Joseph Burchett

As I had stated in a previous posted I made, I am the organizer of a game development meetup in the Sacramento area, and well…   It turned out amazingly well!  The whole event was hosted and catered by an a truly awesome Sacramento social gaming company called Klicknation, best known for the creation of Super Hero City on Facebook.  Not everyone in the entire world could be there to see the awesomeness that is Klicknation but luckily lots of media was taken for your viewing pleasure!  First up we have a lovely slide show of all the images taken from the meetup, enjoy

This first video was basically the introduction for everything that was going to happen at the meetup… Sadly the camera was positioned underneath some sort of vent or something, so it was really hard to hear what was going on in the first 15 minutes, sorry about that.  It’s still good stuff, you get to hear the CEO of KlickNation; Mark Otero and his partner discuss the origins of the company and how they got to where they currently are now.

In this next video Mark gives an awesome presentation showing off the features of their new game along with a short demo (amazing stuff!).

Then Aaron Nemoyten the product manager of Superhero City gives a great presentation on Superhero City. He talks about it’s creation, where it’s going and much more!

Then to finish it off the Klicknation crew open up to some Q&A, were they answer a ton of questions.  Sadly due to the distance of the camera and the lighting it’s a bit hard to see and hear what everyone was asking, still great though.

After a long night of Klicknation I very gracefully finished the night off with my presentation on using the Flash platform for mobile game development… Sadly the battery went out on the camera about halfway through my talk, so things had to be cut short. Oh well, at least you get to see me make a fool of myself for the first 25 minutes

Well that was the meetup, all and all id say it turned out to be pretty darn good.  Well Over 70 rsvp’ed and from the looks of it probably 30 or so showed up, which I think is a pretty great turn around.  It was really nice to see all of the game development talent in Sacramento, and hopefully with more of these meetings it will allow for the game development community to really develop and make Sacramento a hot spot for game development like it is in the Bay area.  I mean we are like two hours away from San Fransisco!  So close, yet so far away.

Sorry once again for the audio/video quality, was the first time I actually did video and what not for a meetup…  Next time should be much better

Go to 8bitfeed.com to watch my very first video interview, I discuss ways to get into the Flash based web industry and my thoughts on how to get into the Flash game industry and the game industry in general. Apologies for the odd eye blinking and my constant looking down… I couldn’t wear my glasses because of the glare, I am blind as a Bat without them! Anyways, I hope you all enjoy and find it all very informative.

Also make sure to check out all the other videos, articles and features at 8bitfeed.com, great web site for anything tech related!

http://8bitfeed.com/2009/10/joseph-burchett-interview/

Although the game isn’t really out of beta yet I thought id talk a it about a really nice little flash game that a fellow Flash developer of mine has been working on. The flash game is called Polyn, which can be found at http://playpolyn.com/, it’s a very cute little and very much educational game, where you play as a little bee that pollinates words that you have created by clicking on different letters. But you know… It probably be best to just really break it all down, so lets get right to it!

After playing the game it seems rather clear that the purpose of this game was to help teach a much younger audience how to create words. So assuming that was the purpose I tested the game out on my 9 year old sister, things didn’t go as well as I thought they would. In the opening screen of the game you are presented with three choices for the game difficulty… That was clear enough for her, she just choice easy. But then once she got right into the game she seemed pretty lost into what she had to do.

When the game play begins you are presented with a large list of letters that you have to pick from, you are then suppose to click on a few letters until you create a word. I had to point out to her that this was indeed what you had to do. After she started creating a few more words, she began to enjoy it, but then she encountered a mistake! She was very unclear on how to remove the letter, being there was nothing clearly marked showing how to do so. I then showed her that she had to click on it to remove it, and yeah.

As all of this was happening at the top a small horizontal bar of what looked to be honey was slowly going down, so basically you were being timed to see how many words you could create with in a certain amount of time, which I thought was a nice way to progress the game. After the timer had run out she then put in her name into a score board so she could be compared against others. That was a pretty clever idea to incorporate competition into this sort of game, keeps it fun.

What I would say would probably be the best way to make these types of games very clear is to embed the tutorial into the game play, so that it teaches you how to play as you go. It may be a lot more work and effort, but this way the user doesn’t have to wave through the “how to” (most people won’t, especially with web games they just want to play, not read how to play). The first time I booted up the game the first thing I did was click “easy” and tried to start playing, clueless with in the first few seconds I immediately closed the game. So if you can make your game easier to understand right on start up then you will pull the person in a lot faster and keep their attention.

When I tried to press the “Esc” key to make an option screen pop up nothing happen. Always want to have some sort of option screen. The user needs some way of going back to the main screen, adjusting the quality, or just pausing the game. I wouldn’t say all of these are essential but it would really help to be able to go back to the main screen and change the difficulty.

