Archive for November, 2008
Piracy and World of Goo
Saturday, November 15th, 2008
I forgot to post this yesterday as I got busy and well…forgot.
Joystiq had an interesting (and scary) article on the World of Goo piracy rate on PC:
- World of Goo has 90% Piracy Rate (www.joystiq.com)
I bought World of Goo for the Wii (it was available as WiiWare) and I thought it was one of the best games I played this year. It’s fun, innovative, challenging when it needs to be, but easy to grasp and pick up. It’s beautifully designed and has abosutely fantastic artwork and music. It’s a great game. And it was made by two programmers and an artist! Three people!
What really pisses me off about all this is that people often justify piracy as “sticking it to The Man”. They say things like, “well, I wanted to try the game, but I didn’t want to support Giant Corporation X”. In this case they’re ripping off a tiny company of three people.
With a piracy rate somewhere around 90% now expected with PC sales, it’s no wonder that a lot of companies are getting out of the PC games business altogether. Let’s say you’re lucky enough to have 100,000 people playing your game. That means 10,000 actually bought it, and 90,000 pirated it. If your game cost $15, like World of Goo, that’s $150,000 made off sales. That’s nothing to sneeze at. However, three people working for a couple of years on a game, and all of a sudden, it’s not a fantastic living. It’s not poverty, but it ain’t great.
I have no idea what World of Goo’s sales are like on PC, they might be better or they might be worse. It’s just a shame. It makes me nervous about releasing my game on PC. It will take me a lot of time, effort, and money to get the game running on Windows/Mac, but if I only sell 100 copies, is it worth it? Who knows how many copies of my first game I expect to sell? It’s so hard to find (cheap/free) data on this sort of thing.
This is all the more reason for me to develop for the iPhone first. I’ll still probably end up building this first game for Windows/Mac too, just to see how much it sells. If it doesn’t make enough money to support itself, I’ll have to think whether or not it works as a long-term strategy. I know a fair number of indie developers do make a living off PC games, but I also know that they almost all struggle with the issue of piracy.
Owen
The Century Club
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
I hit revision 100 in my code repository this morning. 100 check-ins so far on the project: not too shabby. Although…that number seems a little low. Maybe I’m not checking in frequently enough.
A friend of mine was in town last night and I went out for a couple of beers with him and a few of his colleagues. I let him play the game with the new double-tap to play mechanic. (Now that I have the game on my iPod Touch, it’s so much easier to get people to play it!) He seemed to really like it. The double-tap completely changes the way a new player plays the game. I watched him actually experimenting with different moves to see what would and wouldn’t work. I think it helped him to learn the possible moves better too.
I also played a few games last night on the subway and the double-tap is starting to feel natural. I find myself double-tapping quickly without paying attention to the first tap, and it feels natural. I think I’ll still put an option to disable the double-tap in the options menu, though, for advanced players.
My friend had a friend’s girlfriend play the game too, last night. She had a completely different experience. She looked at it, said “what’s going on?” So I explained what she was supposed to do. She made two moves, said “ok, I’m done” and went back to talking to her boyfriend. I guess you can’t please everybody.
That was actually a good experience for me. Mostly because it didn’t bother me. At this point I’m convinced that I’ve got a good game, so hearing someone say that they’re not interested in it actually didn’t bother me.
Owen
Code Cleanup and Interface Changes
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
I spent most of today cleaning up the code I wrote over the last two days. I had initially implemented all the rendering code right up the application starts up, which was not a nice place for it. Today I broke it down into a nice set of classes and I can now swap between different game modes. Each game mode has its own update and render functions. This basically means I can load up textures for the front-end, then dump them all and load the in-game textures when the user enters the game. It all seems to work and it’s a much nicer design.
With that out the way I put some time towards figuring out how to make interacting with the iPhone a little nicer. I mentioned in an earlier post that the player’s finger gets in the way of seeing what they’re doing. For someone like me (who has played the game hundreds of times) it’s not a big deal because I don’t need the visual cues. However, for new users it can be confusing.
Today I put in a double-tap requirement to make a play. The first tap shows you what the effect of tapping a given square will be. If you tap the same square again, it executes the move. It definitely makes it easier to see what you’re doing, but I also find that it kind of interferes with the flow of the game. I’m not really sure what to do about it. I was thinking that it would be enabled by default and when the user hits a certain level it could ask them if they want to turn it off. They would also be able to turn it on/off in the options menu. I don’t know. I think I need to get some people to play it and see what they think. I think I need to spend some more time with it too.
Aside from all that, my search for an artist continues. I’ve sent out several emails to potential artists whose portfolios I liked. Hopefully I’ll start to get some quotes back soon.
Owen
Holy Crap! It Works!
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
After two days of slogging through code and documentation I’ve got my game converted over to using OpenGL-ES instead of the iPhone’s UIKit. This is very exciting, as it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I also remember more about OpenGL than I thought I did. I haven’t touched the stuff since university, but I guess the principles remain the same.
The other big upside of switching to OpenGL is that my game runs much more smoothly already. I’ve also discovered that an animation bug has been fixed in the process. With the old system I discovered that moving a texture with an alpha channel in it was causing the CPU usage to spike. The end result is that while my animations were playing, the iPhone was too busy to handle touch events. With OpenGL, this isn’t a problem anymore and my game is very responsive. Hooray!
Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of swearing involved in getting this to work, but two days is less than I thought it would take. Mind you, the code I hacked together on the rendering side of things is pretty awful, so another day of code cleanup and I should be ready to move forward again.
Owen
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Monday, November 10th, 2008
I’ve been looking through the example OpenGL-ES project that comes with the iPhone SDK trying to get an idea of how much work it’ll be to get things up and running that way.
The most frustrating thing right now is trying to find enough information on my two possible paths so that I can make an informed decision. I’ve been digging around and no one’s sharing information on how they’ve chosen to implement their games on iPhone. I get it: people want to protect their secrets. The iPhone isn’t really old enough yet to have a huge base of experts to draw from either. So I’m following the path that most other devs have probably followed and kind of diving in with what little information I have.
I’ve decided to pursue the OpenGL-ES route, as it looks like it’ll be the most flexible. The biggest problem with is that I’ll most likely end up writing all my own UI stuff, instead of being able to leverage the Apple UI widgets. Maybe there’s a way I can use both, I just need to get into it further.
In other news, it’s been really valuable having my prototype running on my iPod. I’ve been able to get a lot more people to play it, as I always have it with me. It’s great. I’m getting some great feedback, especially from new players.
I’ve got some emails and art asset lists out to a few 2D artists and I’m waiting to hear back with quotes at this point.
I’m also starting to work with a sound designer and composer at some early stuff to do with sound effects and music. That’s very exciting, as even the early work that’s coming in has me really pumped about how good it sounds.
Things are moving along…
Owen