06.19.07
Posted in Thoughts at 12:03 pm by Jordi Fita
Recently I have seen some indie and free (as in free-speech) games’ pages that uses the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux logos to represent the platform the game can run on. Since I’m in the process of making the new web site for Amoebax I though I could use those logos to represent which platforms it can run on, but first I looked up the logos’ usage guidelines.
As I expected, I have no problem in using the Linux logo in my web page provided I credit the author. But in the case of Windows’ logo and Mac OS X Universal’s logo the situation is different, which is not a surprise.
If I understood correctly those guidelines, in the Mac OS X Universal logo program I need to send them a written and signed license agreement to Apple in order for them to approve or not the use of their universal logo in my “product’s”. This is not really a problem, but I would like to avoid it 
Even worse is the Windows logo guidelines. All I could find is that if I want to use a Windows logo to identify this platform as a supported platform I need to enroll to a Microsoft Logo Program and then I could only use one of these logos (the “Works for Windows” logo in my case.) Worse still, to be able to apply for a “Works for Windows” logo I need a VeriSign Organizational Certificate which costs US$99 “thanks” to a partnership of Microsoft and VeriSign.
After seeing this I decided to scratch the idea of using operating systems logos in my web page and do like the Mozilla Foundation do on their home page: just put the name of the operating system.
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06.12.07
Posted in Thoughts at 12:05 pm by Jordi Fita
If you read any game development forums you will see that there are countless people wanting to get into the development of computer games. Have you ever wandered why there is so many people wanting to start writing games?
I’ve met people in the past that thought that making games is “cool” because, hey, games are cool!! They quickly believed that they could do the next Quake and get rich and famous (at that time MMORPGs were not so widely known, but I guess if I met them today they would believe that they could make the new WoW). They learned a cruel truth: developing a game is very hard work.
Still there are a lot of people that resists the temptation of giving up, put a lot of effort and makes beautiful games. Why is this? What do these people have that makes them spend a lot of time in front of a computer in order to have little creatures move around the screen? Surely there are a lot of reasons, but my guess is that the top reasons is a passionate love for games.
Now, there is a little dirty secret of mine: although I do love making games, I do not like to play them that much. All games, not only my games ;-). Then why I love making games? Because I like a lot watching others playing games! Yes, it is weird, but I like it.
Here is a little story: At early stages of Amoebax’s development (we didn’t released any version yet) I used to met a person on the train to home. Not a friend, but someone that was very pleasant to talk about almost everything. One day she discovered that we were doing a game, because I bought my GP2X to show how well the game were running on it to Ferran, one of the project’s contributors. From that day on almost every day she spent the whole trip playing the game, sometimes giving some funny comments about the amoebas’ faces, others moving the console when the falling amoebas were going to step on a bad place (a curious instinct, as if moving the console would affect the amoeba’s position…).
While she was playing at it I just felt an extreme happiness because she was playing my game, and better yet she was having fun with it. I think the most accurate way to put it in words is by using the japanese sentence: “shiawase ga afuredasu” (roughtly “the happiness overflew“ if my japanese is not so bad). I remember thinking: “Now, I understand why I spent all this time making it…”.
So, it seems that my motivation in making games is just to see my users playing it and most of all having fun with them. And I feel good because I know that the effort I put in making it was worth, even if it was only for another person to have fun for thirty minutes.
If you make games, what is your motivation in doing so?
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06.11.07
Posted in Thoughts at 4:47 pm by Jordi Fita
Last Friday I bought Bullet Candy through Gibbage.co.uk. Why? Because it was one of the few Mac games available there (and because it was cheap enough for me…) While browsing the good games available at Gibbage.co.uk I though to myself: “Why there’s so little indie games available for other platforms than Windows?”
The first cause that came to my mind was that since Windows is the most used desktop operating system most developers don’t want to “waste” time with less crowded systems. Although I can see some truth behind this statement, why do not use a cross-platform library like SDL, ClanLib, Allegro, etc. which abstracts the developer from the actual platform and lets concentrate with the actual gameplay. Heck, you can even use Java like developers of Tribal Trouble did with an impressive result!
