One of Nan and my favorite TV mini-series is Return to Treasure Island (starring Brian Blessed). If you don’t have it, you can buy it here. (Region 2 DVDs only.)

We watched it again this past week, and this time we made a drinking game to go along with. We used peanut M&Ms and went through about 2 pounds of ‘em! Here are the rules in full, have fun! Download/Print PDF.

Return to Treasure Island (Brian Blessed) Drinking Game

If you’re teetotalers like us, or under age, use M&M’s instead. It has the same effect if you play for long enough.

Take a shot when …

• Someone gets knocked unconscious
• Someone mentions “slipping their cable”
• Someone mentions “diamonds, rubies, and sapphires”
• The map changes hands
• The map is hidden
• Long John fights someone with his crutch
• Long John bribes, flatters, or threatens someone
• Jim is captured
• Jim tries to flirt
• Jim appears shirtless
• Ben Gun taps his nose or whoops
• Van Der Brecken mentions “a plan”
• Van Der Brecken kicks
• Van Der Brecken expresses his dislike or distrust of Long John
• Rev. Morgan mentions “the Lord”
• Trelawney says “What?”
• Keelhaul cackles

So, if you’ve been following this blog for a while (like a year) you might recall last year’s “October Challenge” game called “Stealth Target” that I attempted to release as a paid beta game, which I then issued refunds for and then made a few vague efforts to revive and .. well ..

I mean, it looks, sort of okay. Those dynamic lights are neat stuff, man I learned a ton about OpenGL and tricks doing this game. The trouble is, since it is a 3D rendered game, when you stick it next to shots of (links to any recent Unity game on touchArcade left as an exercise to the reader) it looks awful. “Why is this dev even bothering?” Coupled with the fact that the interface was a bit kludgy using a mouse and at least twice as bad using touch, it just wasn’t a great fit for, well, anything sadly. To finish the project it would take me at least 3-4 more months of serious work and I don’t expect that I would be happy with the final result, so I had to kill it.

.. But I had written some keen code. And I still liked the game concept. So I thought about it a bit more. I had made another game a ton of years ago called Escape from Anathema Mines. It was a similar “dodge the guards” type of game with an overhead visual aesthetic that actually worked pretty well.

I thought it over and decided that with some of the GL experience I had acquired while working on Stealth Target, and by going in the direction of the overhead view that worked so well in that game, I could re-mix the two games together and create something new and exciting and simple enough that I could get it done. After just a few days of work I’ve already got a OpenGL / HD playable of Escape from Anathema Mines.

I’m going to extend the game with some of the bomb concepts from Stealth Target and maybe top it off with some other wacky features. This game is much easier to work on for the primary reason: it isn’t in 3D. Not being in 3D just makes rendering and working on it so much easier. One thing that also helped getting this up and running quickly was being able to reuse a ton of the code / algorithms that I had already written for Stealth Target.

I also been learning about the Object Component model over the past year and I’m using this game as my first attempt at it. I went to a talk at 360iDev (check it out) and got a very nice overview of the model. But the BIGGEST point he made that worked for me was when he said, “It doesn’t really matter how you do this, as long as it works for you. You won’t make a perfect model, so just make one that gets the job done and don’t feel bad about it.” Which was really liberating for me, I’ve always felt it was supposed to be some perfectly coded model, and being allowed by someone to just “get the job done” really helped. I was able to use the things I learned in his talk to help my code without having to do weird stuff that wouldn’t work with my style of coding. I have everything in a single structure named Entity. Really simple, but the thing I also do is have a bunch of bools like “has_light” “has_position” and then more members like “position_x, position_y, light_a” and so on. That way everything is always there (very C) but it’s component oriented (I can test if a component is there and take action on it if it is.)

Here’s the level editor, which is actually is very similar to the one for Stealth Target, only .. since the game is actually an overhead game, it was a ton easier to get working.

So, yeah. I’m enjoying doing this project. It’s actually my “hobby project” which means I’m only allowing myself to work on it during off-hours. I will probably attempt to monetize it somehow, but my main goal with this project is to satisfy my need to get these game ideas out the door and see how they come out. I’ve got my main work hours dedicated to some of the other commercial projects I’m working on this year.

Which I should talk about more soon. A lot more.

