So, I’ve been plugging away at Slay the Beast and posting builds on IndieDB. It’s… pretty cool actually. I admit that I was a bit cautious going into the whole “open development” thing, but posting regular builds to IndieDB has been really enlightening and encouraged me to ferret out many bugs that I might otherwise have let fester. So, yay that!

In other, highly-related, news, I’ve release version 0.0.9 of Slay the Beast for your consumption.
Since the last build I have:

• Fixed characters not flashing red on fatal blow
• Knight will now fall in different directions depending on direction of fatal blow
• Added blue glow at base of flame attacks
• Added particle effects to fireball and slash impacts
• Fixed race-condition crash going from menu to in-game
• Archdemon can now turn-around by pressing RB (Right Bumper) / P on Keyboard
• Fixed some garbage collection issues
• Added particle effects on Knight and Archdemon death
• Fixed Knight knockback logic to be framerate independent
• Fireballs that land outside arena no longer spawn flames inside the arena
• Added shadow under fireballs
• Added breakable candles that release power-ups that can be used by heroes

Hit the link to enjoy the chaos:

Anyway, YouTuber and Twitterer (Tweeter?) @xtomass recently uploaded a video of his play-through of version 0.0.6 of Slay the Beast and I would be remiss not to share it.

So, enjoy!

That is a whole lot of missiles!

I can’t think of any more appropriate back-of-the-box quote than that for Itano Alpha Flight, my latest game on Xbox Live Indie Games. This game is all about missiles, yours and your enemies. It’s a little bit of Afterburner, a little bit of Macross, and a whole lot of action.

You can see screenshots of the game below:

Grab the game here or on your Xbox 360 for 80 Microsoft Points ($1 US).

Okay, enough being coy. Money talk.
Since Robot Legion’s November 28, 2012 release on Xbox Live Indie Games, I’ve had 2824 downloads of the trial with 751 purchases. At 70 cents a pop (the purchase price is $1 of which 30% goes to Microsoft), that comes out to $525.70 to date. That amount I then split with the original creator of Robot Legions.

Broken down by month, the numbers come out as follows:

So, that’s not a lot of money, but then again I wasn’t really expecting that much. Of course, I wouldn’t mind making more money but I’m mostly thankful to have a hobby that doesn’t cost me money and allows me to keep my gamedev skills sharp.

Still, it is worth noting that the conversion rate (purchase over trials) for the game comes out to 26.59%. Compared to old-school shareware numbers (which generally had a conversion rate of < 10%) that number is pretty good. For Xbox Live Indie Games however, that’s a fairly average number (and low compared to successful XBLIG titles.) The Xbox Live Indie Games market may be small but it is abnormally focused. The people who actually go there are primed to buy games and it shows in the conversion rates.

As a side note, my 2010 Xbox Live Indie Games release Legend of the Rune Lords is pulling in around 25 purchases a month. Since December 2011, it’s managed to total about 376 purchases. So, the long tail is there on XBLIG, it’s just really, really thin.

Before that though, a few words about why I’m doing #OneGameAMonth (#1GAM for short) in the first place. Here is the mission statement from my #OneGameAMonth profile page:

My biggest hope in joining #OneGameAMonth is to use it as a chance to challenge all my assumptions about how games should be made. By holding to the seemingly impossible goal of One Game a Month, I hope to find what I need to change (and what I’m unwilling to sacrifice) in order to make more, better games. Also, making friends and becoming AWESOME!

My main goal is to challenge myself to approach game development in ways that I haven’t before. So, this is how am I doing so far:

For my first #OneGameAMonth project, I decided to start with an easy warm-up: an update of an existing game. In this case, an update for my latest XBLIG game, Robot Legions. Be sure to check it out to see how it went.

For my next trick, I’m going to try for a real challenge and make a new game.

Naturally, making a new game from scratch takes time so I’m leveraging as much of my previous projects as possible. I’m even going so far as copying my last released game’s code wholesale and then replacing the parts I need to make my new game. While I am spending some time cleaning up and excising code I don’t need, I expect this approach to pay dividends once I start having to implement menus and such. If I can get away with just re-skinning and adjusting the flow of my previous title’s menu code, I can spend that much more time focused on the gameplay itself.

