F5 Games blog
Recent News
Feb
16
2011

How the future of all gaming could be mobile (Part 1)

posted by Readmore at 8:04 am

This post centers on a thought I’ve had for a while now, that mobile gaming could be the future of all gaming. I’ve really been impressed with the adoption rate of mobile gaming over the last few years, it’s one of the reasons F5 is focused on mobile games, but a few things have happened even in just the last month that, I believe, could show us how the future of gaming could play out.

Smartphone Gaming vs Dedicated Portable Gaming

Smartphone gaming has really taken off with the iPhone, and to a lesser extent Android, over the last couple years. This redirection of gamers time into smartphone gaming has been especially troubling for Nintendo and Sony as the more time people spend gaming on their phone the less time they spend using a DS or PSP.

That is one of the reasons we’re only a month away from a US launch of Nintendo’s new 3DS and why Sony recently announced their NGP, or PSP 2. Both of these gaming devices have advanced technology and features that Nintendo and Sony hope will convince gamers that they need to carry an extra device with them to satisfy their gaming needs. While I’m excited to see what both of these devices can do I’m starting to feel like the days of dedicated gaming handhelds are numbered, and I’m not alone.

Recently John Carmack, the father of the First Person Shooter, was asked about the impact of phone gaming on the overall market and he had this to say:

“The smart phone may turn out to be 80 percent as good at gaming as a dedicated gaming platform,” Carmack said.

“People are going to carry their smart phone, and if it’s an 80 percent gaming device, how many people in the gaming market will be satisfied with that? That’s the question that’s in everybody’s mind, and I really don’t know.” – Dallas News

Obviously, I don’t know either, but I think that as smartphone adoption continues to grow you’re going to see more and more people who were never interested in purchasing a DS or PSP become interested in gaming on their phone. For them an 80% gaming device is more than good enough and they’re going to be incredibly satisfied with that. So the question isn’t ‘how many people in the gaming market will want that’ it’s ‘how much larger is that 80% gaming market than the current one’. As a game developer, that means smartphone gaming could represent a massively larger market that is growing at an incredible rate and is going to have a wider range of players to create games for.

The other advantage that smartphones have over gaming portables is their lifecycle. Apple has basically put the industry on a 12 month product refresh cycle by continually updating the iPhone year after year. That means that every 12 months we’re seeing a pretty dramatic increase in the processing power and graphical capabilities of these phones and the cost stays steady at about $200 on contract. In fact it’s rumored that the jaw dropping chips that are powering the NGP are very similar to the chips that will ship in the iPhone 5 and iPad 2, 6 months before Sony ships the NGP. Developers, including Carmack, have said that even if the chips were exactly the same a dedicated gaming machine will have better performance because of the low-level tuning that can take place, but in the long run that doesn’t matter if smartphone hardware gets faster every 12 months.

The PSP was released in America on March 24, 2005 and it’s successor, the NGP, won’t be available in the US until most likely 2012; that’s almost a 7 year lifecycle. At the current rate of enhancement the mobile phones of 2013 will be more powerful than the NGP and will be able to play more graphically impressive games probably on 3D screens exactly like that of the Nintendo 3DS. There is just no way that the traditional style gaming handheld can compete with the run-away growth in smartphone processing power.

If these trends continue, I don’t see how it makes sense to bring another dedicated gaming handheld to market. I fully expect the 3DS and NGP to be the last generation of dedicated gaming handhelds, and that all mobile gaming will be replaced by phones over the next few years.

Sony’s Response

A few weeks ago when Sony announced the NGP they also announced the Playstation Suite, a software platform and gaming store for mobile phones. At first I was interested in the Playstation Suite because it could be a better way to sell games on Android, and a way to get our games onto the NGP in the future. After some more thought, however, I’m beginning to think it may be one of the smartest moves Sony has ever made in mobile gaming. They are basically betting on two horses; if I’m wrong and there is still a large market for a dedicated gaming portable then they have the NGP; but if I’m right and phones will overtake the NGP and 3DS in the next couple years then they have the Playstation Suite. They can divert resources over to developing for their ‘certified’ Playstation phones and have a foothold in the new, and much much larger, phone gaming market. It’s a brilliant strategy, and after the Xperia Play announcements at MWC this week it seems to be something they are taking very seriously.