-Phil

Hey,

I’m the dev / admin behind the Ludum Dare 48 hour game developer competition. This past weekend our competition grew from 350 contestants to 600 contestants thanks to @notch. Not only that but his live video blog of the event and twittering drove a TON of people over to the site just to spectate the event. This led to a ton of press coverage on. In short, 48 hour game development BECAME a spectator sport. Which is totally not something I had anticipated – here’s a completely inaccurate motivational poster I created a few years ago:

Anyway, that wasn’t the case, and this is what happened. (Short version: $8 shared hosting server burned to the ground and we got kicked off and had to find greener pastures, and then do a ton of optimizing.) I want to give a shout out to Mike Kasprzak for keeping the masses at bay and helping to endlessly test the site and hold my hand while I worked through all the mess. Here’s the lessons learned:

1. Profile site database use.

You can find out what queries are killing your site by using the WPDB Profiling plugin. This was a HUGE deal for us. We were able to see exactly what queries were destroying us. Without any debate this is the #1 tip I have, because if you don’t know what the problem is you can’t fix it!

2. Remove inessential plugins.

Not all WordPress plugins are developed with massing scaling in mind. We found by disabling all the plugins except for the essential plugins we were able to go much faster. Not only that but even efficient plugins add a CPU drain to the site just by having their PHP files loaded.

3. Clear out the sidebar.

Sidebar stuff can also be a huge drain. We just plain removed the sidebar for the competition. We’ll probably re-enable some of it eventually, but be careful, even some of the WordPress issued functions have some monster queries in them.

4. Optimize slow 3rd party plugins.

One plugin we wanted to keep using I like this is really cool, but it uses a table that is not indexed and it adds an extra query per-post on the front page of your site. I indexed the columns in the custom table it had as well as removed the unnecessary per-post query it was issuing. Now we can use that cool plugin without any notable slowdown. Here’s my bug report / patch.

5. Add in custom caching to 3rd party plugins.

Our custom competition plugin was really un-optimzed. I had written it to just work, and it worked great under low load. I used a number of techniques to reduce the load:

- I added in my own mini profiler so I could track how often certain functions were being called and how long they were taking. This helped me track down the issues to an even finer detail than I was able to with the WPDB Profiling plugin.

- I was using the get_userdata($uid) function from WordPress as many as 600 times on a page, so I cached that data with the records in my database so I would almost never have to call it, that was probably the biggest issue and was causing 600 database queries on those pages.

- I added paging to the various views so that instead of seeing all 600 entries at once, you only see 24 at a time, this really reduced load in terms of queries and images being loaded off the site in one request.

- I also added some page caching for the few pages that calculate results, this is largely a CPU save because generating those pages is pretty intensive

6. Be smart with 3rd party caching solutions.

Pre-made caching solutions for WordPress can’t save you if your site is largely driven by custom plugins and signed-in users using web apps (like our compo system), in fact those caching plugins actually can slow down the site quite a bit. They are designed more for static content blogs (which is more typical for blogs) and probably work great for those, but for us they didn’t work so hot.

… Conclusion.

I’m now quite happy with how the site is performing. We’ve reduced the load on our new VPS from 70 or so (meaning that we had about 30x as many processes wanting to use the CPU as the server could handle) down to about 0.5 which means we’ve got room to handle spikes again. I hope

-Phil

Hey,

So, I’m joining forces with a few other indie game developers to post some short youtube videos talking about being an indie game developer. It’s called “indie indie conversation“. Be warned, though I keep it pretty SFW, not everyone else does.

Cheers!
-Phil

So, hey, we recently (3 months ago) moved to “the goat ranch” and I finally got around to decorating my office. Since moving in, I’ve released one game and I’ve got three (or so) in the works. So a lot of stuff is going to be happening here this year!

Everything in that picture has got some sort of anecdote behind it, so if you’re curious about anything, just ask

-Phil

So, I just sent out my “hey everyone, come get a refund” email to all the people who purchased the Stealth Target beta. There are a number of pretty high-profile indie games that have built an entire business upon being a paid beta. Minecraft, Wolfire’s Overgrowth, Data Realm’s Cortex Command are a few that come to mind.

Here’s some analysis on the subject, and why it didn’t work for Stealth Target .. and at the same time, the factors I think that would be important to having a successful paid-beta project.

