A great many respected game developers seem to start down the road to their next brilliant creation with these tools:

These days, I find myself starting here:

In many ways I envy those who’ve found joy in the analogue implements. Perhaps at the end of a career it’s something magical to sift through stacks of dog-eared and war-torn papers, some stained with the rings of an errantly-placed caffeinated beverage or perhaps the scorched trail of a forgotten lit cigarette.

It’s a shame, then, that Unity so nearly freely translates ideas directly from the brain into digital life, where the only notes made are those in the margins of a Google Doc or an Evernote, or perhaps whispered softly into a voice memo app.

In the end though, it doesn’t really matter how you arrive, only that you have the most fun getting there.

In case you missed it, last weekend was the 10th anniversary edition of the Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making competition & jam.

I entered, and completed, the competition for the 5th time in a row. It’s been one of the constants in my game development life since I went independent nearly two years ago.

I still remember how much of a stressful rush the first one was. I was basically in a manic panic for 48 hours straight, and when I finally and nervously published my entry I collapsed in a shivering heap and slept for a whole day.

Back then I had only the slightest idea what I was doing with the tools I’d chosen. Then, as now, the mandate was only to “ship” a playable build within the time limit.

I didn’t really think too much of the consequences of “winning” the competition back then, but the simple act of entering and chronicling the process in the blog netted me a minor boost in exposure. To anyone casually observing the event the benefits of crafting a good game and winning entry were pretty obvious. Many independents don’t want to admit it, but there is a very legitimate business angle to competing in the Ludum Dare. You can go from unknown to well-known in independent gaming circles in 48 hours (plus 3 weeks for rating and results, of course).

When there were only 300 entries to the competition, I felt like I had a shot.

graph via Jari Komppa (@sol_hsa)

This time there were just over 1400 entries. It’s become less of a contest of skill and more of a lottery. I’m still down for the challenge, but I don’t think I’m going to be trying as hard to “win” as I have in the past. And maybe this is better for the soul.

As for the resulting game, I’m satisfied with what I produced. I know that my greatest weakness as an independent game developer is the creation of emotional and meaningful gameplay. Fortunately this is a common weakness and typically the key ingredient when crafting a hit. It’s the lightning in the bottle, that perfect mix of charm and engagement that gets people playing and then subsequently talking about your game.

I know I can make a game that works. It’s making one that charms that remains the last hurdle that should transform what I’m doing into an actual money-earning livelihood.

To all Ludum Dare’ers who submitted a completed compo entry, I salute you. Especially you first timers, good show and I hope your game gets all the recognition it deserves.

Be My Friend

Concerning Facebook. I used to think like this, and maybe even back then it was a bit wrong-headed.

I’m tired now. I get physically and mentally tired, when I go to Facebook and stare at that Wall. It just seems like such a clusterfuck, like I’m looking at the guts of something and watching it sputter and wheeze without really accomplishing anything meaningful for me.

Twitter has nearly completely supplanted my broadcasting needs. It’s unfortunate that the handful of folks who I’ve collected to my Facebook don’t really use it, but whatever.

So I’m reversing my policy, and opening up my account to whomever wants to be Friends. I want to take advantage of some of the gaming opportunities presented by Facebook, most particular the current alt-game that Funcom is running for the Secret World. This seems like a worthy use of the system.

So, to that end, I’m now accepting any and all Friend requests on Facebook. Add me, I’ll add you back. Check out all the crap I’ve collected on my Wall so far and I’ll take a look at yours. Let’s see if we can wring some use out of that terrible network before the whole thing implodes.

While we’re on the vein of social networking, I’ve also added a Twitter “terms of service” page that’s linked to the personal account. It explains a bit of the hows and whys and wherefores of my behavior on that fantastic 140-character merry-go-round.

Et Cetera

Work continues on Project Prevengeance. Apple Developer licenses have been renewed and the iPad should be swallowing a hot load of our tower brawl sometime this year.

Writing has all but stopped in favor of game development. It’ll come around again. It always does.

I’m heavily invested in Guild Wars 2. I’ve put a few hours into the beta and I can tell you it’s good. I’m looking forward to launch, and hope to run/manage a guild, something I wanted to do in the World of Warcraft but never really made the time for.

I guess that’s it for now. In case you skipped down here to the end:

• Ludum Dare 48 no.23 is done and under review.
• Let’s be Facebook Friends.
• Prevengeance is coming.

Oh, and the new Jack White is pretty darn good:

The image above is one that I commonly link to friends who announce their birthdays over social networks. A fun jab, but also a grim reminder that life’s short.

I’m half-way to 74, which was at one time the average life expectancy for a Japanese male. I’m not sure if I’ve gone through a mid-life crisis yet, though I have been looking rather seriously at the latest model Dodge Challengers, perhaps an equivalent to a Harley Davidson for someone who doesn’t ride motorcycles.

