  Design question | 
Posted - 1/26/2009 11:16:50 AM | I'm working on Pop Pies 2. Pop Pies is my most successful game far as ad-revenue goes. I'll also admit that it's not my best game. Myself, I much prefer Meltdown, although both games do have that visceral id-gratifying "blow up lotsa stuff in one shot if you set up everything just right" bit.
One thing I'd always planned for Pop Pies 2 was levels that got more difficult, ala Meltdown. Although I'm starting to think that that's getting away from my old "quick to play" mantra that I'd kept up from the beginning of this little puzzle game experiment. Meltdown does have multiple levels, but you can play through a single level in 1-2 minutes, so even if you make it through five or eight levels, it's still pretty quick. Pop Pies has only one level, but it takes a longer and more thoughtful setup if you wanna get the big 'splosions.
My initial plan was to have three growing meters at the bottom of the screen that measured pies 'sploded, columns cleared, and gifts cleared (see Poppit for this). If you got above a certain threshold on each, you'd move to the next level and the thresholds would get a bit higher, thus making the next level more difficult to clear. But now I think I'm just overthinking things. I should just make the game one level like original Pop Pies but make the level much more interesting with little bonuses and suchlike popping up everywhere.
Because, this is my hypothesis, most people who play Pop Pies don't do it for the score. While it is gratifying to break 10,000 points, Pop Pies is more about the visceral thrill of filling the screen with a big explosion. And if ad-revenue is any indication, people don't seem to mind pressing the "play again" button or the reload-button in their browser.
So now I'm leaning strongly against "Pop Pies With Levels" and more towards "Pop Pies With One Much Cooler Level".
Thoughts?
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| Wednesday, January 21, 2009 |
| Book book book bookety book! | |
Posted - 1/21/2009 2:35:47 PM | 
Actual paper copy of the book. Ooooh, amazing. Scientific. And yes, slightly bent courtesy of our good pals in the brown truck.
Okay, I've been meaning to document the process for quite some time. This is how the gamedev series came to be.
According to my email archive, it first landed in my and Drew's collective laps around September of 2007. The idea got pitched to Dave and Kevin a while earlier, but it turned out that they had real jobs or somesuch other lame excuse, so they decided to hand over the project to a couple of the other shaved apes on the staff of gamedev who didn't have to deal with such frivolities as jobs. Namely Drew and myself.
I think it was I who came out with the absurdly simple original plan for making the books. We have Superpig use his astounding SQL abilities to dump the entire archive of gamedev article-links into a spreadsheet, we read all those articles, judge 'em for suitability (for a beginner-book and and an advanced-book, rated on a scale from 1 to 5), figure out how they'd need to be edited to fit changing technologies, contact the authors, get edits, cut 'n paste the whole mess into a Word document, press "print", and then spend the rest of the time sipping mint juleps while checks roll in.
And, of course, it worked exactly like that. With only a couple of minor changes. First off, Drew's herb garden didn't pan out because mint doesn't grow well under the frozen ice of New York or New Jersey or whatever part of the Great White North is his habitat. Next, even though we originally agreed to split up the article-reading and grading task 50/50 (still a pretty big task as our article archive numbered some 1500 articles), it ended up actually being closer to 100/0 with my ownself doing the lion's share of the reading and grading.
The reading and grading did get done. And Drew, now wracked with guilt after dropping the ball in the article-grading department, stepped up to the plate and took over. He took my original list, double-checked it, came up with some more authors who could put together some original articles for us, and made proposals and sample tables of contents for what became five books, two big programming books and three smaller design books. He also came up with a method for figuring out page-count that came within 0.00001% of reality, plus or minus 50%.
Then we had to contact authors, which was easily the least fun part of the process. Several of the articles I liked were rather old but I felt were "timeless" in their wisdom and deserved immortality in print, provided they could be updated to match the technology. And it was certainly a good assumption that the 8 year-old hotmail address associated with the article and/or gamedev.net account was still actively checked.
And about a third of 'em were. About a third of the remaining authors were easy to find with a little googling and facebook-ing. And a few more I found via friends of friends. And about a half-dozen I just never was able to find.