I think most developers did spend a lot of effort into learning Windows-only API/libraries like DirectX and now they do not want to “waste” time into learning yet another API/library. Frankly, I could never understand the COM architecture used in DirectX so I found a lot easier to learn SDL, which is my favorite library when dealing with multimedia and graphics applications. Of course not everyone is so limited as I am, fortunately.
I also though about the possibility that some developers perhaps don’t want to lose some features of the platform specific library by using “general” libraries. Perhaps this is true in some big companies doing AAA titles, but most indies won’t use that much of the library not because they are not technically able, but because most games done by indie developers do not need these features.
So what remains as a roadblock to build multiplatform games? The only think left I can think of is that most developers do not have access to any platform but Windows. Why? Well, as I said before Windows is the most common so it is easier to get the hands on it. Also, if the other platforms are less known there must be some reason, isn’t it? Even if it is a social instead of a technical reason. And I think this is a shame, because as I see it the indie game industry could shine in an environment where the big ones do not want to enter, for now.
What is true is that the developers behind Democracy, Determinance, Gibbage, Jets’n'Guns, Kudos, Naked War, New Star Soccer 3, Steam Brigade, and War On Folvos did not get my money even though all of them are listed at Gibbage.co.uk just for a single reason: they did not make a Mac version of their games and I do not have a Windows machine at home!
A truly shame for they and also for me, since I can not enjoy any these fantastic games.
Edit 2007-06-16: Jets’n'Guns actually ships a Mac OS X version, so I also bought it.
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06.07.07
Posted in Thoughts at 11:48 am by Jordi Fita
Last Friday’s night I was at an Irish-style bar and having a fun time with a couple of friends of mine who also like the place. From time to time there are some local bands that play their repertoire there, but I noticed that most of the time the songs they play are just a version of a well known song or even the original song unchanged. That fact, and perhaps too much beer, made me think if all indie groups, whatever their domain, are doomed to “copy” well known creations.
This also can be applied to indie game developpers. If you take a look at major games portal’s lists of “top 10” games, you’ll see that most of them are are clone of well known games, and most of these clones are match-3 games.
Don’t get me wrong now, all these games are really professional and well made, and I do not have any doubt that all these developers have put a lot of effort making them. I just feel that is a shame that so many great developers spend time to develop yet another match-3 game when they could be creating a new creative gameplay. Some of them do it, others do not.
Perhaps the problem is not that these developers do not want to make creative games but people don’t want to play games that have a very different structure of what they are used to. After all, all these games are the Top 10 for some reason…
Of couse, I’m do not have the right to point others and say “you all have no creativity…” since I don’t even follow my own advice with my games :-P. But I think this is something we should take into account when planning a new game.
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06.06.07
Posted in Thoughts at 11:40 am by Jordi Fita
Some days ago I read at GameProducer.net that Yaro Starak, apparently a very successful Internet entrepreneur from Australia, had released a free ebook called Blog Profits Blueprint which contains a lot of information about blog marketing and monetization. I’ve read it not because I want to monetize my blog (and if I wanted to do so I would be lights-year far to this goal ;-)) but for the advices about marketing. Sincerely, I’ve found this book to much commercial and auto-advertised but this comes as no surprise as it was written by a marketing guru, but don’t relay on my comment. Go and read it if you are interested.
More interesting is the idea I’ve got from this ebook: all marketing advice he gives to the readers are nothing more than regular marketing techniques and tactics but applied to Internet, which is sightly different than traditional medias and give a wider range of audience and hence opportunities. So, as I see it, if you are good at “regular” marketing then you should have no problems moving to blog marketing, unless you have some kind of technophobia…
Why I found it interesting? Well, computer nerds like me (yes, I am a typical computer nerd. Even completely strangers ask me, sometimes, “You work as a programmer, don’t you?”…) are not very good at marketing, social networking… well, actually we are not very good at any social activity, so we could have a really hard time marking our blog, forum, regular web page, business, etc. I don’t really think that any (good or bad) marketing advice could help us much, as I knew most tactics I’ve read from the Blog Profits Blueprint but my blog does not have more than a single reader, besides me (hello Àlex!). There must be something else we, computer nerds, have different from “regular” people.