As for the game play itself, I found it to be pretty fun, very relaxing and simple. Create the words, click the bee and he flies around all happy and eliminates the words I just used, it put a nice little smile on my face like I had just accomplished something. Although I did find it a bit odd when I started putting in words like “we” and it did not recognize it… But when I put in words like “mes” it did, id assume it’s because it’s all still just buggy considering it’s in beta.

The graphics are very colorful, and very appealing! Love the cheerful music to, as soon as the game started up it caught my attention! Not enough flash games have animations, it really makes things stick out! I like how the bee flies around and sparkles follow him when he pollinates the flowers and all that good stuff.

The controls were pretty responsive, and straight forward for this type of game… You just move the mouse over and click on a letter or button on the screen… Nothing really to complex, pretty to the point. Would like to point out a few bugs though… For one when I clicked on the “hard” difficulty every once in a while two bees would just show up and float around. Also after the game is over and you are asked to “pollinate again” clicking that button actually locked up both of my browsers! Latest FireFox and IE8, I am on Vista Home edition… Don’t think that matters, but that was a big one.

All and all id say the game is pretty nice! Needs a bit of work, but for a beta it’s pretty well done. This would defiantly be an excellent game for teaching young people how to create words, it really does have that sort of appeal! Really look forward to playing the final build and seeing what you come up with to further improve this already great game!

Lets say you have a game idea, a really good game idea, with tons of funding and no worries at all, you are financially in a safe place and with a very strong and balanced team of programmers, designers, and and artists. A couple of months have passed by and your game is out and booming! I mean you are really making some serious cash, heck you are even about to break even. But then suddenly the money begins to stop coming in as fast… You begin to wonder why. You have the perfect team, everyone is top notch in their profession it just doesn’t seem to add up. But then you start looking to the forum and seeing comments pouring in talking about how the game is slowing down, bugs are being found and people are complaining about more and more issues. So of course you go and try and fix these problems, but then suddenly your developers begin running into their own problems. They are unable to easily track down a bug, things keep happening really randomly, hours upon hours are spent tracking down mundane issues, moving through waves and waves un-structured and barely documented code. This situation is what you would call being in
Technical Debt.

Technical debt is when you start loosing money because you are losing players from not being able to fix issues fast enough, or not being able to easily add new features fast enough. Now of course an argument can be made that a lot of really big company’s may have really unmanageable code and they are thriving and doing really well… This may be true but you also have to keep in mind that because whatever made them so successful was good enough to allow them to grow at an astounding rate they were then able to just toss more and more developers at the spaghetti code because they could offered it. But if you are a much smaller company you are almost always doomed to fail. Because when you are in “start up” mode you need to be able to effectively support and expand your game without issues and with as quick a turn around as possible.

A lot of people would also argue that in time once enough money has come in then they will then be able to sit down and begin re-factoring the code to make it work more effectively… But way to often people get in the mind set of “well, it does work… Ill just make it better later”, and they never get back to it! This makes for bad engineering and badly designed code. It is still very possible to dish out a product in a short amount of time if you train your developers to code in a clean and effective way; K.I.S.S. This is something honestly that a lot of so called “Software Engineers” are lacking these days…. Discipline.

By becoming more discipline it allows you to be much more productive because instead of having to wave through tons and tons of code you can look through simple, small and very clean looking code, this in turn making it super easy to find a solution to a problem. By doing things this way you also allow your developers to develop good coding habits and very effective code. When they begin to develop these good habits and practices it makes it easier to design a very loosely-coupled system, which in turn makes it easier to introduce new features into the game thus earning you money and making your users very happy!

To sum it all up it’s a very bad idea to think that just because you are able to get your game out there fast by simply slapping some code together in the end it will always come back to haunt you and possibly doom your project to ever having any type of success in the future.

All these thoughts are merely my opinions on the idea of technical debt and game development (or really any type of software development) I am sure many others share different ideas on the subject and id love to hear what you have to say. Also here are a couple of links to articles on how to optimize our code.

Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization techniques and practices
The Java Posse discuss technical debt
50+ important flash developers
.Net related but still good talk on writing good code

Although I have discussed in this post the down side to technical debt there can also be a good side to it all as well…  This excellent blog post discusses why you should “embrace technical debt” http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/07/embrace-technical-debt.html.  Very good read.

After using Apples app store for manly games and a few random apps here and there I have begun to notice that when it comes to games the app store really is like another low grade Flash game portal. Especially after reading Keith Peters blog post on the app store (and his lovely return to the Flash world!), it has come to my attention that just like with Flash game portals games in the app store get buried pretty darn fast. Even though there seems to be websites popping up giving reviews on IPhone/IPod Touch games the only way I have really known of any quality games is simply either through blog posts/twitter or word of mouth.