And then it turned out that five books was both a bit too ambitious page-wise as well as not as organized as it should've been. So Drew re-shuffled his three books into two and the wobbly quintet became a stronger quartet.
As I found authors, I sent proposals to 'em. Thankfully about 95% of the authors were very amenable to the idea. In fact, most offered to update their articles even when I didn't think they needed much done. Most of our original-content authors were also happy to oblige, although I did have to lean on a few of 'em to get me their updates. A couple of authors did completely flake out on me and bailed from the book entirely, but thankfully it was just a couple. I recall one author who finally declared that I was an unreasonable bully because I only gave him five months to update his (four page) article and demanded to be released from such a responsibility (which I gleefully did). The rest of the article updates trickled in at a rate that gave me time to sanity-check and submit 'em to the publisher. I did end up following the 90/10 rule with the final 10% of the articles taking up 90% of the time, but the downtime waiting for articles gave me time to do some housekeeping. . .and by that I mean pictures.
Pictures were a problem. Turns out that if you ask an author if he still has the original JPG images for an article he wrote five years ago so you can try to make 'em something that'll look good in print, the answer's usually "oh hellno". A couple of authors were gracious enough to recapture their images or screenshots in higher resolutions, (and if any of you ever catch me at a convention, flag me down and I'll buy you a beer). The rest either had to be redrawn or just resized as-is.
I also had to change text to make up for the fact that the book was gonna be in black-n-white. I think I was able to catch and rewrite/redraw all the parts that read like "that faint blue line in the middle of the picture is the most important part, and I'm gonna talk about it for six paragraphs, all the while referring to it as a faint blue line". The upshot is that if you're profoundly color-blind, there are gonna be some articles that make sense more than they used to because I changed it to a thick black line :)
The editors at Cengage were great. For much of the book, the process involved Drew and I saying "umm, I don't know, so let's do it this way" regarding how we were submitting content to them, and they worked with us. Mind you, we were also pretty flexible. I recall talking to a zealot programmer/author once who ended up firing his publisher because book submissions should be done in open-source workers-of-the-world-unite XML rather than evil proprietary fascist MS Word format. We all had an understanding that the goal was to get a book on the shelves, and if it worked towards that end, all was well.
And it looks like it's there. One book is out on paper. I just got cover-art for the next book to be released (Beginning Programming), and it looks great. I hope you enjoy the series and I appreciate any constructive feedback.
The only gray area I'm aware of is the companion website. The books don't have a companion CD-ROM (which doesn't bother me in the slightest, as you probably already have more 30-day trial copies of Paint Shop Pro than you need), so they'll have a companion site. Many of the articles have downloadable source code associated with 'em. I've been keeping all the downloadable code organized, so I don't think it will be an issue.
And so, to answer the most pressing question in my mind about the books, I present The Gamedev.net Collection Mini FAQ.
Q: So, why on Earth would I wanna buy these books when I can just read the same danged articles on the website for free?
A: Because they're not the same articles, smartarse. Many of the articles are 102% original and written by industry professionals and are being presented in book form for the first-time ever and won't be available anywhere else. Most of the remaining articles have been updated to match technology. Some were changed a little, but some were completely rewritten from the ground-up. You like that article about Texture Splorging In Direct3D 7? Well, now it's an article about Texture Splorging With Programmable Shaders and other stuff that was just a gleam in nVidia's eye at the time of the article's original run.
So feel free to keep reading my "What Language Do I Use?" article from 1999 for free, especially the comparison between IconAuthor and Hypercard (neither of which are available anymore). And just wonder to yourself how much more useful that article would've been if it had a discussion about things like Flash or .NET or Python or the plethora of server-side languages that were in their infancy in 1999.
| |
| Wednesday, January 14, 2009 |
| book kewelness | |
Posted - 1/14/2009 2:31:16 PM | Looks like Amazon's little book-excerpt-reader-thingy has indexed the first of the gamedev.net books. Bask in wild wonder!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1598638092
Looks like Rick's article as well as mine are in this one. I have another article in the Beginning Programming book, which is scheduled to hit the ground on February 10.
