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  SHOTGUN'D! 06:27 PM -- Fri March 18, 2005  

I just had a nice round of Sol Hunt multiplayer with some other indies! Well, kind of a lame round. The game's pretty lame right now. But you can see the potential, provided I can fix the agonizing bug that I spent all day messing with. Hopefully I can have it fixed in time to try it out with you all. Thusly I announce:

Tomorrow, March 19th, at 4:00 PM PST, visit the Sol Hunt forum for the link to download the current work in progress, and come join us in an all-out Sol bash!

It'll be super fun, if we can get more than 5 or 6 people to join. Hopefully I'll have this bug fixed by then, but if not, all you need to know is that if you join the game and find yourself stuck in the wall, just exit and rejoin a bunch of times until you're not stuck! It's the most ridiculous bug ever.
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  Guitars Are Tricky 05:48 PM -- Thu March 17, 2005  

Man, I don't know how people play these things. You gotta contort your hand all over, and the strings still buzz anyway! It's maddening! But I'm doing my ten minute exercises, maybe I'm even developing some skills. On the other hand, without a teacher, it's more likely I'm just developing really bad habits.

Got a calendar program today with an alarm feature, so I rigged up my daily schedule as a series of alarms. Should be fun to experience.

I will posit here what I said on the forums, see what you think:

I have signed up to have discs printed by www.discmakers.com (self-service option, it's pretty cool if you have some CDs you want to make yourself!), which will then be shipped out by Plimus (my new order processing company). Here are the options I have, and what they cost me:
  • DVD case $7.44+shipping - Just like before (but with nicer printing quality! They look good), but with no manual inside. The big problem I have with this is that the sample I got has an extremely weak center stud holding the CD in. The CD arrived loose in the case (with lots of little scratches on it, though it worked fine), and I quickly discovered why - I could put it back on the stud and shake it quickly once, and it would pop right off. I was not happy and told them so, we'll see if they have a reply to that. It wasn't broken or anything, just a really bad design.
  • Jewel Case $8.24+shipping - Like the old hamumu days (with nicer printing, again!). Manual, tray card, color CD, the works. Very pretty, and very pricey. I have not seen a sample, but I can't imagine it has the looseness problem the DVD case does. I've never seen anything like that before!
  • Flexi-plastic $6.69+shipping - The cheapest option, and I think maybe kinda cool. Just a "semi-clear flexible plastic case" with the color CD inside. No cover art, no manual, just the disc looking pretty.
  • Paper sleeve $6.49+shipping - Only 20 cents cheaper than the flexiplastic. It does have one advantage though, see below. Oh, and I'm sure it would have the lowest shipping cost.
All those costs are based on getting batches of 100 done at Discmakers and stored at Plimus (which adds $4 packaging+handling to ship each one). In addition, if I store more than a 3-month supply at Plimus, they will charge me $1 per cubic foot per month to store the excess. So the larger size options will end up costing me money in that way, but probably not much. Even DVD cases, you can fit about 30 in a cubic foot, so even if I sold zero of them, it'd cost about $3 a month to store 100 (of course, that's 100 PER game... but on the other hand, if I was gonna sell zero, I wouldn't bother with the whole thing!).

So I will of course charge for them based on the cost... I want to make roughly the same profit on a CD sale as on a download, so that it's all your business whether you want one or the other. So it'd cost maybe $8-$10 total (I think Plimus automatically adds the true shipping cost, so I'd charge just the rest of the cost).
You can look at the various container options here if you're interested.

I just don't know!
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  2 Hours Is All It Takes 08:19 PM -- Wed March 16, 2005  

I did it! I worked on Sol Hunt! For a little over 2 hours. What I ended up with was a little shooter game where the players, as purple cubes, shoot yellow dots at each other trying to kill each other. All online! So it works. It's nice. I think I'll post up a little test game on the forum and we can all shoot at each other, maybe this weekend, once I've gotten it a little tighter (right now, when you get killed you have to exit the game and re-enter it!) and added scoring and some obstacles to hide behind or something. We'll see though, because I really should be working on different aspects, like the tilemap (right now you play on a completely black screen).

I also read Following Through, stem to stern, all yesterday.

I did so to avoid doing work.
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  Random(MAX_INT); 01:10 PM -- Tue March 15, 2005  

So many random thoughts swirling about...

