Retronator

Having some fun with Instagram on my poor iPad without a camera....

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:33:00 +0100

Having some fun with Instagram on my poor iPad without a camera. (Hint: sneak peek!)

Asciilator (html5 ascii art tool) in the making: character...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:34:00 +0100

Asciilator (html5 ascii art tool) in the making:

character typing
mouse cursor navigation
arrow keys navigation
wacom painting
special characters
font family, size and spacing
colors
background colors
pallete parsing
save/load

Edit: before I get too drunk to trust myself with FTP operations, I uploaded the current version:

http://dawnofplay.com/asciilator/

If you ever clicked view source on my webpage, you’d see...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:58:01 +0100

If you ever clicked view source on my webpage, you’d see the above picture (at least if your browser displays it with a monospace font). That’a ASCII art.

Today is Employee Day at Dawn of Play and we get to work on whatever crazy project we desire for the following 8 hours. A long time ago I planted a seed for something I like to call Asciilator and today is finally the day to pour some water over this idea.

Stay tuned for more …

I promised a better video for Nidhi Chanani on the 52 Women...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:44:00 +0100

I promised a better video for Nidhi Chanani on the 52 Women Project and this one is lovely beyond words.

This story is one of the finalists on The White House webpage and needs your vote.

Go here and send some love to Nidhi’s video on the bottom left (appropriately titled Capturing Love).

The latest addition to my 52 Women Project: Kelly...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:24:14 +0100

The latest addition to my 52 Women Project:

Kelly Oxford

Writer, Mother

As always, more posts about who the portrayed woman is come up once a day for the rest of the week. If you like getting to know inspiring women, that’s your thing to follow. And we’re now even Pinterest friendly. :)

Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor Every now and a while...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:34:00 +0100

Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor

Every now and a while comes a talk that changes how I see things. This is one of those talks. It may even be one of those that come only a few times in your life and completely change everything.

The Scale of the Universe 2 by HTwins is an amazing interactive...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:10:00 +0100

The Scale of the Universe 2 by HTwins is an amazing interactive visualization of how big (and small) things really are.

Take this, illustrate it with great care, write a paragraph about each thing and you get what I want to accomplish with Illustrapedia one day. Deep nod to these two guys (Michael & Cary) for working in this direction.

View it on their site, for fullscreen experience.

I told you it’s going to be a...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:42:53 +0100

1up!

8x4

I told you it’s going to be a thing!

beverly-heels:

indiebeards:

Ben Brown is not a game developer per se, but not too long ago he created this cool browser/iOS pixel-art tool Make Pixel Art. I’m using it and I’m a game developer, so it’s cool. He joins the club.

internet, i have a new favourite blog. its called “indiebeards” and it is about “Celebrating facial hair in independent game development.”

aka im in love.

Guys, guys, guys! By which I mean girls! I totally received my...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 02:00:00 +0100

Guys, guys, guys! By which I mean girls! I totally received my Pinterest invite today and have been spamming the streams of my 0 followers all day. Make that 1, my boss just followed me.

I have a special welcome gift though. A collection of all my early 2D and 3D works for your haha-newbie-art-point-finger laughs. It was quite fun uploading this as I realized, after seeing them again, that I actually have progressed a little since 10 years ago when I was finishing high school.

Check it out and if you’re a woman with an actual account there, let me know, so I can follow you back or something.

You have some of the most wonderful work! Love your style ^_^ it's inspiring to me. I need to make some more chip tunes again >,<

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:11:20 +0100

Yes, sir, you most certainly do! There’s never enough chiptunes in the world!

Feel free to add me on Last.fm to see if we share any artists. Also, I did an album art for a local chiptune/metal/interesting-thingy musician recently — the album is still in the works, but when it’s done I’ll post a timelapse of the illustration. I think you’ll like that.

(Also, when you do get your tunes done, if you need a pixel-art album cover, you know who to ask. :))

A fun collaborative project at the local SloGameDev forum. I...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:33:04 +0100

A fun collaborative project at the local SloGameDev forum.

I did the dam between the water levels (D5), the cow and the flag (E2) and carnivorous plant under the Prehistorik guy (A4).

If you could choose to have one super power what would it be?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:48:00 +0100

This one is easy: Flying.

No doubt about it. Sometimes I dream of flying and it’s one of the most intoxicating of feelings. When/if I get rich from making videogames I’ll start skydiving, then basejumping and in the end I’ll die early flying a wingsuit.

