The concept was born during the twenty-two hour road trip from Toronto to Winnipeg. Michael Todd (of Michael Todd Games) and I were discussing ideas for the jam. He described to me a game with no friction, where you had four arrows. What he was trying to describe was an Asteroids clone. I completely misunderstood and thought the game sounded incredible as an icy-arena deathmatch. After clarifying that I had an entirely different game in mind, Glaciators was kicked in motion.

Starting with the code name Icerena there were numerous discussions on whether or not a game featuring people primarily in parkas with harpoons would be considered racially charged. Ultimately it was decided that Ice Climbers was seen as just as a cute game, and there was no reason to worry about it too much. Particularly when you’re developing in the dead of winter during a snowstorm in -30°C weather in Winnipeg, everybody is wearing parkas anyway because absolutely nothing else will keep you warm. (Note: some local Winnipeggers can tolerate temperatures as low as -50°C with nothing but body hair. Do not attempt this at home.)

Blood on the ice

Enough of that. Let’s talk a bit of tech. Glaciators was created entirely in ActionScript 3 using the Flex SDK to compile to AIR. From the very beginning, the controls integrated my MacJoystickANE which permits the native input of gamepads and more importantly analog joysticks. The controls are a bit like traditional hockey games in that you push in the direction you wish to go, but skating momentum will force you to take a wide turn on the ice if you have some speed already.

Harpoon (technically javelin) throwing is very simple, it will always launch in the direction you are facing and you can press and hold the throw button to “charge” up a shot to throw it further. Being hit by a javelin is instant death. You start with only four of them, so if you waste all of them, you’ll need to collect more from corpses and the ground which can be a deadly errand in itself.

The gameplay ended up being very tight and crowds quickly started to gather around which you can see in this great Super Gamer Podcast for PEGJam 2013. Several times it was necessary to kindly ask people to stop playing so I could add a new feature. This was easily one of the best games I had ever made and I was extremely excited about the clean, competitive, addictive gameplay. Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo, PEGJam organizer and Indie Game Musician Extraordinaire whipped together a jaunty soundtrack that fit the mood perfectly. Things could not have gone better.

Unfortunately, the sales of the game since its “commercial” launch have been icy at best (ha, ha.) Two weeks is not a lot of polish time, but I had hoped that the one dollar price point would be enough to convince folks to give it a shot. To date there have been literally 20 sales total – after PayPal’s cut, that’s $14 or so. Less if you consider that I will need to convert from USD to CAD.

Still, this has been an amazing learning experience – and I’m certainly not finished with the game yet. I’ve been hard at work on a Level Editor and a revamped physics engine for Glaciators which I plan to release in the near future. The game is too good to give up on. Glaciators v1.1 will be launched with a few extra arenas, some powerups and the new physics. I’d also love to redo the art, as I’m clearly not an amazing artist and the colors look intensely bad on Windows. Hopefully it can gain a little more traction then.

Until next time, keep your javelin off the ice.

There have been a lot of missteps too – we’re seeing a lot of those same Kickstarted projects failing to deliver on time (or in some cases, canceling outright.) Steam opened its Greenlight program, which has been at best a mixed blessing.

And now today, the Humble THQ Bundle launches to great displeasure among the indie community. As I write this mere hours into the sale, they’re already well into the tens of thousands of units sold, so there’s no question about the popularity of this bundle. People like AAA games. They like getting them cheap. This isn’t really a big deal. There are so many things wrong with this being a “Humble” bundle though, it’s hard to know where to start.

Let’s start with a bit of “history” – the Humble Bundle was invented by and made popular by independent games and independent game developers. Humble Bundle (or rather, Wolfire Games) wouldn’t have nearly the notoriety it does now without the good will of several well-known indies. Through this network they were able to reach out to other, lesser well known indies and elevate them to recognition in the public eye. It strengthened the community, and was built both by and within the rising crest of the indie game wave. It gave confidence to fledgling developers who realized their hobby could be more than just a hobby. It could be a legitimate art form, a business, a way of life.

Needless to say, THQ (at least THQ today) doesn’t fit this mould in the slightest. Most of the people who sweated blood and tears into the games offered in this bundle no longer have jobs at THQ. That’s right, they were laid off some time ago. So the THQ slider on the Humble Bundle is essentially you deciding how much the publisher gets for simply hanging in there at the expense of all their former employees. Bravo.