I have so very not worked in Sol Hunt in like a week and a half. To be fair, I have been super busy with other things (setting up our new order system and CD stuff - which is still not done, but I have to wait for the sample CD to arrive to see if it's okay), but I've also been avoiding it. It's hard! And I'm stuck-ish! I'm thinking about forgetting the internet stuff at least temporarily, and just get the basic gameplay running, hopefully architected somewhat towards potentially being internetable, but mainly just WORKING, so there's something to play, and something to get me interested in working on it again. Heaven help me, yesterday I thought up an alternate version of Sol Hunt I could be doing!

I'm trying to learn guitar. Well, as of yesterday. I've certainly fiddled with them enough. My wife has a guitar, and this "learn to play" book which involves doing 10 minutes of exercises a day, over a very long period of time. I hope I will stick with it enough to get some measure of control. It's cool. I want to learn music theory in general, as I do love music very much.

I'm a vegetarian. I have been for probably 2 years now, maybe just 1.5 years, I don't know. And you know, I'm really glad I'm a vegetarian. There's so many upsides. There's one big downside: no yummy ham. But that is actually also an insidious upside - I'm a suburban white male American from an upper-middle-class family. It improves my brain to actually experience "doing without". It still hasn't managed to put a dent in my extreme laziness (ooh, something for the next paragraph!), but there's just something to it. To be deprived... it's character-building. You know, it's like taking away your security blanket and realizing you can live without it. I really like meat, but I sure don't need it. And deciding for myself that I won't eat it is empowering. It also means never worrying about what might be lurking in the scratches on our cutting boards!

Laziness comment: I have a book called "Following Through" sitting on a bookshelf with a bookmark in it at about the halfway point. That bookmark hasn't moved in years. That's a funny anecdote if you think about it (and possibly one I've put on this Journal before, sorry if I did). I'm thinking about picking it up again though, because I could sure use some kind of instruction on how not to be lazy. It's a real problem for me, because I've only ever held one real job in my life, and that was only for about 9 months... and it was NOT a demanding job. But here I am, an indie, and I live or die by my own work now. So being unlazy would be of great benefit to me. The problem is, books that tell you how not to be lazy tend to be new-agey claptrap that I just laugh at (they may be super useful, but the message is lost on me when I giggle and point). I don't want to invigorate my transfiguration potentiality... I just want to get things done! Come to think of it, there's a book called Getting Things Done. Maybe I should look at it. How do you make yourself do things?

*Note: I wrote this nice long entry to avoid doing work!
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  In The Biz 08:07 PM -- Mon March 7, 2005  

So I spent all day today working on the new ordering page! That is so not exciting for you! As part of all this simplifying of my life (like dropping out of CD making), I'm switching to a payment processor that does all the work for you (which is what I used to have a couple years ago before I went to a merchant account). That means giving up a lot of the profit, but while I was kind of shaky on whether it was really worth doing initially, as I set about setting up all the little parts I actually saw more and more reasons why it was a good idea. Not that I can name any particularly, but it's just going to completely erase all the recordkeeping tasks I had to do, not to mention handle paying affiliates and contractors automatically. I'm very quickly running out of things other than game development to do! That's good. Oh, and the new ordering page isn't up yet, so no need to look for it (plus it's not going to look much different!).

I know I haven't done the monthly newsletter yet, but I'd like to get out the three (or 4?) add-ons WTG has sent to me, and hopefully the new Supreme patch first, so the newsletter sounds more exciting.

Hey, I don't know if this has been announced yet, but at the very end of this month, we are off to Baja California for a bonafide vacation! About a week. Everything will still run peachy, especially if I manage to offload the CDs before then - if that happens, it'll all run completely without me! But our hotel will have wireless access anyway, so I'll be online all the time as usual for tech support or whatever.