While Sony seems well positioned to make the jump out of the dedicated handheld gaming space if the need arises, I’m not so sure about Nintendo. I haven’t seen anything from them that suggests they are interested in moving their operations to mobile phones, and honestly I don’t see how they would do it. They are an incredibly proud company, and I can’t see them just deciding to develop games for the iPhone or Android. It’s possible that they could continue to sell handhelds to younger players but the phone market is so much larger and more diverse that I can’t imagine them ignoring it. Perhaps they they will make a Nintendo phone? I’m sure they could find another Japanese phone manufacturer that would like a way to counter Sony in their gaming push.

Conclusions

So, we’ve covered the reasons smartphone gaming will replace dedicated gaming handhelds. The markets are much bigger, people don’t want to carry multiple devices, and phone hardware is increasing at such astonishing rates that a 5-7 year product lifecycle isn’t competitive. But, the title of this post wasn’t just about currently mobile games it was about all games, including home consoles. I also believe that we could be only a few years away from a huge shake-up in the home console space as smartphone gaming begins to intrude on their turf in many of the same ways that they are killing the dedicated gaming portable.

However, this post is already long enough, so you’re going to have to wait until part 2 to hear the rest of the argument. Let me know what you think in the comments and look for the second part of this post on Friday.

Posted in Industry News | Comments (2)
Feb
01
2011

Sony and the NGP

posted by Readmore at 7:02 am

Last week Sony unveiled their long awaited PSP2, only they called it the NGP (for Next Generation Portable). All through their announcement all I could think of was the picture up above from the excellent iPhone game Game Dev Story (with a little text editing by yours truly).

The Device

If you haven’t been following the news then the easiest way to sum it up is that the NGP is a BEAST! It’s what you get if you asked 100 hardcore gamers what they most want in a handheld gaming console, and then you threw it ALL in there. It’s got twin thumbsticks, dual cameras, dual touchpads, quad cores, it’s insane. This thing has $399 written all over it, when it finally comes to the U.S. in 2012 (yeah next year, everyone seems to have mistaken that ‘Holiday 2011′ release date in Japan for an American one). If you’re really interested in the specs of this thing then check out this rundown from Engadget and for a longer write-up about all the different features for the NGP try this article from Venturebeat. Basically, it’s a portable PS3. With all that said, the gamer in me really wants one, you can’t put that much power in a device and not expect us to all swoon over it.

The Promise

The problem with all of this is that it’s very similar to the original PSP announcement. Sony trotted out this amazing powerful system that was going to bring the home console experience on the go and the world was amazed. Then it came out and we all bought it on launch day, played Lumines for 3 months, and then shelved it; at least that’s what I did. Unfortunately even with all that power there just weren’t enough quality games to really make it worth while. Hopefully that won’t happen with the NGP, and Sony seems to understand that they have to improve in the content area. Not only have they lined up a large group of 3rd party developers who are interested in releasing games on the device, they are also following Apple’s lead by introducing a game delivery service called Playstation Suite. Playstation Suite is a framework that Sony is using to certify Android handsets as ‘Playstation Ready’ and then ship them with a game store for PSOne era games as well as games from other developers. This part of the announcement was really exciting to the developer in me because it presents both a way to actually ‘sell’ games to Android users and, since the NGP will also have access to the Playstation Suite, it gives us a way create and sell games to the more Hardcode audience that is going to shell out for the NGP. I would love to see some of our upcoming games make it on to Sony’s crazy new handheld!

What does it all mean?

So, with the NGP announcement Sony has made the next 16 months even more interesting in the portable gaming market. Not only do we have the 3DS coming out in March but we’ll then have the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 (which are rumored to have similar hardware to the NGP although not quite as ludicrous) followed by Sony’s new entrant. It’s a really exciting time to be making games for people on the go.

Now it’s time to get back to work.

Posted in Industry News | Comments (0)
Jan
27
2011

Prototyping Weekend – RPG Test

posted by Readmore at 6:17 am

This last weekend I decided to take a short break from our upcoming puzzle game to have a prototyping weekend and work on a new project. I mentioned in a previous post that we’re working on an RPG game for later this year and I felt it was time to start building out a prototype for that game so we could see it in a more real form as we continue to design it. In short, the ‘weekend’ was a great success; even if it did last until Wednesday morning.