Well, at least these games will be DRM free, right? Nope. Humble has decided that’s not in the cards this time. You will get Steam Keys – nothing else. The whole point of the Humble Bundle was the goodwill and trust established with the community. Support indies; in return we’ll treat you like human beings that can be trusted to do the morally correct thing without needing digital shackles to keep you in line. THQ likely never would have agreed to this. They probably see piracy as their number one enemy, without realizing why the piracy exists in the first place.

Which leads to another thing that is very convenient for THQ: no Mac or Linux ports. Not more than a week ago I had espoused the benefits of enforcing Mac and Linux ports as the Humble Bundle does, in fact arguing that the Humble Bundle does the right thing. I’m not sure who had the bargaining power in this deal, but I’m guessing it wasn’t Humble. Omitting Mac and Linux ports removes a significant chunk of sales, as previous Humble Bundles have shown these two combined make up around a third of total sales.

Let’s ignore all that, somehow. Let’s ignore what made the Humble Bundle great in the past. Maybe you love THQ. Maybe you want to see another Saint’s Row or something because you haven’t got enough GTA-likes with purple dildos in them. I can sympathize with that, legitimately. Here’s the problem.

A company like THQ needs multi-millions to run for even a short while. Imagine THQ makes $3mil from this. Well, $360,000 of that is going straight into CEO Brian Farrell’s pocket this year. So 10% of that money is gone, even if all of it went to THQ. It doesn’t. Some portion of it goes to charity (great) and to Jeffrey Rosen et al (not so great at all given recent events.)

So what does a company like THQ do with a small handful of money, no prospects on the horizon, a losing business strategy? Is this actually a last-ditch effort to revive the company so they can get back to great classic games like Zombie Shooter With Marginally Better Graphics 4? My money is on THQ liquidating and shoveling out the cash to what few stakeholders are left. It’s a last ditch effort to squeeze blood from a rock. I can’t imagine how this pittance of cash even gives a glimmer of hope of sustaining THQ otherwise.

So why is this bad for indies, why all the fuss, who cares if THQ is offering their products at unsustainable breakneck prices?

It destroys the Humble Bundle reputation. The reputation that was built by indies with hopes of a brave new future ripe with interesting and unique games. It was the bundle that every indie strived for, looked forward to and dreaded launching beside. Now a good chunk of that is eroded if not erased entirely. The indie community, more and more, is showing that it hates AAA titles until enough dollar signs show up. Humility can be bought.

Your friend’s followers will try to prevent you from getting to them, broadcasting tweets as swarms of them attack your Twitterspace Spaceship.

Be sure to follow Tweet Galaxy Game on Twitter if you’d like be in the default ‘enemies’ list!

When super cool dude Kyle Pulver asked around for help getting native joystick input for his super cool baby throwing game Offspring Fling, I figured it would be a great opportunity to improve my Flash chops a bit and maybe even get a ‘world first’ in the Mac AIR apps scene. (Okay, not really, but it sounded like a fun challenge!)

MacJoyANE is the result of a week of sweat, code and tears. The project consists of three main parts:

This project links directly into the IOHIDManager for MacOS X and so far no issues have arisen, but it’s early days yet. It’s open source and I’m happy to take contributions.

MacJoystickANE Project on GitHub

First off let’s put this into perspective. They’ve killed Flash Mobile, more specifically the plug-in that comes with mobile phones in their browser. Does this mean Flash on mobile and tablet platforms is completely dead and gone? No, in fact the majority of Flash experiences on mobile and desktop will likely move to AIR.

Can AIR3 save Flash?

Android phones can still use AIR, as will the RIM Playbook (ha ha.) iOS apps built with Flash are built in a different way, essentially having a version of AIR compiled into them – and iOS never permitted in-browser Flash – so it’s completely irrelevant to that platform anyway.

Matter of fact I would say this announcement is a good thing. First of all, Android and Playbook will still get Flash Player 11, which is way advanced for a browser plug-in for your phone. Still I think the Flash pipeline is starting to breach into some really cool territory, with fully fledged 3D hardware acceleration and the ability to finally produce fully native apps (see Captive AIR Runtimes and other AIR3 features.)

