Ride's Over, Kids

It's been a while since my last post and a wild ride in general over the past few months. I thought I'd offer some final thoughts and tie some loose ends before moving on to greener pastures. As fair warning, there's a lot to read and most of the following is a mix of my opinions and rants about the past year in game development land so if you're not interested in that kind of thing (all two of you that might happen to read this) then move along.

MyDreamGames 'Game in a Year' Contest
Where to begin? Perhaps a bit of backstory.

The 'Game in a Year' contest was the catalyst that got me moving forward with the development of Bit Battles. The allure of a $10,000 grand prize was too great of an opportunity to pass up and my game idea seemed solid enough, perhaps even a winner. The prize money would've more than payed for development of Bit Battles and possibly whatever project I wanted to start next. It all sounded like a really fun experience and a great way to get a foothold into the more serious side of indie game development. This was the contest that was supposed to pave the way for the future of Fanatical Games.

What actually happened is the entire contest became a debacle; a reminder of what can go wrong when a small company bites off more than it can chew and then involves an entire community in their shenanigans.

Bottom line, the thing was a mismanaged nightmare almost from the start. The Dream Games crew made promises it couldn't keep (like offering to support the teams behind the games with marketing, asset creation, etc.), failed several times throughout the year at administering the competition (various rule changes/clarifications, not releasing/creating point tallies for the final two quarters, etc.) and then bungled the actual process of selecting a winner (which seems like a pretty vital part of any contest to me!) by dragging out the judging process for nearly five months PAST the 'dead line', putting every team in limbo for nearly half a year.

I don't have any special insight into exactly why things went so wrong. I think people had the best of intentions (I know I did) and, for a while, the competition was actually fun. I suspect the contest was really a ploy to market Dream Games' products and I suppose it worked. Many of the contestants discovered DG via the contest and actually purchased and used their tech, buggy as it was.

In the end Bit Battles didn't win, the grand goal of gaining a financial foothold in the game development realm never happened. However, after recently chatting with the winner it seems the 'grand prize' wasn't quite so grand after all (surprise, surprise). Apparently losing is just as good as winning according to Dream Games.

InstantAction Contest
This was another contest I entered early last year. The prize this time was a chance to have the game published on GarageGames' new InstantAction platform. It was an opportunity to work with the 'big boys' of indie game development and would've really put Bit Battles out there and on the forefront of some really interesting tech. Bit Battles didn't win or even place in the top 3.

The games that did win were either: 1). games that had been completed before the contest had started (in some cases, years before the contest had started) and had gained a respectable following of players or 2). prototypes of concepts that have still not gotten off the ground (nearly a year later) and are not, and may never be, on IA.

More importantly, and this really gets to the heart of my problem with the contest and InstantAction in general, is the games that did win (or even place as a finalist) all had teams of people behind them. The one-man studios, the true 'indies', never really stood a chance because their entrees were up against games made by full-fledged companies who call themselves 'indie game developers' when in reality, they're more like professional studios who lack a dedicated publisher.

Developers like Introversion (makers of Darwinia, etc.) have more in common, in my opinion, with the 'pros' than with the bedroom coders slaving away on some personal project and yet, somehow, they're still considered just as 'indie.'

And that's my petpeeve about InstantAction. It's really just a showcase for the small studios who are no less professional than, say, Bungie or Blizzard but who lack the sheer numbers to be considered outright 'professional game developers.' While I don't have an issue with the smaller studios having an outlet for their games, it seems odd to me that GarageGames, a company founded on empowering independent developers, would spawn something that isn't accessible to actual independent developers.

Perhaps this is just another way of asking, "Where is the line between indie and professional?" Is there a certain number of employees a company has to hire, a certain number of games they have to release? What's the criteria that governs whether someone is independent or not?

And another little nitpick about the IA contest: There was absolutely no follow-up with any of the contestants. None. The GarageGames employee responsible for managing the contest promised to give some type of feedback about all of the entrees, even do some writeups about the games but that never materialized. The employee in question also apparently went MIA afterwards as there's been no further posts/blogs made by him.

Oh, and the game that won and received the publishing contract? Yeah, still not on the InstantAction website.

Indie Development Scene
Not really sure what to say about the state of the indie development scene. With GarageGames under new management it almost feels like the passing of an era. The founders are gone, many of the old employees have moved on and there's a definite sense that GG is becoming more about empowering studios rather than developers.