I still don't have the paper copy yet. I did get my article-payment for this one, so I presume that paper versions are motoring their way to your retailer as we speak.
Still not sure why Drew's name comes in front of mine. H comes before S in the dictionary, and I edited the two biggest books. Clearly I'm a victim of size discrimination.
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| Tuesday, January 13, 2009 |
| Sanctimonious busy programming me | |
Posted - 1/13/2009 12:30:54 PM | First off, here's my guide to Marital Infidelity For Smart People(tm)
1. Decide that you wanna cheat on your wife.
2. Agonize about the "dump wife" versus "cheat on wife" decision for a while. Insist that it's being done out of enormous love for yourself. . .I mean your wife.
3. Reveal to your lucky lucky LUCKY wife that you've decided not to dump her, but you've instead decided to cheat on her.
4. Reveal this to the world in your blog.
5. If anyone points out that that's a pretty scumbag move, telling your wife that you're giving her the gift of marital infidelity rather than divorce, invent a new yet-unseen neurosis and give an official-sounding name like "Remote Diagnosis Disorder" (rather than "Don't You Judge Me"), and apply it to all who say so.
I'm not usually one to use peoples' names as adjectives, but that's a pretty L Ron Hubbard move there, coming up with ad-hoc neuroses, giving 'em official-sounding names, then applying 'em to your detractors. He even went the Hubbard route of giving the disease an acronym (RDD).
You stay classy, Steve. And remember, if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.
(I think the funniest thing about that song is that it's a single two-minute-long sentence)
On an utterly unrelated note, I'm still working on Pop Pies 2. I have about three projects that are about two weeks from getting pushed out the door. Unfortunately I'm only one person so I gotta work on 'em serially. Basically the projects are. . .
Pop Pies 2 - about halfway done. I wanna make it really compelling so Facebook people will spend lots of time challenging their pals to games.
Duck Tiles 2 - this one's pretty simple. Just Duck Tiles 1 with different levels. Duck Tiles is about as refined as it's gonna get, so there's not much call for improvement to the mechanism. I learned that with Bulldozer. People don't much care about how it looks. They just want more levels.
Retro Pack - this thing is compiled and works fine. I just need to convert all the HLP to CHM and write an install program. I converted all the HLP files to DOC format and found an appalling number of spelling and grammar mistakes, so I'm gonna make new CHM files manually rather than going some kind of automated CHM2HLP route.
And I gotta write some book and product reviews. And the Gamedev books are gonna be hitting the shelves in a month or two.
Should be fun!
| |
| Great freebie again | |
Posted - 1/6/2009 11:06:56 AM | If you didn't catch this freebie back in August, here's your chance to catch it again. This is Edraw Max 4.3, and it's a great vector-based tool for making any kind of blob-n-arrow documents. It's a lot like Visio, only I like it better. It has loads of drawing templates for stuff ranging from furniture layouts to flowcharts to UML diagrams.
It was a real lifesaver for me for the Gamedev Collection books. We had a lot of circle-n-arrow diagrams that were too low a resolution for print. I was able to redraw quite a few of 'em with Edraw and export 'em to high resolution TIF.
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/edraw-max-43/
Actually if you did catch the freebie last time, you might want to grab it again. The August freebie was version 4.0, but this one's version 4.3.
Just remember that you must download and install the program TODAY. Part of the deal with giveawayoftheday.com is that their installers only work for the day that they present their daily freebie. So you can't just download the installer and install it later.
And it's legit. I've done several giveawayoftheday.com programs and have been very happy with 'em. There's no registration or ads or anything.
So don't miss it this time!
Oh, and somebody posted a list of a bunch of useful free stuff from Microsoft here. There's not a lot of really useful stuff here, but some of it is worthwhile.
| |
| Saturday, January 3, 2009 |
| I'm in trouble. | |
Posted - 1/3/2009 12:53:53 PM | I received the following email from my six year-old.
dear johnhattan please giv me 548$ yor cretet card has expird
I think this is the first instance of a six year old trying to pull a Nigerian scam on her own father.
I'm also amused that she managed to catch the nuances of Nigerian-English grammar perfectly.
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