At least for the immediate future, AIR3 is a great step forward for game devs in Flash because it gives them a way to get their awesome experiences out to the world with minimal fuss.

Still, stigma is a big thing on the web. HTML5 is the future, primarily because the number is higher than HTML4. It has exciting things available like Canvas and WebGL which mean Flash will soon be redundant. Well. Someday.

HTML - The Future.. sort of

See, we’re not quite there yet. For games, HTML5 relies heavily on WebGL to deliver good performance. The Canvas element (while cool) isn’t really up to speed in the performance arena. You can also resort to moving images around the screen with JavaScript and CSS, which is kind of a nasty hack in my opinion. But WebGL can do some really cool stuff!

Awesome WebGL Water FX

Hopefully you can see that properly, it’s a really cool rippling water demo in WebGL (see preview image at right.) If you can’t – well – WebGL isn’t available to everyone for a few reasons. One would be that not all platforms and browsers support it. On one particularly important platform, it’s proprietary and only available to advertisers. Actually one other browser manufacturer that makes up fully 40% of the browsing world has no plans whatsoever to support it.

There’s a number of other issues – incomplete HTML5 implementations aside, we’re plagued with other problems like people who don’t or can’t upgrade their browser, performance and inconsistent behaviour (see above.) But we’re getting there. Still, it’s hard to understand why we’re accepting these drawbacks now when we have a plug-in (Flash) that all but eliminates these problems.

OK. So the word “Flash” isn’t sexy anymore in the tech world, especially not in the web world. More and more we’re seeing developers jump ship before the spectre of Steve Jobs crushes Flash for good. Personally I feel the jump to another platform is premature – especially HTML5 – but it seems to be raising awareness of another not-so-new contender in the web games arena, Unity.

Unity 3D - Powerful, Easy, Awesome.

Briefly stated Unity has some advantages over WebGL for game development that may allow it to really shine right now. For one, it performs consistently and quickly across all platforms. You’re not restricted to the browser – you can publish native apps for just about any platform, including all the popular consoles. It is a game engine and editor first – not simply a graphics library – so it can really help companies and developers play with ideas and publish something quickly. It does 2D handily as well as 3D, so it’s worth anyone’s time really.

There’s a couple caveats to this post I’ve written. Probably the biggest one is that yes, HTML5 really is the future. For web browsing. That’s important – just as important as it was to move on from frame-based websites and table layouts to HTML4. It’s a good thing we’re moving on. It really is. There are also tools emerging which will make game creation for HTML5 less painful – Stencyl (not yet but soon,) Construct, GameSalad and others are all great programs to keep your eye on if you’re someone curious about game development and the fantastic new world of compliant browsers. Flash is also really good if you’re exporting native apps – nobody has to know that you bundled AIR in there and you can certainly make excellent experiences with it. Plus Flash already has some support for HTML5 and you can expect them to build upon that in the future. The bottom line is that Flash has a great pipeline for animation into code and you can still make incredible experiences with it. If you’re concerned about what is industry sexy though, it may pay to learn a new trick or two!

Moving on. As you probably know the purpose of these here ‘Jam’ thingies is to create something new, awesome and fun. There were lots of incredible entries and I encourage you to find them … somehow. I’m not exactly sure how, there’s no central PEGJam game listing.  Alas.

Super Busker

SUPER BUSKER is my contribution to the madness. It puts you in the shoes of a panhandler trying to earn his way to the very top of the busker income ranks. Look for this to show up on a portal of some kind soon.

Dr. Precarious: Case of the Deadly Party

Wander about the room and accuse various party guests of being the murderer you seek! Every incorrect guess results in the untimely death of another innocent guest, but each time the murderer strikes they will leave another clue which will help you narrow your suspects down. Enjoy and please leave feedback on Kongregate or here if you like.

We Get Signal Redesign Preview

Well, it took quite some time but I finally saw the light. The old site was awful and relied on a twitchy Flash carousel that gave some people motion sickness. I figure that since I’ve designed more than a few sites over the past year I should spend some time on my own and make it pure CSS/JavaScript like the real companies do these days.

On a related note I’m also redesigning the About and Portfolio pages in a similar fashion, but I think the blog will stay the way it is.. for now.

Hopefully you all find this version a little more usable and attractive!