Basically, this graph maps out the rest of my life:

This might become a thing. indiebeards: There used to be a...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:21:00 +0100

This might become a thing.

indiebeards:

There used to be a cool blog called Indie Beards on wordpress. It doesn’t exist anymore, but thought I should share my “This is SPARTA” look for the club. So why not make a Tumblr about it.

If you make games and have facial hair: submit!

Indie Game: The Beard, indeed.

Your blog is the coolest thing I hath ever seen with mine eyes. I shall follow thee til the end!

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:25:35 +0100

Wow, what can I say … thanks! I really hope the day when I get to finish the rest 80% of this text adventure theme is not too far away. :) See you around in the mean time!

Be prepared not to break-even

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:25:00 +0100

Something that didn’t make the cut in a big article I’m writing:

You need another source of funding. For us it’s the contracting work the guys at the research and development studio do. For you it might be your “other” day job or a rich uncle. Have enough cash to cover at least a year of giving it your best before you dive into it full time (and not like my lazy 4 hours of sweating per day, be prepared to work all day, every day).

When I wrote my business plan for Retronator back in 2008 I correctly assumed it would take me 3 months to create a game I could sell for $1 dollar. I correctly assumed that I couldn’t cover even my basic living expenses if the game sells under 10.000 units. At the time I was aiming at Xbox Live Indie Games, which didn’t even launch yet so I looked at sales figures for Xbox Live Arcade instead. I figured they won’t do nearly as good and took the lowest possible brackets as my estimates: 30k optimistic, 20k realistic and 10k pessimistic. Boy, would I have been wrong if I went down that path.

Instead we pursued the iOS market with Dawn of Play, not to say any less blindly. The market is better, but with the numbers we now know the most iOS independent developer make it’s just as hard to sustain yourself in the start.

Extra: you can now see that business plan (alas, in Slovenian) here.

And this, my friends, is why people should still make their own...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:11:50 +0100

And this, my friends, is why people should still make their own (physics/graphics/game/AI) engines. And I’m talking specifically about indies here. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if we all rely on Unity and Box2D and whatnot, we’re limiting our creativity and progress.

The game, if you’re wondering, is Cortex Command, slowly built over last 10 years and alpha-funded by preorders.

littlebluerobot: mikeyruh: iangallaghers: pinklysm00th: godsh...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:23:21 +0100

littlebluerobot:

mikeyruh:

iangallaghers:

pinklysm00th:

godshipspikey:

nostalgicgamemusic:

The Sims- Buy Mode

i want this played at my funeral

same

#wedding music #funeral music #birthday music #walking music #jogging music #waking up music #reading music #etc

I bet if retailers played this song in their stores they’d be met with a significant increase in sales…

This song and this game were actually a massive part of my childhood. The Sims was the first game I ever started studying in terms of design. I have a Spice Girls binder somewhere with hand written notes about this game (and many others), how addictive it was, and why it had a far larger female fan base than most games. Tons of memories.

Oooh, quote pyramid, never done one of those. My heart personally melts at The Sims build music. You guys should watch me draw in this video, Where did all the good games go?. Shed a tear, for the music’s sake.

you play video game

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:47:35 +0100

Why, yes, yes I do.

I love this game. And these pixels by Fabricio Rosa Marques.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:53:01 +0100

I love this game. And these pixels by Fabricio Rosa Marques.

The Unsustainability of Starting in Independent Game Development

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:13:00 +0100

You know what gets me down? The fact that it’s hard or impossible to start from zero, make games, sell them and earn enough to cover your next one.

It all comes down to this graph from an interesting survey on iOS gamedev:

“What is really interesting to me is that developers do seem to generate more revenue over time (on average). This should be encouraging if you really want to make games, but your first game was a flop. Fear not! 50% of developers who have only released one game made under $500 on that game. However, the more games developers had released, the more per-game average revenue they seem to generate.”

Fear not? This looks motivating, but it really is scary as shit. What it means is that what I’ve always dreamed of — starting from zero, doing what I love and slowly making my way up — is impossible (unless you’re lucky and you hit a jackpot app right off the bat). Why so? Because it’s impossible to make a game on a $500 budget. It’s still hard to make a game with a $5,000 budget, which is as much as you can realistically expect for each of your first five games, but at least we’re getting somewhere. If you’re really frugal, you might be able to live on it for 4-5 months in an European capital. Or move to the third world and get twice as much time to make your game with that money. Or live with your parents.

It just doesn’t pay off enough. If you want to make games for a living, you have to start off with something else to get the initial savings up and have a big enough reserve, to get you through the first few releases that probably won’t cover your expenses. And that fucking sucks!