Perhaps if we got fresh air from that room with a so tall blue ceiling… 
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06.05.07
Posted in Amoebax, Thoughts at 11:48 am by Jordi Fita
At least this is my case. As many hobbyists game programmer I have started a lot of games, always trying to start small and as my skills were improving going to harder game designs. My biggest problem is still to maintain my motivation high enough to finish the game / application / web / whatever I am currently trying to make and it is a shame, because this last part is probably the part to where I can learn the most.
I’m not saying that setting up the framework (let it be DirectX, OpenGL, SDL, ClanLib, etc…), figuring out a data structure for my little sprites or 3D models, making up the code that follows the game rules I have so carefully crafted, or any other task you can think of are boring or easy to learn. The problem with these tasks is that normally they are done at the beginning of the project when my motivation is at highest and I feel that I will make the greatest game ever known to humanity (or something like that, you know what I am trying to say ;-)), so normally I tend to do these task almost for every project I start, so I have come to understand them well and I’m not feeling like I’m learning something new.
What have finishing a game that is so interesting? Finishing a game, as most of you know better than me, is a very hard part of the game. I don’t know you, but I lost count of the times I think myself: “That will work for know, I’ll make it better later”. It is not that I make a hack and I forget about it, it is just that the feature works as expected but can be done more beautifully.
For example, in Amoebax, the first implementation of the falling pair’s rotation was done by computing the next pair orientation and then perform the movement at the next frame. It worked as expected without the need of any hack or poorly designed code, but now the movement is performed gradually by computing the positions between the origin and the destination orientation, it looks really nice and, over all, more polished.
Other examples of this “beautification” that I can think of are transaction effects between screens, options menu, installation scripts, manuals, a proper web site, smoother animations, etc. These parts does not add actual value to the gameplay but are really important to make a finished product that looks professional. That’s why I think it is the hardest part.
What do you think?
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05.30.07
Posted in Amoebax, Projects, Thoughts at 11:52 am by Jordi Fita
A few days ago Ferran, Amoebax’s Windows® coder, sent our latests release through IM to one of his friends so she can tests it and send us some feedback for our non-GP2X builds since we did not make too much “advertisement” of them and so very few people has tested them.
After some problems installing the game, related to a badly installed Microsoft® Windows® Installer which I believed it came with Windows® XP but seems that no, she asked: “So, shall we start a game?”. Of course she though that the game was playable through Internet which is not.
Nowadays is so common that a game has a network mode that most players expect them to have it, not matter the game type or the intended audience: the game must have a network mode, either cooperative or competition but they must be able to play it through Internet, not only on a LAN. No excuses!
Then, why Amoebax does not have a network mode? Because I designed the game initially for GP2X only which does not have any communication device unless you are using ethernet over USB on you computer, but then the console becomes less portable ;-). Another reason is the lack of resources: at the beginning I was the only programmer Amoebax has, and I am still the core programmer, so I though: “well, it is difficult enough to make the whole game with all the available modes and all the artificial intelligent players, adding network here will end up being too much work for me alone.” Besides I’m not very good at network code, but that’s not an excuse 
I’m almost sure that, if we release a final version of Amoebax, the most requested enhancement will be a multiplayer mode over Internet. Heck, I even believe that a multiplayer only version of it would be more popular than the current version, like TeePop does, but then we would exclude the whole GP2X comunity, something I do not want to do.
Will Amoebax have a network mode available sometime? Perhaps, I don’t have a crystal ball :-). What I do know is that it won’t be available on the next version. Time will tell.
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05.29.07
Posted in Thoughts at 12:19 pm by Jordi Fita
Lately I’ve been thinking about a possible indie game business model that gives away its source code using an open source license. This is my opinion, so don’t take it too seriously ;-).
First, let me introduce my logic into thinking that keeping your source code “closed” is not always a necessity (but sometimes, perhaps, it’s a must).
Currently, most indie games use registration codes or files to prevent unauthorized copies by the so called pirates. My guess is that if there’s about 1,000 millions of users in Internet chances are that any of them will break your copy protection scheme. So, if you are indie, why waste time into an worthless “feature” instead of putting this effort into making your game better, when there’s such so little chance of not being copied? And that’s more interesting if you take into account that most times copy protection measures are more an annoyance than anything else.