The other weapon in my time-saving arsenal is an almost single-minded focus on the game’s concept. I want to do ONE THING with this game and that is replicate the feeling of an Itano Circus. The Itano Circus (or “Macross Missile Massacre”) refers to the wild flurries of missiles that occur in anime dogfights like those in Macross. Check out the video below if you want to see what I mean:

While making a game, it’s easy to have feature creep set in and blow the scope of the project. As much as possible, I’m trying to stay aware of that phenomenon and stop myself went it starts to take place. Whenever I have a new idea for the game, I ask myself: “Does this help the Itano Circus feel?” If not, I cut it. Then and there.

Here are screenshots of what I have so far.

(It’s probably not coincidental that every choice I make to bring out the Itano Circus-ness of the game seems to take it closer to Afterburner II. I imagine the creators of that game drew inspiration from many of the same sources I’m now using.)

So far, I’m managing to keep focused on my goal. Hopefully I can keep it up and finish this game this month. After all, I have a new project waiting for me next month because, well you know, #OneGameAMonth.

This update improves upon the original with new graphical effects and an added ability for the player to toggle their firing modes. Now you can switch between synced and alternating fire modes allowing you to choose between accuracy and rate-of-fire as best fits the situation.

New visual effects in this version are bullet trails, smoke from explosions and a new vignette shader effect. These new effects can be toggled on or off in the options menu for people who prefer the original look of the game.

Check out these screenshots for a taste of what the new Robot Legions has to offer:

Robot Legions, available now on Xbox Live Indie Games.

But wait, there’s more! I’m not the only one posting on YouTube about Robot Legions. Here are a few picks from other folks talking about and playing Robot Legions on their Xbox 360s:

Lets Play Indie Games: Robot Legions XBLIG by SecretSuperHer0:

Fun with 80 MSPs: Robot Legions (XBLA Indie Game) by pjdaddelgreis:

Robot Legions 20 Minute XBLIG Gameplay by aaronthesplazer:

Robot Legions on Xbox Live Indie Games: Get it now!

Click here to see the Robot Legions product page on Xbox.com.

About Robot Legions
Blast your way through the legions of robots to liberate your homeplanet! Robot Legions is a twin-stick arena shooter that features several different enemy types, each with unique behavior. As players defeat enemies, they will collect cash that they can use to upgrade their defense and firepower. The game also features several special feats to accomplish for players who want an extra challenge.

Screenshots

Gameplay Movies(Courtesy of AaronTheSplazer)

A 5 minute video starting in the game’s free trial mode:

An extended 20 minute video of the full version of the game. You can see some of the enemy variety that shows up as you progress:

Robot Legions, available now on Xbox Live Indie Games. Get it now!

Robot Legions is a new twin-stick arena shooter for the Xbox 360. It features several different enemy types, each with unique behavior. As players defeat enemies, they will collect cash that they can use to upgrade their defense and firepower. The game also features several special feats to accomplish for players who want an extra challenge.

This game is a port of the original Robot Legions flash game developed by Sentry Games. Naturally, I’ll be updating the game a bit to take advantage of the Xbox 360’s horsepower. If you’d like to play the original, you can find it here on Kongregate.

As the XBLIG version of Robot Legions nears completion, I plan on posting it for play-testing on the Xbox Live Indie Games site. If you happen to be a member, drop me a line and I will let you know once the game hits playtest.

So, yeah.
Robot Legions.
For Xbox Live Indie Games.
Coming soon to an Xbox near you!

Boo-yah!

Note: This a re-post from my old blog, originally posted June 2010

On June 11, 2010, I released my first indie game, Legend of the Rune Lords, on Xbox Live Indie Games. LotRL is a short role-playing game featuring many of the trappings of full RPGs: stat-driven combat, leveling, multiple characters, and a cutscene-driven story. While hardly a great game, I think that it stands as a good example of what a determined (or at least stubborn) individual can accomplish in their spare time even while crunching at their day job.