Prototyping and Graphics

Cody and I have set up 5 builds for our RPG prototype that takes us through a large portion of the gameplay elements we need to really determine if the game will work like we hope it will. Each of these builds is small in size and so the expectation is that we can finish them in a week or so of work. With the work I did this weekend we’re more than halfway through the first build, and it is what you see in the picture below.


I swear this isn't a Zelda remake.

And no, before you ask, it’s not a Zelda clone. While I was looking around for some generic dungeon sprites to use in my tilemap I found this great site called The Spriter’s Resource. It is absolutely full of old-school sprite graphics from the NES, Genesis, and SNES eras and it’s awesome! So after looking around a little I came across some great sprites that were pulled from The Legend of Zelda, and in no time I had my development graphics. While it’s obviously not necessary to have polished graphics for the prototype stage I always enjoy it when my prototypes can look closer to the expected result. I don’t expect our game to look like Zelda, but this is MUCH better than the stick figures I was going to draw.

So far in the prototype we have a player (Link) who can move around the dungeon that we’ve created, he can run into walls and pillars, which means he’s confined to the dungeon and can’t wander off into the blackness outside. He’s also animated and changes his facing as you move him around. Currently for movement I’m capturing when the user taps on the screen and then determining which direction that tap represents. So if you tap above Link, he moves up. Tap to his left, and he moves left. This is the same style of movement used in one of my favorite iPhone games 100 Rogues, and I felt it made a lot of sense here as well. We also have a skeleton for Link to look at, because so far he doesn’t move and there is no attacking, but soon all that will change.

The only real problem I had in this build was a strange Cocos2D error that occurs when you move a tilemap around with a CCMoveTo action. In the simulator everything works perfectly but once I put the game on my iPhone there were all these tearing and flickering artifacts as I moved and it made everything look really awful. Thankfully a quick search brought me to the Cocos2D iPhone forums where I found a really quick and easy fix. Once again the Cocos community saves the day.

Now that my ‘weekend’ project is done I’m back to working on our upcoming puzzle game. If you’ve got any questions about the game feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer it. I’m already planning another prototyping weekend around the Super Bowl so there should be another one of these posts pretty soon. Until then, happy gaming.

Posted in Dev Diary, Game Design | Comments (0)
Jan
19
2011

Potty Training and Game Design

posted by Readmore at 4:35 am

This is a post that has been rattling around in my head for the last week or so. Recently I ran across an article on Significant Bits that dissected the level design of Super Mario Bros 3 to show how Nintendo was able to convey so much instruction to the player without ever making it explicit. It’s really a great read and you should check it out.

The Potty Training

While thinking about the game design cues from Super Mario 3 I noticed an interesting parallel in my own home. My wife and I have been working to potty train our almost 2 year old son for the last few months and so far things have switched back and forth from great to not so good. Recently things have been working much better however, and one of the main reasons is because my wife had the brilliant idea to let my son put a sticker on the calendar at the end of any day in which he didn’t have an accident.

This may seem like a standard reward system but it’s new in that it is a more long term goal than any of the previous rewards we have tried. When our son makes it to the potty on time we congratulate him, give him a small sticker to place on the bathroom door, and sometimes give him M&Ms. Each of these small rewards has started out working really well but the novelty soon wears off and things begin to degrade again. However, with the new ‘end of the day’ reward it has given my son another reason to really work at not having accidents that goes beyond just right now, and it seems to be working.

The Game Design

Super Mario Bros 3 Coins

Collecting coins has both immediate and long term rewards.

So how do potty training habits pertain to game design? In my mind it really laid out the need for multiple levels of rewards for players, something that you’ll see implemented in plenty of great games, including Super Mario Bros 3. Think about some of the immediate rewards in a Mario game.

  • You stomp on an enemy and he flattens out, you get points, and a cool sound effect plays.
  • You collect a coin and you hear a cool sound effect, get points, and the coin counter increases.
  • In later Mario games you collect other types of coins as well as star bits, etc. and they all offer similar immediate rewards through sound, graphical flourish, and counters increasing.
  • Collecting a Star results in the end of a level in Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 as well as celebration music and a cool Mario pose.