I'm interested in seeing things take their course but I'm not overly optimistic about the future. To me the entire indie development scene feels like a grand experiment that harkens back to some golden age of gaming where anybody with a computer and enough time could write a game, toss it onto a floppy disk and do something with it. Unfortunately it wasn't sustainable (in the financial sense) then and I don't believe it's sustainable now.

Bit Battles
What can I say about my game? It was a fun project, probably the culmination of a lot of my favorite things about various games all rolled into one. I think it's fun to play and apparently so do others who've played it. There's things I would've designed differently, features I wanted to implement, additions I wanted to make but overall I'm happy with how it turned out. I think.

With all of that said, if given the chance to do it again, would I? Yes, provided I knew it was destined to be freeware. I wouldn't have spent quite so much time or effort (or money!) on it and probably would've left it half-finished and closer to the original concept. I would've had fun working on it from start to finish or simply not worked on it at all.

So, that's the end. Fanatical Games will be closing up shop soon-ish. In the meantime, Bit Battles will be available for a couple of months in it's open beta form before it dies a digital death and becomes another page in the annals of Internet history. Get it while you can, I guess.

April 30 (The End?)

The end is nigh! Who knew the final week, then final day, then final hours would be here so soon? With barely an hour to spare, I managed to get latest version of Bit Battles out the door to both the MyDreamRPG contest judges and the general public! That's right, Bit Battles has hit open beta.

First, the important stuff. If you want to take part in open beta, maybe help me squash a few bugs or just check out the latest TRON-inspired indie game, then download Bit Battles by clicking: here. Be warned, this is still very much a beta. You most likely will run into unexpected problems. Report them to me either via email: feedback [at] fanaticalgames.com or the proper way: joining the Fanatical Games forums and making a thread in the Bit Battles area.

Getting from where I was last week to the finish line was supposed to be an easy task. I mean, hey, the game itself has been pretty much ready for public testing since March. Or so I thought. With three or four hours to go I was working on setting up a proper installer (that's right, no simple .zip file here) when I noticed a few small bugs with the game. Minor things like certain text fields not updating on map change. Simple problems with easy fixes. But fixing them required essentially recompiling the entire installation package followed by lots of testing to make sure everything still worked correctly. Each time I thought I had a good release candidate, I'd find another little bug or quirk that I just had to fix. And so on and so forth until I realized I had about 30 minutes to get the thing out to the judges. Sigh.

Anyway, the game is out there now. It's available for play, for judging and for criticism. So, where do I go from here? Only time will tell. Based on the feedback I get (assuming I get feedback, which if the closed beta was any indication, I won't) I'll probably be working for another month or so on bug fixes. After that, testing, marketing and shopping the game around to various publishers. It sounds good in theory but will it work out like that? If the past year has taught me anything it's not to plan too far ahead because things have a way of working out... just in a completely different way than you expected.

Progress Backlog - April 26 (Balancing Act)

[The following post is a backlog of progress which occurred from April 20 through April 26.]

Another week gone. I managed to wrangle the game manual into submission; one less task on the todo list. After taking care of that I turned my attention to the Bit Battles website. It's been an ongoing project for a while now and after half a dozen attempts I'm starting to make some good headway.

One of the problems thus far has been figuring out exactly what I want the website to be and do. Should it be a hub for all thing Bit Battles (similar to the old TribesPlayers site for the old school T1 players out there) or something much simpler (maybe a page with some screenshots, a big "BUY ME NOW!" button and a link back to Fanatical Games)? That's a question I still haven't fully answered. I'd certainly like to have a be-all, end-all website for Bit Battles complete with a nifty ladder or tournament system, place to host user-created maps, etc. but that seems a bit presumptuous. If the game sales poorly then it's all wasted effort and time, time which could've been spent making the game itself better.

Perhaps the best choice is something in between those two extremes. Finding the right balance, though, is easier said than done.

Progress Backlog - April 19 (TBD)

[The following post is a backlog of progress which occurred from April 13 through April 19.]

My focus this week is getting the documentation for Bit Battles updated. The MyDreamRPG contest awards points for proper game documentation (although the lack thereof isn't an automatic disqualification).