Development of Legend of the Rune Lords started in January 2010 as a challenge to myself to complete a game from scratch in 2 months. The reason I decided to limit myself to 2 months was because I wanted to enter the game into Microsoft’s Dream.Build.Play competition, the submission deadline of which was in early March. The game was actually an entry in the Old Spice Challenge portion of the Dream.Build.Play competition, so “Legend of the Rune Lords: The Quest for Runic Magia” actually started life as “Legend of the Spice Lords: The Quest for Olde Spice”.

As you may guess from the name change, Legend of the Spice Lords did not win the Old Spice competition. Unfortunately, I found out later that the .ccgame package I sent to the contest judges did not start up properly, disqualifying LotSL from the competition. It was a bit disheartening to not be able to even make a proper showing at the competition, but I didn’t give up. After a month off the project and then a month of de-Spicing and bug fixes, the game was reborn as Legend of the Rune Lords.

Then, after 2 months back-and-forth through playtest and peer review, Legend of the Rune Lords was finally released to the world on Xbox Live Indie Games.

What Went Right

1. Using TorqueX: Given just 2 months to make the game, using an existing game engine was a no-brainer. In this case, I went ahead and invested in an indie license for TorqueX 2D. TX2D provided a base level of functionality that allowed me to start putting my game together immediately instead of losing valuable weeks writing base level content and scene graph handling. Having a level editor is always a plus.
2. Tight Schedule and a Solid Deadline: Nothing motivates someone like an incoming deadline. Building the game for Dream.Build.Play was almost an excuse to make sure LotRL got finished. In the past, I’d had the bad habit of starting projects and tweaking them forever without ever getting closer to finishing them. Using Dream.Build.Play as an external pressure source forced me to surge ahead even when my natural urge would have been to stay and tinker a little more.
   Another benefit of setting the strict deadline is that I could tell my wife exactly when my feverish late night coding sessions would peak and, more importantly, when they would be over. Knowing that she wouldn’t be losing me every night indefinitely, she was very supportive. The night before the contest deadline, as I was gearing up for a long night of trying to squeeze in the last missing parts of the game, she was the one who put on a pot of our best, strongest coffee for me. It that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
3. Have Sprites, Will Travel: With the super-tight deadline, I knew I didn’t have time to negotiate with artist’s for custom spritework and I certainly didn’t have the skills myself to produce attractive art in any suitable timeframe. Luckily, I was able to find several free-to-use collections of graphics from Lost Garden (from the guy who did the art for Tyrian!) and Reiner’s Tilesets. If it weren’t for their generosity, this game would have never happened.
4. Scope Control: The tight schedule forced me to cut early and often. I ended cutting a lot of features that I would have considered must-haves under different circumstances. Some of the cuts, like an inventory system, ended up making LotRL a much sparser affair than it might have been, but their inclusion would have likely made an already short game even shorter.
5. Dirty But Not Too Dirty Code: I love to engineer my code. UML and use case analyses make my day. There’s nothing better than designing a robust solution to a programming problem then coding it and just having it work. But it’s also time consuming and is possibly overkill for a lot situations. Because of the NaNoWriMo-esque, get-er-done mindset of the project, I allowed myself to break a lot of my engineering and coding rules. Hard-coded values. Code copy-pasting. Inefficient code. They were all over the place. But, the game worked.
   Now, I did make sure to not lose all my discipline and applied coding best practices to the most important parts of my code. I basically applied the 80/20 rule. The 20% of my code where the player spent 80% of their time got the most software engineering love.
   I also made very agressive use of asserts all across my project to test parameters and return values. Naturally, the vast majority of the asserts never tripped (a good thing), but those that did let me find potential crash and data corruption bugs as early as possible and I’m certain saved me from some potentially very time-consuming debugging at the end of the project.
6. Playtesting with the Creator’s Club: Submitting Legend of the Rune Lords to playtest was incredibly helpful. The community of fellow XNA developers are extremely engaged and well-informed. Their advice and constructive criticism allowed me to find a lot of bugs that I had missed. Also, using their feedback, I was able to figure out where to concentrate my remaining development time to have the best overall effect on the game.