This also means I must once again traverse the stretch of time that’s brought me from birth to this point, and on reflection it’s a hell of a long journey. One that at one point I never thought I’d make very far.

When I was 17 I was a drug-dealing low-life on his way to rock-bottom. I often celebrated the fact that we were all living fast and hard and on our way to dying young and leaving good-looking corpses. If you couldn’t romanticize what you were doing, there wasn’t much point to doing it. I honestly never thought I’d make it to 25.

I crashed hard into the bottom when I was 21. Penniless and strung out, malnourished, spiritually broken, living hand-to-mouth and falling into a dirty, sweat-stained mattress at the end of each harrowing day there were really only two options left. Die, or climb out of the hole I’d dug those past 5 years.

Obviously I made the “positive” choice. I went back home, cleaned myself up, finished school, and got back on the path that I’d left as a younger man of 15, playing games on his NES and PC into the late hours of the night as Link and the Avatar of Virtue. The kid who loved Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy novels, and technology more than anything else in the world.

It would be another 6 years before I got some inkling of what I’d really wanted to do with my life. In that time I’d work as a sushi chef, waiter, security guard (fully licensed, educated in the fine arts of calling the police in the event of an actual crime), and English teacher. It would be 8 more years after that before I’d really be in the position to do what I wanted to do: make video games and write novels all day.

The point here is that it’s never too late to start something, but you’ve got to be prepared to run a long race, and it’s one that never really ends.

Back On My B.S.

It’s been over 5 months since starting the first full collaborative project on the Acre, code-named “Prevengeance“. It’s a brilliant design by Darryl Spratt, and the first real “money” project I’ve done.

The thing is that shortly after we started work, Darryl got a job working on this monstrosity. It was going to be good experience for him, and more importantly a few months of salary. So we stopped working on Prevengeance, mostly due to certain contractual obligations on his end. I poked away at it here and there, but spent more of the time expanding my skillset.

As is often the case in the games industry, D’s contract came to an end and with it his employment. Now back on the bread-line, he can focus his energies on getting Prevengeance out the door. I’m now back working full-time on the game, and we’re doing our damnedest to get it into a state where it’s ready for the world. In development terms it’s still pre-alpha, meaning that it’s not quite fully playable. I’d say it’s got a little bit more to go before we can see if all the proposed designs will work together, and then after that things should happen very quickly to get it to market.

Follow the Dark Acre Games account on Twitter or the subscribe to the Dark Acre Page on Facebook to keep abreast of developments, if you’re keen on that kind of thing. Of course there’ll be an official announcement here once everything’s ready to go.

VENLAFAXINE XR 37.5MG

Depression is common among stay-at-home, self-isolated independents. It’s a condition that creeps over, slowly, insidiously, and the early warning signs can be quite easily dismissed as funks, “periods you’re going through”, or par for the course.

Left undiagnosed and untreated it can lead to all kinds of nasty things. It can wreck relationships and even end lives.

I started feeling a sort of distant malaise last year. I thought at that time that I was just burning out, working too hard, and a short jaunt to Japan would fix it. It turns out it ran deeper than that.

I was extremely resistant to getting diagnosed. It’s a scary thing. A lot of us have grown up under the negative stigma of mental problems, and how badly society treats people who could be perceived as “crazy”. It’s worse in a real workplace, never mind for an independent working for him or herself. In an office, if people think you’ve got mental issues, you could suffer all kinds of social shame. It’s even possible your career could take a turn for the worse as you get passed over for promotion for other more “reliable” candidates.

It’s a shitty reality to face. And then what, after diagnosis? Therapy? A lifetime of pills? All of these fears are real and justifiable.

Unfortunately they’re the lesser of two evils. If you’re sick, you need to get treatment. It’s what I did for 5 years of my life in the pursuit of the ultimate high. I was self-medicating back then, and I’d left the ultimate cause of my symptoms untreated.

It took me nearly 20 years to come to grips with the fact that there was something bothering me, something that had turned my personality against me and pushed people away.

Just talking to someone about it helped a lot, and then of course there’s the medication. My condition isn’t full-blown clinical depression, though it could have been if I’d left it to fester. If I’d been more of a drinker, or still been abusing drugs, it could have been much worse. Fortunately I’ve kept clean, and with a little bit of help I should be right as rain.

The interesting thing for me was, after leaving the doctor’s office for the first time with a better sense of what had been bothering me for most of life, I started to think of the other people I was passing in the street. How many others like me were keeping things inside themselves, festering, turning their own characters against themselves? Or how many more were currently being treated for such? People I’d dismissed as jerks and assholes might simply have been manifesting some deep-seeded and unaddressed psychological issues.

It really makes you think.

Thanks as always for your support, and stay tuned for further details on Prevengeance! Also, hope to see you at the upcoming Ludum Dare 48 special 10-year anniversary jam!

Until next time!