That’s all well and good but the immediate rewards quickly begin to lose their luster. When you collect your first coin or smash your first Goomba it might put a grin on your face but before too long you’re flying through the levels and grabbing things so quickly that you don’t even notice anymore. That is why each of these immediate rewards also feeds into a longer term goal/reward that keeps you working even after the initial shine has worn off. Let’s list some of the long term rewards that flow from the immediate ones.

  • Bouncing from one enemy head to another begins to alter the sound effect and give you more points each time, pushing you to try and line up more enemies. This culminates in the coveted 1UP.
  • Collecting coins continues to push the coin counter higher and higher until you reach 100 coins, at which time you receive a 1UP and the count starts over.
  • Blue Coins and Red Coins are newer medium-term rewards that ask you to collect a set number of coins in a contained area for a special reward.
  • In New Super Mario Bros Wii each level contains 3 Star Coins that are ultimately used to unlock an entire new World at the end of the game.
  • Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 have you collect multiple stars in each level so that you can unlock later levels. Each world culminates in the collection of a Grand Star that is even larger and more exciting to get.

From Stars back to Potty

All of this points to the clever use of layered rewards as a way to keep the player engaged in exploring and collecting new things in your game. This has made me realize that just having a high score probably isn’t enough, but by layering other rewards into the high score process, like granting a free life at 100,000 points or after 10 kills without taking damage, you can encourage the player to continue exploring your game mechanics to discover new rewards and hopefully keep them interested in completing your game. You also may find a great system for Potty Training a 2 year old.

Posted in Dev Diary, Game Design | Comments (0)
Jan
07
2011

Fling – Possibly the first great iPad joystick idea.

posted by Readmore at 3:46 pm

CES is taking place this week and that can mean only one thing, tons of new gadgets! Among all the new 3D TVs, tablets, and set-top boxes came news of a very cool little gadget for iPad gamers from Ten One Design called Fling.

Fling is the latest gadget attempting to solve the lack of physical controls, and tactile feedback, in iPhone/iPad gaming. While other solutions have attempted to snap on a clamshell around the iPhone to give it a working set of controls I believe the Fling represents a much more elegant solution to the problem, and it’s the first of these devices that I’m actually excited about. The problem with adding external buttons to the device is that for them to really work game developers have to develop with them in mind. Since none of these solutions is likely to have a very large market penetration any work to support them is a ‘nice to have’ and definitely not a ‘must have’ feature. What makes Fling different is that it is designed to work with existing on-screen joysticks by ‘suctioning’ right on top of the on-screen controls and interacting with them as you move the joystick.

The initial reactions are good, TouchArcade has a great write-up about the Fling over on their site, and it sounds like for most iPad games it works great! The greater precision in dual stick shooters and FPS games sounds really great, especially since one of our upcoming games is a dual-stick shooter, but I’m really excited to use it on a game that I would LOVE if only the control was more precise, Galaxy on Fire II. If the Fling is as precise as it sounds we could finally get a worthy successor to Wing Commander on the iPad, or maybe even a punishing platformer like Super Meat Boy.

I’m planning to pick up a Fling, although I’m still trying to decide between a single or double pre-order. So once I get my hands on one I’ll update this post with my impressions. Based on what I’ve read so far, I fully expect future F5 Games to take advantage of the Fling, here’s hoping it lives up to it’s promise.

Posted in General News | Comments (0)
Dec
28
2010

Looking ahead to 2011 – The Year of F5 Games!

posted by Readmore at 6:43 pm



Merry Christmas everyone! I’m back from Christmas vacation and trying to get back into a game making groove so I thought it might be a good time to take a look at our plans for next year and let you all know where we’re headed.

A Look Back

First off, let’s take a quick look at 2010. While we’re still waiting to see how our IndyNight sales were over Christmas (iTunes is on holiday break until tomorrow) we’re pretty happy with the number of downloads we’ve had so far. We’d always love to have more of course, but from the beginning Independence Night was an experiment for us. We wanted to get a game out there this year, experiment with different advertising methods, pricing methods, and just try to learn as much as we could about developing and releasing a game for iOS. From that perspective I’m really happy with how 2010 has turned out for us. We learned a TON of great information about the game development process, and we’ve really become much more proficient with the tools we’ve been using. In fact we’re already seeing pretty drastic dev speed increases in our new projects. So, while we haven’t set the world on fire, yet, we’re definitely in a good place to move forward.

