got my hands on a copy of the new Pokemon White. I decided it’d be fun to post a couple blogs about my journey through the game, so that’s what I’m going to do. Hopefully I’ll be able to move through it at a decent pace.
The Black/White games, other than being racist, are the fifth generation of Pokemon games (not to be confused with the fifth game). This means its the fifth set of new Pokemon introduced, and presents the next leap forward for the series. The game brings along not only 100 some new Pokemon (up to a total of ~600), but a new engine, items, world, and gameplay tweaks. Because of this, the majority of the game only includes the new Pokemon, meaning me and everyone else are going into this completely fresh.
Before I start, I do want to mention that I bought this game used, which is an important detail coming up. I feel a bit bad, because the guys at GameFreak are gods for working on this, and only this, IP for 15 years straight.
With the boring stuff out of the way, let’s begin this.
Project Grudge is a side scrolling shoot-em up game developed by a team of nine students during Game Studio 1, a three month long intensive team project class where we go through full production on a game. The player assumes the role of a UFO taking over Earth using alien technology to interact with the world. Our focus with the game was to create a uniquely inspired audio/visual experience with some kind of hook in gameplay. We decided to structure the gameplay as a three-tiered system utilizing a feature we dubbed multi-channel gameplay. The term was derived from the RGB channels in digital images. Gameplay was meant to mimic this by having each objective have a respective color and button to highlight it in a manner similar to sonar.
The visuals in the game were greatly influenced by Tron and combined with street art and light graffiti. We focused on creating visuals that highlighted contour lines in contrast to a pitch-black background of the game. Our audio direction drew inspiration from Rez and the Bit.Trip series of games. Both of these games try to simulate the effect of synesthesia by syncing audio and visuals to each other. We wanted to emulate this effect as much as possible. The goal was to sync audio effects with player actions and have them seamlessly mix into the background loop, ideally through the use of timers controlling all actions.
Although our final result was unable to complete some of the lofty goals we set forward, we were able to hit the core ideas we wanted.
WHAT WENT RIGHT
I’ve worked on a few ‘games’ here or there. Small projects and personal things that I never felt very attached to. Usually these took the form of pen and paper games or mods of existing things, but never anything too large. Never once during those had I ever thought of putting my name on it and having others view my work.
Just a second ago, I created the credits page on my first ever game. It was a very surreal moment. I’ve been looking to make games for years, and here finally, is my first ever game. In 10, 20, or even 30 years, this moment will be something I should remember. I could look back an reminisce on this project and be amazed. On top of that, here is a project I’ve been working on with my team for 11 weeks, and doing the credit page just signals that we’re close to finishing.
But there it is, my name alongside my teams’ names, on a screen in a game, that others can play.
Of course, that game is unlikely to see larger release other than being shown in our portfolios, but still, it’s a very meaningful moment to me.
I feel bad it’s been so long since I last posted. To be frank, it was kind of because I forgot my password x_x.
Last week I attended the annual Game Developers Conference out in San Francisco, the city of rainbows, for the first time. The year before I scheduled meetings for GZ and helped plan shoots, but I turned down an invite to go. So I had a little bit of experience in what to expect, but having never actually been there, I was a bit nervous. The reasons for that are simple; rather than going there to do some press interviews and talking casually with developers like I have before, I was there to sell myself to them. That didn’t seem so intimidating at first, until I got there and saw what was going on. I looked down upon a crowded hall filled with sweaty men and a few females desperately attached to some man for fear of their safety (I don’t blame them, I get nervous around sweaty men too, especially ones who like to critically look at games <_<). At that moment, I realized I was in a crowd of thousands of people, and all of them have some reason to be there, because they were in some form associated with game development.