What can I say? It's fairly boring stuff. Hours of writing, formatting and revising all aimed at teaching players how to quickly jump in and get playing. The game manual (and I use that term loosely as it's more like a quick help guide than a full-blown, "every option under the sun is explained" manual) is essentially an HTML doc. I explained a while back why I decided to go with a simple HTML page instead of a .doc or even one of those fancy-schmancy .hlp files (compatibility, ease of use and ease of creation, in case you're wondering).

My goal is to keep the documentation simple and to the point by covering only what the player MUST know to actually play. After reading the help file a player should be able to join a game and at least be competent enough to know what the objective of each map is, what powerups are and how to collect/use them and how to mix it up with an enemy without getting insta-gibbed. Anything beyond that is considered outside of the scope of the document. In my opinion, no help file is a better teacher than good ole' experience.

For next week, I'm aiming to finish off the manual and perhaps put in some more time on the Bit Battles website.

April 12 (Dead Tired... Does That Make Me a Zombie?)

Another slow week down the tubes. Things are definitely winding down. The game is ready for open beta, the website is getting there and I'm ready to see it all come together and finally be finished.

The deadline for the MyDreamRPG contest is just two weeks away. I wish I could say I'm feeling particularly confident but I can't. With a lackluster response to the closed beta I'm hoping the game is ready for the masses (and I'm also hoping there will actually be "masses") but I really can't say for sure. Testing a multiplayer game requires, well, people other than ones self which I've only rarely had the privilege of having. Nevertheless, I'm pushing on with an aim to hit the finish line, good, bad or ugly.

Should Bit Battles win the competition, it'll go a long way toward financing the next game. If for some unfortunate reason it doesn't, I plan on getting the game out there and letting it be. If it sales, great. If not, I'll take my proverbial ball and go home. I wish I had the motivation and budget to really market Bit Battles but I just don't. And truthfully, at the moment I'm liking being strictly a gamer rather than a game developer.

Anyway, enough with the gloom and doom. Here's the plan for next week:

• Continue website development; still need to tweak a few things for certain browsers and finish the screenshots section
• Tie-up any loose ends with the contest (like getting the last revision of the design doc out to Dave!)
• Bug fixes?

Until next time, folks!

Progress Backlog - March 31 (Still Truckin')

[The following post is a backlog of progress which occurred from March 26 through March 31.]

Not much to report on this week. With the exception of a few bug fixes and tweaks, Bit Battles is all but done. I'm currently focusing on all of the other things (website, manual, etc. etc.) that need to be completed before the game is released.

I'm also still dealing with the issue of all of my beta testers mysteriously disappearing. It's really a troubling situation, especially so close to the contest deadline. What's worse, not many even offered feedback on the game before going MIA. Why take the time to sign up to test a game if you're not, you know, actually going to test it? Ultimately I believe I'll be wiping the slate clean and getting a whole new round of testers. Disappointed? Absolutely but I can't afford to wait for the current batch of folks to get it together.

Looking ahead, I need to step up the advertising effort again and soon. This month was by far the best for the Fanatical Games website with more unique hits than any previous month. It's a good sign, I suppose, and couldn't come at a better time but more exposure is needed. I have some ideas in mind but for now my focus has to remain on finishing the MyDreamRPG contest first.

March 25 (Motivation)

Another week down. Here's what's been happening over at Fanatical Games.

I setup the first "official" multiplayer test of the game this weekend and got exactly 0 folks to participate. Disappointing. Keeping the testers motivated is really becoming a problem. Some have signed up to test, got accepted and I've never heard from them again. Others signed up, offered some preliminary feedback and then dropped of the radar.

The lack of participation is really hindering the game in more ways than one. For starters, winning the MyDreamRPG contest depends on community response to the game (including feedback from testers). Not having much of a response other than a few signups is a problem. Secondly, the game just isn't being sufficiently tested and I can't (and won't) start the push to final release until I feel confident Bit Battles is bug-free. And perhaps most importantly, seeing the testers go MIA really makes it hard to keep myself motivated now that the "fun" part of development is over.

At the moment I don't have any ideas on how to address this problem. Jay Barnson of Rampant Games is using a staggered testing approach where small groups of testers are given access to the alpha at certain intervals. Rotating different groups of testers in is advantageous because it means you get fresh feedback about the game and it keeps everyone excited as they wait for their next turn to play. It works well when you have enough people to fill multiple testing groups but unfortunately for me, I just don't.

If you have any ideas, feel free to comment.