I’m still working as a contract programmer at a games studio at the moment. I’ve been coding user interface systems in Lua for the most part. But the project itself hasn’t been publicly announced yet so I can’t go into more detail than that right now.

I’ve been working this position for six months so far and I’m currently contracted for a few more months. Eventually I will get back to working on Substream full time. I’ve been separated from it lately in a variety of ways:

This is really focusing the work I do into very specific places. I’ve been prototyping enemy behaviours, which unfortunately was something I didn’t usually do until I already had a polished model. Using boxes to start with is a better approach!

The other thing about this situation is that I can’t really play the game at all, and haven’t for months!

So all my thoughts about it are at a very high level: What development practices have I been doing badly that I can improve? Why is it taking thrice as long as I expected? Is that a bad thing? I know I spent a week on this bit but is it actually fun? Can I schedule my work better? What things have I focused on too much, or not enough?

High level thoughts are welcome, because it can be really hard to access them when I am focused right down on the transparency of a particle or a bug in an algorithm. I’m making lots of notes, starting a full project schedule and a design manifesto so I can remember all this in a few months when my contract ends and I’m working on Substream full time again.

I’ve seen a few online discussions asking whether this constitutes a game. And some reviews on gaming websites which immediately suggest that it isn’t. I’ve seen these kind of arguments about projects such as Minecraft and Sleep is Death in the past as well.

FYI, I’m not about to quote a definition for “game” here.

In the UK in 1999 if you said you were “texting your friend” you would have been some kind of idiot. Your English teacher would have cracked a wooden ruler over your knuckles and told you that you were “composing a text to” because “text” is a noun. A few years later, “text” was added to the Oxford English dictionary as a verb because so many people were using “texting” this way that it had taken on a new meaning in the English langauge.

A review might be right to suggest that Dear Esther doesn’t fit a particular definition of game, but when you scroll down to the comments and see that it’s players “favourite game so far this year” and that they “would recommend the game” it’s the definition which may need some attention.

Gaming is growing and new genres are appearing. Not all games are going to be competitive or goal driven, but I’m sure the word “game” will get carried along with this movement. The dictionary is there to tell us what people mean by words, and that will largely be down to the public.

I’ve been doing some contract programming work for the last few months and this looks set to continue into early next year. The bad news is that Substream development is as good as paused during this time.

I’ve been pretty busy lately with this and other things. I tried to write some blog posts bringing the timeline up from my last post to the present but they didn’t get finished. To summarise: looking for contract work earlier in the year would have saved me a lot of stress. I have blown the original budget for Substream. I wish I’d approached a few things differently but I don’t regret aiming for the quality I’m aiming for. This work means I can continue to do that. Before I start on Substream again I want to make a rough long term schedule to see what I should be aiming to do. However I’ll be keeping the details to myself – I think giving my milestones and goals publicly (e.g. on this blog) hasn’t helped anyone. Stepping away from the project has been great for me, I’ve identified a few things that should be approached differently; in the way I code and in the game’s design.

I can’t promise another post here in the next couple of months, but Substream is definitely not geting canned or anything so please stay tuned!

Proun

A racing game with abstract art and a jazz soundtrack – This is my kind of game. Rather than racing along a 2D road surface, Proun has you wrapping around a pipe which snakes through it’s understated geometry. Solid controls, radiosity lighting and depth of field effects make this game look and feel as smooth as smooth jazz.

Fotonica

Fotonica plays something like a cross between Canabalt and Mirror’s Edge, and looks like neither. Controlled with one button you sprint along a wireframe course leaping from one surface to another. Release your button to jump, or hold it to run or dive out of the air. Sounds simple but the speed, effects and animations make this intense.

Rock Paper Scissors

Now I’m sure you’ve played rock paper scissors before, but (probably because I’m a programmer) it’s the AI in this version that grabbed my interest. The Veteran AI is simply based on all the play history the system has gathered since it’s been online. And if you want you can watch how the computer is deciding what to do next. Trying to outsmart it seems to be the safest way to lose.

Did I succeed? Yes and No. ;o)

At the start of June I took a build of Substream on my laptop to the monthly Sheffield Indies meet up evening, where some local game developers get together to drink and chat about the making of games. I got some interesting feedback from this, as well as some more thoughts and bugs from online testers at around the same time. Addressing all of this took a week. Fixing one set of issues brings others to the foreground so I wanted to address some of the common problems and ideas sooner rather than later. Several people wanted better visual and audio feedback about when you or an enemy has been hit which will I hope will make the game feel fairer.

In the next two weeks of June I built half of the level. This means I was fairly accurate in my prediction, in this case at least. That’s reassuring.

But I then I got bored!… One problem with working on a game that’s synced to music is that I need to listen to that music over and over again. I need to listen to each small section carefully to get inspiration, understand the patterns, and then check that everything is syncing correctly. So I don’t think I’ll be assigning “month X for level Y” in the future. I need to swap and change to stay sane.

I probably have enough material for a new trailer now, but I’m not putting that together immediately as I’d like to have a preview build I can send out at the same time. A preorder with beta access is still the plan after that.