Lost in an endless sea of games… That’s pretty much a Flash game portal in a nut-shell, and probably one of the biggest issues in why Flash game developers have such a hard time making a living off of it, one day your game is great and then it’s lost forever never to be seen again! This same sort of thing seems to be happening with games in the app store, except you hear more success stories of people becoming rich, simply because unlike with a flash game you have to pay money for what really essentially is just a higher quality flash game (some times not even that).

Really it seems to be that a lot of the top games you will see in the app store are games that are really simple (as Keith discusses in his blog post), and it’s these very same games that could be made in flash probably faster then it took for that IPhone/IPod Touch developer to make his/her game. Sure you have more powerful 3D possibilities but the type of people who use the IPhone/IPod Touch I am pretty sure are not looking for a hardcore 3D experience… Okay, well I may be wrong with that, I am sure there are many people looking to replace their handheld gaming device with their mobile device as their gaming platform of choice, but I bet a pretty large percent are people who just want something quick and easy to play to pass the time while they are waiting in line or something, hence the reasoning why Popcap’s games are so popular.

Also It seeming like that a lot of the same trends that have been with the Flash gaming community for a while are staring to be adopted in the IPhone/IPod Touch gaming world… The idea of putting your games out for free with ads and that sort… In a way it’s just becoming a dumping ground for just lots of random games. Sure the app store has the “Top 25″, but it seems like if you don’t make it there then why even bother spending time making a game for the app store? I mean really at that point wouldn’t it make more sense to put that same simple game out to a dozen different portals using “flash game distribution“, apply ads to the game and just put it out and get immediate feed back on your game? Why spend all that time working and trying to compete with the growing number of mainstream companies that are putting there games on the app store, and having to wait for Apple to okay your game when you can have your game made in less then a week and get feed back possibly with in minutes of posting!

Money is always lovely, don’t get me wrong! But just seems odd to me that so many are flocking to the IPhone/IPod Touch spending all there time (and money) trying to make a really killer 3D game which will essentially be lost in the shuffle, when they could have made a much simpler game, quicker, gotten instant feed back and possibly made some real money off of it depending on how they approach the marketing/development of the game in Flash. You know now that I think about it why not just prototype your game in Flash, see if it does well then port it to the app store, this seems to work very well with Shift. But yeah, I suppose I am getting a bit off topic here… Basically my point is I really feel the app store is becoming nothing more then a low grade flash portal, unorganized and just a dumping ground for games, sad but true…

This same type of issue is happening with the XNA Community games, but I won’t get into all of that…

Forgive me if this turned out to be more of a rant, but I was searching through the app store and felt the need to express my opinion on it… Anyways, it’s 3am… Time to sleep.

When it comes to making a game the only thing I am decent at is programming, everything else, well, I just suck at! Luckily I found a bunch a links to free audio/art assets that you can use to make games

http://pushbuttonengine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=90
http://wiki.freegamedev.net/index.php/Free_3D_and_2D_art_and_audio_resources#Pixel_art
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/
http://tsgk.captainn.net/
http://www.idevgames.com/news/textures-brushes-models-free-game-assets
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/index.html?genre=Rock
http://www.flashkit.com/loops/
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/
http://forum.freegamedev.net/
http://www.flashsandy.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=683&p=4022&hilit=free+models#p4022
http://charas-project.net/resources.php?wa=0%E2%8C%A9=fr&area=Charasets&offset=85&howmany=10&fsearch=
http://www.videogamesprites.net/
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-excellent-free-3d-model-websites/
http://www.findsounds.com/types.html

Well I did it, after what like…  *counts on fingers* almost three weeks!  I finally finished editing the first episode of the second podcast I started up   Game Developers Radio.  I interviewed Ada Chen of product marketing from Mochi Media about their up coming Flash Gaming Summit.  She was real nice, and besides me saying “like” a million times (edited most of it out ) and talking a bit fast, I must say it went very well

I already have a whole list of people I want to email so I can setup interviews with them next…  Going to try and get all kinds of different developers on the podcast, so stay tuned   So yeah, check out the episode, and make sure to leave lots of comments if you liked it (or didn’t ).

This is so exciting, can’t wait to see who I can get on next

-Joe

I finally bought my ticket for the Flash Game Summit and I must say I am really excited to go!  I looked up the Schedule they have planned and well there is going to be some really exciting speakers talking at the event!  For those of you who are not aware of what the Flash Game Summit is, think of it as like, uhm…  The GDC of Flash games   At least that is the way I think of.  Anyways, this should be really fun, I will defiently be twittering about  it and taking pictures when I go   To bad it is only one day.