What’s in Store for 2011

Cody and I are both hard at work on projects for the new year. We already have two games in the prototype stage, one in the design phase, and another that we have kicking around in our heads for later in the year.

Cody is currently working on a new retro action game that is similar in scope to IndyNight. He’s already got the basic gameplay in place with some temp graphics and it’s already fun to pick up and play. Our hope is that we can finish up the core mechanics of that game, polish it up, and release it sometime in February.

I’m working on a new puzzle game that has an interesting history in our family. Nearly 15 years ago our Dad developed a new type of puzzle game that is really pretty inventive. He built a few physical games that he has tweaked over the years but he never really got it to a production phase. Thanks to the success of the iPad I think it’s time the world new about Dad’s game, and we’re working on bringing it to the iPad this year! There is still quite a bit to do before we can release this game but my hope is to have it submitted to the App Store in March or April, so hopefully you’ll all be playing it this Spring.

The third game on our list is a big one, and it’s an RPG. This is a game we’re really excited about at F5, and we can’t wait to be able to give you some info about it. If IndyNight was an experiment for us then this RPG is the game we’re expecting to really hit it out of the park! There is still a ton to do on this game, in fact Cody and I are having a huge design meeting on it tomorrow, but I’m hopeful we can have the first version out sometime this Summer.

Finally, we’re back to our Zombie game. The last game that we have planned for 2011 is the Zombie game that we originally started working on in June. We’ve learned so much over the last few months that I think we can tackle the development requirements of a full SNES level action game. Hopefully by the Fall we’ll be able to let you all try to survive our Zombie apocalypse!

So there it is, 4 games in one year. It’s a daunting schedule but with everything that we’ve learned so far I think it’s doable. Stay tuned to the blog for updates and more info on each of these games as we move through the development process. I’m usually pretty hesitant to share my ideas before they are ready to go but my plan is to start opening up more here on the blog.

So until next time, have a safe and Happy New Year!

Posted in Dev Diary, General News | Comments (0)
Dec
23
2010

BulletStorm and ‘too much cursing’

posted by Readmore at 2:27 am

I had an interesting thing happen today. I tweeted CliffyB, as I have done a few times now, and he responded. I tweeted him because I had recently seen the latest dev diary video for BulletStorm and thought that the game looked awesome, but that the language in the trailer was a little ridiculous. For context I’ll embed the video here so you can take a look for yourself. (Debatably NSFW)

After watching that video I mentioned to my wife that Bulletstorm looked like a lot of fun, but the language was so unnecessary and off-putting that it made me want to skip the game. The language in BulletStorm sounds like 13 year olds yelling obscenities at you over a Halo deathmatch, not really my idea of fun. So when I saw Cliff tweeting out a pre-order link for BulletStorm today I decided to let him know what I thought:



@therealcliffyb I’d be more interested in Bulletstorm if it didn’t have all the cussing. We need a ‘no-cuss’ option in the game settings.less than a minute ago via webReadmore
Readmore

Amazingly, he responded with this:

“@Readmore: We need a ‘no-cuss’ option in the Bulletstorm game settings.” @tanyajessen Tanya do we have this in?less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Cliff Bleszinski
therealcliffyb

His response makes it sound like a ‘No Cussing’ option may actually make it in the game; and I learned later that Gears of War 2 has the option as well. That really surprised me, and while I’m still waiting to hear if the option will be included for sure, it’s nice to know that Epic is at least thinking about it.

I caught a fair amount of flack on Twitter for my ‘pansy stance’ on bad language, or the fact that I think ‘shooting someone in the face is okay but bad words are un-acceptable’, but that isn’t what it’s about at all. The game is M rated, and I fully believe in and support the games industry self regulating our own content. I also absolutely think that Epic and the guys at People Can Fly have every right to put in as much violence and vulgar language as they see fit; BulletStorm is artistic expression, and I don’t want to censor that in any way. My only problem with the language is that it decreases my enjoyment of the game. I’m really interested in the ‘kill with skill’ play-style, all the combos, and the idea of a fast and fun FPS that takes us back to the ‘good old days’ but from the trailers I’ve seen the language is just un-necessary and I would like to be able to enjoy the gameplay without hearing obscene curses every two seconds.

