Deathracer haitus

Deathracer has been giving me grief the past month or two. It’s a combination of factors. The apparent inability of the Shiva game engine to run complex code efficiently enough to control the number of computer drivers that I want, when running on an iPhone, is probably the main problem. I have spent a lot of time trying to optimise code, and Paul has spent quite a bit of time reworking polycounts and textures for me.

There’s also the issue of scope creep, and of the difficulties of developing in a distributed team. I just remembered why Darkwind was always planned as a one man show..

So yeah, I probably don’t know Shiva as well as I should. I need to start working on smaller projects, just like I did with Torque in 2004/2005, before ramping up to something more substantial like Deathracer.

Sidekicks and viral marketing

During a pleasant evening with Nicholas Lovell before the ‘World of Love’ conference, we chatted about Deathracer and how it might work. Now, Nicholas really knows his stuff, so some new ideas came up here.

The game definitely needs some kind of unique hook, possibly something to give it a chance of virality. I explained to Nicholas the concept of sidekicks that Brian and I had toyed with in December. The idea is that the sidekicks have different personalities as well as different skills.. so some are trigger happy, others are careful with the ammo, some may be loose cannons that don’t choose their targets wisely or according to your wishes, etc. But the key idea is that the sidekick does the shooting, while you do the driving, and that the sidekick can be influenced by your wishes but operates somewhat to his/her own agenda. Nicholas’ idea is that there could be an option to actually shout instructions to the sidekick, rather than use buttons. The image of someone shouting ‘shoot now!’ or ‘hold your fire!’ at their iPhone while playing is an interesting one.

Still on the sidekick theme, perhaps the game could be free, but you have to pay for the more powerful/interesting/sexy sidekicks, maybe $1 a pop. Nicholas has been an evangelist for the ‘power laws and whales’ concept for some time now, and he is very much an advocate of letting your players pay what they want to pay (be that $0 or $10) rather than forcing them into a ‘one size fits all’ price.

I also like the idea of a tamogatchi type thing with the sidekicks.. they get injured, and they’re unplayable for a couple of days; when you check into the game, you visit them in hospital, smiling weakly back at you.

Minecraft

One of the things I learned from ‘World of Love’ was that it’s really important to keep checking out other games. I have had a tendency to just work away on my own, because what I really like to do is create games, not play them.

With a 9 yr old and a 7 yr old in my house, I have a willing team of researchers in place, who are more than happy to work for free if I pay for the games ;-)

So yeah, this Minecraft thing I keep hearing about. Let’s get it..

3 days later: wow, it’s pretty awesome. I can see on many levels why this game is such a success. Casual, exploratory, non-confrontational, creative. Harry, Andrew and I all play the game differently and all enjoy it on different levels: Harry is an ‘achiever’ who wants to craft and gather one of every possible block; Andrew is a creator who wants to build houses; and I’m an explorer who wants to find vast underground caverns and hollow them out as tourist attractions.

World of Love

I was at the indie developers conference with the strange title ‘World of Love’ , presenting an invited paper on ‘Running an MMO part-time, single-handedly’. I wasn’t really sure if this would be of interest to people, but it turned out to definitely be so. I guess it has been the dream of most games developers at some point or another to create their own MMO… and it’s also a ‘known fact’ that creating one on your own is impossible.

As a conference it was very unlike the academic conferences that I have been attending since the mid-1990s. At ‘World of Love’ there were about 10 presenters and 200+ audience members; at academic conferences you’d expect nearly every attendee to be involved with a presentation on some level. This was nice because it meant lots of people wanted to talk to me afterwards and were interested in what I had to say.

The other speakers were quite mixed.. some presented well, with interesting insights into their game development process, while others didn’t really have much to say and came across (IMO) somewhat unprofessionally.

My ‘take home’ messages from Tak Fung and others.. keep experimenting; don’t get tunnel vision about focusing on one game at a time; and never let it become a chore because that sucks the life out of it all.

All in all, a very positive and supportive experience, so I guess ‘World of Love’ makes some sense as a title after all.

Here’s a pdf of my talk..