Category Archives: Fun and Opinion

Blogging for the point of blogging.

Wait… Did You Say You’re Going To PAX?

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This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.

I put “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” to several indie game competitions, letting it be reviewed by several committees and panels and judges. These all met with loss to other games. Which is to be expected, although I still think the uniqueness of my game stands out a bit more (easy, don’t get jealous…).

One of the many things I submitted to was “Indie Megabooth,” which technically wasn’t a contest: they try to book space at large events and rent off their spaces to indie developers, ultimately being cheaper for indies and profitable to the organization. The developer still pays for the space, but the Indie Megabooth has to pick which games to show. They were the most encouraging of all the feedback I’ve received, but still passed on “Drew.”

But “Indie Megabooth” has connections, which is why I highly recommend all serious indie developers to submit to them. I got emails from other agents and groups that support indie development, some charity, some businesses. One such opportunity was to show my game at PAX anyway, by booking my own booth, at roughly the same cost as what Indie Megabooth offered. I didn’t have time to be hesitant, so I took it.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.

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Silly Unity3D…

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I love Unity3D. The game engine is still one of the most intuitive I’ve used, it’s easy to port to almost any platform, etc.

But after compiling my final game project, I was surprised that some bugs popped up. I suppose issues like this are almost certain upon finishing a project, and I’m lucky I didn’t spend more than a couple days on it. But still, you’d hope what you play in the editor can be done in the exe.

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No Such Thing As “Easy” Software

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Quick update on “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth:” my hand-drawn 3D indie game is seeking voice actors and music, two things that I can’t do on my own (well, I could, but it would be embarrassingly bad, and having it at decent quality does wonders for the final game). I admit that I should have contacted people I have in mind sooner… now hoping to get these things finished in the next couple of weeks, I realize most of my contacts are either not available during the summer or busy with other things. If only I started contacting a few weeks ago… but I haven’t gone through all of my contacts yet. And surprisingly, a lot of existing sources for both of these things exist to hire people/content on short notice, and I did expect to pay something anyway…

Now, the point of this article. Some months ago, I volunteered to help a session of high school students experiment with “Kodu Game Lab” on the Xbox 360. I had a conversation with another student about the software: it was meant as a simplistic visual interface to make games, cute and colorful, sort of like “Little Big Planet” on PS3, but with a greater focus on the actual programming and design of games. My point of view was that Kodu wasn’t that easy to pick up. Well, perhaps for a newcomer it may have been more inviting, and certain concepts would have come through. But in my mind, having learned programming in another class years prior, I felt programming in general was really easy to pickup. And so, I felt that Kodu was redundant, since you couldn’t actually do much with it, and any time spent learning to use Kodu could probably have been spent on learning a real programming language, and in the same amount of time.
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Some Cool Crowdfunding Projects (July 2014)

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Holy cow, it’s already July. I wish it was June again…

Anyway, as usual, here’s some crowdfunding game projects I think are worth looking at. It annoys me how poorly thought out some listings can be, as if they were put on Kickstarter.com in a minute by a 8th grader thinking it was a sure way to make money. Either that, or they ask for tens of thousands of dollars to complete what I could personally do within a month. What’s more, some of these projects actually get fully funded… <sigh>… the people of the Internet are strange creatures sometimes. Here’s a few I think actually deserve some attention:
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