Obviously I can just not buy the game, but I felt it was important to point out to Cliff that the language in this game was costing them a sale, and he responded really well to that information. I love Epic Games, I’m pretty sure I’ve bought just about every game they’ve ever made, all the way back to when they were Epic MegaGames, but I’m up in the air about BulletStorm because of the language. If I don’t buy it, Epic won’t even notice, but it’s pretty awesome that Cliff would respond to my concerns and show that they care enough about their fans to take it into consideration.

After people started responding to my tweet in dis-belief Cliff posted one more tweet that I really respected.

Some folks are ok with violence but not language. Who are we to judge? We want them as happy fans/customers too.less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Cliff Bleszinski
therealcliffyb


While that doesn’t necessarily represent my opinion on the matter I think having this kind of an attitude toward your fans is definitely the right way to go, and I appreciate it. Thanks Cliff.

Posted in General News | Comments (0)
Dec
16
2010

IndyNight Dev Diary 2

posted by Readmore at 6:13 am

Welcome back to the Independence Night Developer Diary Series. This is number 2 in a series of… well probably just 2 actually. If you missed the first installment you can check it out here., it’s cool I’ll wait…. Okay, now that we’re all caught up I’ll cover the rest of the topics that I eluded to in the last post.

Fireworks Mode and the Balloons

Originally Independence Night only had two gameplay modes, Story and Arcade. However, during development it became clear that my son (who was between 18 – 20 months old at the time) really enjoyed the game. More specifically he enjoyed tapping the screen and then seeing and hearing the fireworks shoot and explode when he tapped. The fact that he really seemed to enjoy it made me enjoy it as well and I thought it would be cool to do a mode for toddlers. My first thought was to have an educational mode of some kind, possibly with floating balloons that had letters or numbers in them. When a child saw the balloon they would want to shoot it and if they hit it we could then play a sound effect of us saying the number or letter that was in the balloon.


Well it all sounded great, but it really wasn’t what we were trying to do with the game. And Cody convinced me that it was kind-of strange to have an educational mode in an otherwise Retro Arcade game. So we compromised and built a Fireworks mode for kids to play where they didn’t have to worry about the game restarting on them because of agressive aliens. We did actually put the balloons into the Fireworks mode with our last update, but I don’t see us going all the way to the educational mode. Although, it could be a different game that we develop down the road.

OpenFeint Integration

Integrating OpenFeint into Indy Night was actually a decision that happened pretty late in the process. We knew from the beginning that we wanted online high score tracking, but for the majority of our development effort we had planned to build our own system and host it on our own servers (we have a lot of web development experience). But, after going back and forth on the pluses and minuses of that we decided that maybe OpenFeint was a better idea, at least for this game. Looking back now, I’m really glad that Cody convinced me to use OpenFeint. At the time I wasn’t all that familiar with it, and to be honest I didn’t like it in the games I had noticed it in. But, once I tried it out in a few games, and then got a look at their API, I was hooked. OpenFeint really made our lives a LOT easier, and because we used them for Leaderboards we were only a couple steps away from adding the Achievements that we included in the last update.

If you’re looking at adding High Score tracking, achievements, or anything like that to your game I absolutely suggest you take a look at OpenFeint before you try and roll your own. In our next game we do expect to have our own server component, but I can promise you that it will be in addition to our OpenFeint integration, not a replacement for it.


Update 1.1 Achievements


If you’re interested in OpenFeint check out their developer website and if you’re interested in how to integrate OpenFeint with Cocos2D try this tutorial. It is a little out of date but between that and the Readme file included with the OpenFeint SDK you should be fine.

What About Game Center?

Once we decided to use a service for our score tracking we started to question if it was better to use OpenFeint or Game Center. We decided on OpenFeint for a few reasons, one is that we had a tutorial that would help us integrate OpenFeint with a Cocos2D game, but the biggest one was that Game Center will only run on the latest iOS version while OpenFeint will run on iOS 3.0 devices as well. As we move forward with IndyNight, and our next games, I fully expect that we’ll integrate Game Center as well. In fact, Cody has a game project he is working on right now that has Game Center integration. What’s great is that it doesn’t have to be a one or the other decision as OpenFient will integrate easily with Game Center if you decide to have both.