Now lets imagine that I arrive at the conclusion that copy protection is not worth the effort because I can’t avoid piracy and I must learn to live with it. If that is my conclusion then I will give full copies to registered users without any copy protection, which means that anyone could copy it. Is this bad? Perhaps, but I already discarded copy protections because they weren’t effective 100%, so what’s the difference?
So, if I give the game without any copy protection, then why I need to save the source code only for me? I could put the source code under the GNU General Public License and give it to my registered users as well as the binaries for their platform. Why will my users buy the full game when they can fetch the source (or even the binaries) from another place and compile the full game? Well, not everyone understands how to compile from source code, and they don’t care, so they probably will do so to prevent the headaches. But more probably because I’ve given the source code for free (as in free speech) but I didn’t do so for the assets, which are licensed in another more restrictive license. Now if you want to get more levels or pass the point where the asserts are not free (as in free speech and free beer, that is the demo version) then you have to pay and promise to not distribute them, as you did for other games’ binaries ;-).
Someone, when listening to my idea, asked me: “But this means that if someone made the missing assets, they will have the full game!“. And it’s true, but I think that if they have taken enough time to make all the graphics, music, sound effects, levels, etc. necessary to run the full game she deserves it ;-). Seriously. In fact, this happened to other open source games and I don’t see any problem, providing they give the binaries and the source code under the GPL as they must do since the original source code is licensed under such license.
Now, after all this, what are my benefits? I don’t have the resource nor the knowledge to make games (in general, but more specifically) for other platforms than Windows, OS X, and Linux. So if someone likes my game enough to make a port (with their own graphics) to other platforms like PDA’s, then they have the obligation to give out the source under the GPL, so I can also have support for this platform without too much effort for my part. This also happened to other open source games :-D.
OK, this was my thought. Perhaps I’m too naive, but I think it’s doable. Of course you have the right to think otherwise, but I would love to know what you think about my idea.
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05.28.07
Posted in Thoughts at 11:37 am by Jordi Fita
Recently I bought the game Tribal Trouble by Oddlabs through Gibbage.co.uk as “[...]every penny of profit this site gains will be plugged directly into funding future independent game projects.” (in case you are interested, I also bought Professor Fizzwizzle by Grubby Games and Eets: Hunger. It’s emotional by Klei Entertainment.)
Tribal Trouble is a very good 3D strategy game made with Java and so runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux. Now, I don’t really like Java (personal preferences) and normally I tend to associate Java with slowness, but surely I have to change this misconception as the guys at Oddlabs made an impressive work: the game looks very professional and I haven’t noticed any slowdown on my Intel-based Macbook.
I haven’t played much yet, but what I liked all I’ve seen up until now, specially its update system. The first time I used Tribal Trouble’s update feature didn’t had any update to do so I couldn’t test it properly, but yesterday I had a problem with the last game’s tutorial: when I moved from tutorial 5 to tutorial 6 the game crashed!
When the game crashed a popup dialog informed me that a “NullPointer Exception” was thrown and that if this error happened while playing I should send they a bug report. I started the game again and indeed the report bug window appeared prompting me to enter a description of the error. Before that I tried to go directly to tutorial 6 from the Tutorial menu to see if it was just a “glitch” or the game had really a bug. It crashed again. This time I wrote my bug report and sent it.
After sending the bug report I saw the Update menu option again. I though that I should have updated before sending the bug report, but it was already sent I went to the Update option and this time there was update to do. While updating I saw some file with an interesting name: they ended with the “.svn-work” extension. At first I believed that I had misread the file name as they passed too fast, but then I couldn’t resists and I looked inside the package to see if I could locate the “.svn” directories that they should be if they were using Subversion and indeed I found them. Of course this is not a secret, they even tell so in their FAQ, but I think this is a very clever way to use an existing architecture: why wasting time implementing an update feature when there are so many nice options to choose from?
Oh, by the way, the problem was solved when the game has been updated 
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