What Went Wrong

1. Using TorqueX: Using a third-party engine has its ups and downs. TorqueX is no exception. There were times when I cursed TX2D’s limited animation implementation. Tweaking data for hours only to find out that there was a bug in the underlying engine is never fun.
2. Platform Feature Handling: I’ve developed for the Xbox 360 before. I know from experience how many things can go wrong when implementing support for the 360’s full spec of multiple profiles (online-enabled and otherwise), storage devices, and the exception cases that come up when people rip out Memory Units or change their profiles mid-game. So, of course, I did my homework and created a stable and consistent framework for handling the Xbox 360’s various platform features.
   No, of course not. I put it off until the end of the development, hacked it together as quickly as possible and had lots of nice little bugs to keep me company. Maybe next time….
3. Too Much Music: Finding music to license for Legend of the Rune Lords was too much fun! The site I used, NeoSounds, has a wide selection of background music and picking the right music really charged me up to finish certain parts of the game just so I could listen to the music in-game ASAP. I actually had battle music playing during combat before there were any graphics ready (I had a text-based place-holder showing all character stats and taking combat inputs.)
   The problem, of course, is that I went a little overboard. I couldn’t stop myself from licensing music and promptly found myself having spent more than 4 times my original music budget. Yikes!
4. Too Random: I’ve always been strangely enamored of the “fistful of dice” systems used in the old versions of FASA RPGs like Shadowrun and Battletech. Basically, as your skills got higher, each point would give you an extra die to roll which means you have an extra chance to roll higher than a target number. After you roll your dice, any die that is higher than the target number is considered a “success”. The more “successes” you have, the better the result. There was always something viscerally satisfying about using a skill that was so leveled up that you needed to use two hands to roll all the dice involved.
   Spurred by my infatuation, I implemented something similar in LotRL instead of going with a typical attack-minus-defense-plus-a-little-randomness approach. Unfortunately, I didn’t think through the consequences of this action. The old FASA system was notable because it introduced an extremely wide range of outcomes. It was often possible to get catastrophically successful or fatal results off of the same stats. This works in games like Shadowrun or Battletech where any thug with a gun, no matter how low his stats, is a potentially fatal threat. In a game like LotRL, it made the outcomes of combat far too arbitrary. The same enemy who was a push over in an earlier fight would cream the player in the next battle. I ended up doing a fair bit of tweaking (and a bit of cheating) to bring the range of outcomes in combat within a more acceptable range of variability, but I probably should have scrapped the system outright.
5. Late in Becoming Active in the Creator’s Club: I didn’t really start engaging the Creator’s Club community until I was ready to playtest and preparing for peer review. I wish I had participated on the site earlier. If I had done some playtests or reviews before submitting my own game, I would have had first-hand experience with most of the common pitfalls of game submission and not have had to run into them myself. Also, since the peer reviews are a purely community driven, building up a reputation as a helpful member of the Creator’s Club will probably help you get through the submission process faster as more people will be inclined to take the time to review your game.

Where to Now, Rob?
At this point, I have yet to turn a profit of Legend of the Rune Lords (I’m getting close though! [EDIT: At this point I have managed to make a (very) modest profit.]), but creating a game for Xbox Live Indie Games was totally worth it. Putting myself under such a strict deadline encouraged me to try problem solving techniques I wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Working with the community of game developer’s in the Creator’s Club is a real pleasure and a great way to learn.
I will definitely be creating more games for XBLIG in the future. Next time, I hope to make a game that I won’t feel the urge to qualify with a statement like “pretty good for something made in a few months.” There’s a lot of room for quality on XBLIG and I plan to be there.

Legend of the Rune Lords
Available on Xbox Live Indie Games for 80 MS Points ($1)
Developer: NobunagaOta
Publisher: NobunagaOta
Platform: Xbox Live Indie Games
Release Date: June 11, 2010
Number of Developers: 1
Budget: $600
Development Time: 3 months + 2 months playtest