This life-simplifying stuff runs deeper than just freeing me up to focus on the core of my business. We're also trying to simplify our real lives. Getting rid of lots of stuff we never use and general clutter. We've cleaned out a few rooms and it's amazing how much stuff you don't need. That's why I am amused by the whole Total Mayhem situation happening now. It's good to just let things go - nobody's ever going to go back and read those old Total Mayhem posts (and why would they?!). The beauty of mayhem is that it never ends, there's always more. We can start fresh and continue to rampage madly. I threw out lots of magazines with notably useful information as opposed to mindless spam, just because I knew that, useful or not, I wasn't going to go digging through them if I ever did think of a question and actually somehow realized the answer lurked in the magazine heap somewhere. I'm a bit of a natural packrat, so simplifying is both a difficult job and yet very liberating. It helps that I also have a highly organized side which can appreciate the beauty of empty spaces.
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  Update 04:07 PM -- Thu March 3, 2005  

Here's the Sol Hunt progress: Very very bad. I'm pounding my head against the wall constantly trying to piece together this network stuff. Currently what works is that you can move your purple square (with your name under it!) around the screen... in single player mode. Multiplayer is currently dead, though I think it's not far from working. I reached the point last night where I finally declared that I would devote only 2 hours a day to serious work on Sol Hunt and not a moment longer. Why is that more productive? Becuase as it stood, I spent the entire day studiously avoiding working on it, and studiously feeling guilty and frustrated that I was making no progress. So now I only have to dedicate myself to it for a little while, and it's not hard to do that. Hopefully the rest of the day, I can relax. It's not really working too well, but I was more productive today for 2 hours than the entire past week!

I am certainly hoping that this is just a hump I have to get over. I think it is. One would imagine that once I have a basic networked blip moving around I may be able to begin making an actual game around it. I don't know. It's just very overwhelming.

So with so little time being spent on the proper project, what to do? I have some alternate easy projects I could be bumbling on, but I think the priority right now is working out the CD situation. I think I may have found a solution to keep the discs almost as fancy (just no manual) and almost as cheap. We shall see! Just feeling very drained these days.
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  Whither Ratchet 4!? 12:46 PM -- Mon February 28, 2005  

So, Ratchet is done. My greatest accomplishment ever! I completed it 100%, all secrets, trophies, bolts, skill points, even the museum, without once looking at a FAQ. Can't remember the last time I did something like that. Feels good, in a "complete waste of time" sort of way.

So guess I'm out of slacking activities. Well, there is sort of one - I'm almost done with a new Supreme patch! It adds a surprising new feature: World Merge. This allows you to take any world and append it onto an existing world. There's a long long list of issues of just what it can handle and such, because of course some things just don't fit together (for instance, it does absolutely nothing about crossing G variables - if both worlds use G0, they'll get mixed up). The real purpose of it is to allow a new type of contest. Instead of making a world, people will just have to make a single level that's really great (lots of limitations, like no global variables, only 40 tiles or whatever, X custom sounds, X custom items, and so on, so that we don't overflow the limits). Then I combine all of them into one world, and people can play them and vote on their favorite, without knowing who made which. We'll see who does the best! Anyway, you can also use this to import old stuff into a new world, but be warned you'll get a lot more than you bargain for, and will have to delete all the extraneous tiles, custom items, and custom sounds you don't really want to use, and test thoroughly to make sure you didn't cross things up in the process.

Hey, maybe we can even offer a Balderdash-style contest - one 'famous' world-builder and a bunch of others (famous or not - anybody who wants to enter) all make levels on a certain theme, and people have to guess which one was made by the specific builder. So all the other people would try to copy the style of that builder in making their level to fool people.

In addition to that, I'm looking at an alternative to CD issues - Discmakers offer an on-demand printing service that's cheap (and with all the pre-existing goodies and color, except the manual, which frankly was never very informative!), and I think Plimus offers warehousing and drop-shipping. Combining those two things makes me pretty much where we are now, only without all the work! And the prices should be not far from where they are, depends on what Plimus charges. Let's hope that works out.
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  Slow Going 06:53 PM -- Fri February 25, 2005  

Ratchet is hard on progress. But I've finished the first run-through, and am about halfway through the second (I've almost saved up enough for the RYNO! But I keep being unable to resist buying Mega weapons along the way... I could've bought it long ago if I hadn't been buying those). It can't distract me too much longer!

Really all I've accomplished on Sol Hunt this week is a lot of thinking, about 20 lines of code, and some specific plans. Specifically, I am going to begin by focusing on the multiplayer Dr. L style play (I'm calling that the "indoor game" as opposed to the "space game"), from which the single-player indoor game will flow, and after which I'll know enough to put together the space game pretty easily. Or decide it's too much work and just have a menu to put the planets together which is the smart thing to do... so I probably won't do it!