The Victory Music

The last thing that I’ll talk about is one of the very last things that I did before we released the game, build the story mode win screen. We really wanted something that had that old NES, epic, I just beat this cool game feeling. So we added in the moderately animated flag and waving boy with the fireworks shooting in celebration, but there was just something else it needed, and that something was music. We don’t have any music in the main game, partly because we didn’t come up with any, and partly because one of the main compliments we got when we showed it to people was how much they loved the sound effects. While it’s still possible that we could add some background music to the gameplay we knew that we had to have some epic WIN music for the win scene.

So I started looking around, and around, and around, and I discovered that music is hard. It’s hard to find something good, it’s hard to find something that suits your concept, and it’s hard to figure out what is free to use and what isn’t. After I researched it for awhile I discovered that really old songs, like say The Star Spangled Banner, have fallen into the public domain. That means that the song itself can be used without a royalty, but any performance of it could still require a royalty for the performer. So what I needed, was to perform the song myself. This was a problem, because I am not all that musical, but I had an ace up my sleeve, The Magic Piano!


I started playing around with the Magic Piano iPad app and I realized that I could play the Star Spangled Banner, using the iPad as a keyboard, and record that for my game. After about 15 minutes of messing around in Garageband I had an impromptu studio set up, and the recording began. It was really a pretty fun exercise and it made me realize that I need a real MIDI keyboard to use for sound effects and game music in the future. Here’s hoping Santa is reading this blog.

Well that’s all I can think to share. If you have any questions about any other part of the game, or just any questions in general, post a comment and I’ll be sure to let you know. I hope you enjoy the game, and the new update! If you don’t have it yet you can pick it up here.

Posted in Dev Diary, IndyNight | Comments (1)
Dec
14
2010

Independence Night 1.1 Update On the Way (Updated – It’s Live!)

posted by Readmore at 4:36 am



Independence Night - Test Your Skills




Update: The update is live, check the updates tab in the App Store app and you should see IndyNight. Good luck on the Achievements!


We’ve submitted an update to Independence Night and it should be working it’s way through the App Store review process as you read this. This isn’t a giant update but it does add a couple cool features so I wanted to let you know what to expect.

The biggest additions is OpenFeint Achievements! We’ve added 9 achievements to the game that you can unlock as you play, some of them will be a secret for awhile but I can go ahead and tell you that you can earn one for beating story mode, and that if you can survive Arcade mode for more than 14 rounds you may get another. The achievements total up to 1000 Feints points so you can really start ramping up your gamer score when the new update hits the app store.

Other than the achievements we’ve also added balloons to the fireworks mode, so the kiddies will have some targets to launch their fireworks toward. There is also a news ticker at the bottom of the main screen so you can stay up-to-date on the latest F5 Games and IndyNight news. And finally we’ve posted a fix for the level progression bug that a few people had run in to. Now you shouldn’t have any problems moving through the levels, well just the aliens and meteors, but no technical problems.

If there is anything else you’d like to see in an upcoming IndyNight update be sure to let us know. We’re always open to gamer feedback!

We’re hopeful the update will make it in this week but you never know. Stay tuned to the blog for more news or just keep checking the updates section of your App Store application to see if that little red 1 shows up.

Posted in General News, IndyNight, Releases | Comments (0)
Dec
09
2010

Game Development Links

posted by Readmore at 4:08 pm

I’m constantly saving links to various game development articles. Last night I worked through a few of them and thought that I would share a few of them here. So here is a small list of articles you may want to check out if you’re working in the indie game development space.

  • The Perfect Newsline – This article covers why you need to have an in-app newsline to communicate with your users. Look for something like this in the next IndyNight update.
  • Angry Birds on Android projected to generate $1 Million a month in advertising. – We all know about the success of Angry Birds on the iPhone but the quick adoption of their ad-supported Android version is very interesting. Especially if they are really able to pull in $1 Million a month by the end of the year.
  • Social Game Mechanics Wiki – This site has a huge list of different game mechanics that you can use to make your game more ‘sticky’ and social. It’s not so much an article as a big wiki of definitions and concepts but it’s still good reading.

There you have it. Your afternoon indie game dev reading list. Let me know what you think of the articles in the comments.

Also, we’re hard at work on the first IndyNight update and are hoping to send it off to Apple by the end of the week. Hopefully it will make it through the review process before Christmas. Stay tuned for more info on that

Posted in General News, IndyNight | Comments (1)