Today I listed out a bunch of weapons I'm thinking of, most of which are variations of ideas from the Dumb Idea "Buddy Blast". They should work nicely in a 2D combat environment. It'll be highly team focused since I'm stealing the Buddy Blast ideas (well, let me be clear: that's just what I'm currently thinking! Who knows what will really happen). Each weapon has a normal fire button and a Buddy fire button, which is some special way of shooting that usually incorporates a teammate somehow. Some basic examples (I'm leaving out the details, so no nitpicking please, like "won't that be a little unbalanced"):
  • Circus Cannon - The Buddy Fire sucks up any person or movable item (like a powerup) right in front of you, and the regular fire launches them out. If you suck up an enemy, he can shoot at you without even aiming as long as he is in your cannon. Use it to launch friends long distances or over water, and to launch enemies right into walls or other enemies. Yes, it's sort of inspired by Ratchet, but more inspired by the Grabby Gloves from my Buddy Blast design.
  • Shockinator - Fires a harmless electrical beam that locks onto anybody it hits. Buddy Fire it to pulse that beam briefly, doing damage to to the victim (if an enemy - if it's a friend, it static charges him so he electrocutes nearby enemies for a little while). The real fun is that if you lock it onto a friend, it comes out of that friend's gun (he can continue using his weapon as normal), so he can aim it at someone just by turning, and if he locks it onto a friend, it comes out of that friend's gun, and so on. When you pulse it, the damage is multiplied by how many guys it went through to get there. You can make a chain all across the level!
  • Prism Shield - Reflects enemy shots that hit your front when fire is held. Use Buddy Fire to hold it up on your back instead. In this mode, it doesn't reflect shots at all. Instead, any friendly shots that hit you in the back will split into 5 shots coming out your front in a spread.
As you can see, a well-organized team can really do amazing things with stuff like this. There are several others as well. Teamplay will be at the heart of the game, just like I wanted for Buddy Blast! In addition to weapons, you can also equip a Utility. These all use the same fuel: Plutonium, which you find around the level in very small quantities. They are things like Turrets, Mines, a Shield to become invincible, a Buddybot, the beloved Swapgun, and that sort of thing. Feel free to flood the Sol Hunt forum with your own ideas for weapons, items, and more that would be useful in a very team-oriented multiplayer game (keeping in mind it will play much like Dr. L in terms of perspective and all).
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  Ratchet!! 10:23 PM -- Sat February 19, 2005  

A lazy lazy saturday. The amazing Sol Hunt got me Ratchet 3! So now I have a headache from sitting in front of it for 4 hours. Ick. Such addiction. It gives me Sol Hunt ideas, it's, um... research! Sure!
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  Playtest Party 12:02 AM -- Fri February 18, 2005  

Well, we had a couple over for dinner and game night... Hamumu board game night! We played Arthouse, Art Attack, and Parallel. They loved Arthouse, both thought it was not for them at all (too difficult to think on the fly and make up silly descriptions, or even to draw something in the 1 minute you're given!), until they got a few rounds in and then they really started getting hooked. We all laughed the whole time.

Then we played Parallel. It did not work well. It's too complicated, and 50% of the people involved really weren't into it (interestingly, the two girls were the ones not into this computer-themed game...), although one of them ended up winning, which also shows part of the brokenness, because those of us who were trying our hardest to win were out first! I think there's some salvagable potential in it, but it needs to be simplified and yet given more options at the same time. It may take a fairly radical reworking.

To round out the night, we had our ice cream, and then played Art Attack. This very quickly became their absolute favorite! It went off without a hitch, and they repeatedly said they loved it. They ended up taking home copies of Arthouse and Art Attack to try out on their own. It was almost like a Tupperware party, only I didn't make any money.

I really couldn't see anything that even needed tweaking in the two art games. They just went so well. Well, I'd like to make a few changes to some Art Attack cards, but they were ones I thought I had already made, so I'm wondering if maybe those weren't the most recent cards. Ah yes, I check my files and I see that the cards have been improved since then! I was already ahead of myself. I really think it might be time to pursue publishing on these two. The only trick is... how? They're party games, which is the hardest market to punch into of all. I'm thinking of trying an agent and see what they say. They take a very large portion of the money, but it's not like I'd get very far trying to contact Hasbro or somebody directly.

Anyway, it really was a great experience. Nothing like seeing people laughing until they cry because of your creation! I wish I could get people testing this stuff every week. I've got so many more games I'd love to see played.
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