• Commitment to a larger vision. In the case of Stealth Target, I had a larger vision, but I eventually realized it was too grand for me to realize.  I’m more of a small-scale game kind of guy at this point.  Perhaps later in my game development career I’ll be doing larger projects, but right now, a “Galcon-sized” game is about as large as I can manage.  I think paid-beta games need to be larger to justify the whole “user-buy in to help fund an epic game” concept.
• Commitment to regular updates. I’m only one dev, and when I take a month to work on Galcon updates, and then take another month to take a break, suddenly the beta users haven’t heard a peep from me about the game in 3 months.  Pretty weak “paid beta”.  If I had a team and I had someone always working on the beta so it kept living despite my other obligations / plans, it might have gone better.
• Building a development team. Yeah, I just touched on that, but it really does make sense.  I could have a team, but my lifestyle doesn’t allow for it at the moment.  My hours are too random and my work schedule too unpredictable.  To have a team you have to have some consistency in your life, otherwise (I’m pretty sure) your team-members will get pretty tired of you.  I think having a team would help deliver the quantity and quality of content and updates to make a paid beta make sense.
• You can’t change your mind and be crazy. I still plan on finishing Stealth Target, however, I’m no longer planning on doing a desktop release of the game.  The paid beta was for a desktop version of the game.  So changing to a iOS-only plan really isn’t possible.  The only way to cleanly resolve this was to terminate the entire beta and issue refunds.  Really, for a paid-beta to make sense, the users have to have something they can depend on, and changing platforms mid-stream is just asking too much.

Anyway, to wrap it all up, here’s the email I sent out to folks who already bought the game today:

Hi,

Turns out the business model of doing a pre-beta-sale really doesn’t make sense for me.  I’m more of a “do what I feel like” kind of guy, and committing to making some sort of super-great-game in some kind of pre-beta-sale promise just isn’t something I can really do.  I think in the case of “Stealth Target” I bit off way more than I can chew.

I’m hoping to finish Stealth Target this year, but I’m probably only going to release it to mobile platforms, so I don’t even think I’m going to be launching a desktop version.

Either way .. I’m offering refunds to anyone who wants one!  Just reply to this email and say so.

Thanks for coping with a crazy indie-dev  Your support is greatly appreciated and I hope I can churn out some cool games that you’ll enjoy in 2011!

Cheers!
-Phil

P.S. Also, thanks for all the feedback you have given me so far on Stealth Target.  I’ve been taking notes on just about everything! You’ve been a huge help!

And, who knows what the future will hold for Stealth Target.  If the mobile version comes out feeling really good, I might try and release it for the desktop.  But the important thing for me is to know that I’m not obligated to produce a “desktop-sized” title when I’m really making a “mobile-sized” game.  I’ve got a lot of things I want to do this year, and I want to do them in the order that I want them to.  A paid-beta project would have “cramped my style” so to speak, and I don’t want to subject my users to a shoddy paid-beta experience.

Thanks!
-Phil

I think we all have a duty to produce a unique centerpiece for Thanksgiving (or your equivalent national eating turkey holiday.)

This was my Thanksgiving centerpiece from last year. Part of it was performance art – the construction of the piece as the turkey was being cooked. It was made from Cheetos cheese doodles and toothpicks.

This year, I’m considering some other options. Possibly even options that might be semi-relevant to this blog. I’d say more, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.

-Phil

I spent the first few days this week integrating Galcon with the Sixense motion controllers! It was a nice break from the work on the Android as I waited for a G1 to get shipped to me (I’m not sure if Galcon will work on the low-end phones yet, but I’m going to find out soon!)

Working with the Sixense was very different, the controllers are great, and it really provides a completely unique Galcon experience. I modified the game to allow all modes to be played Co-Op with multiple users (mouse + up to 4 Sixense controllers). And I also added a special Sixense Multi-player mode where you are divided into two teams and can play against each-other.

Like with any interface design I always try and fit Galcon to the device. In this case, I had to modify a few subtle things in the user interface to make it work just right with the Sixense. I also set one of the controller’s buttons to be a “Select-all” and a “Deselect-all” button, which makes it easy to do those common actions. So I think I’ve done a pretty good job matching the Sixense controller interface with the Galcon interface. You can also see in the screenshot that each controller gets a different color for their planet selection / action choices, and the crosshairs contains the Ships % information. The mouse player still goes off the standard Ships % that’s show in the bottom right corner.

All-in-all, I think this variant of Galcon is going to be a ton of fun! I have no idea when it will be available for people to play, but I’m sure it’ll be good times when it is!

-Phil

So, turns out I’ve got a lot of cellphones now. But, in fact, I have service for none of them! I just use the Wi-Fi to test my games.

But, I found at GDC earlier this year when I first got the free Droid from Google (with free service for some amount of time) that having a cellphone with 3G in a city is super convenient! I was able to navigate the city and use busses and do all kinds of neat city people stuff. Wow! I even saved myself $50 by taking a bus to the airport instead of taking a taxi! Neat!

Unfortunately, eventually the free service period ended. The trouble is, when I check the Verizon website (which seems to be the carrier for Droid and Palm Pre, etc) they want me to buy a phone for $500 to get cell service. And maybe get a contract, or something. It was all very confusing and sounded pretty expensive.

But I just want to pay for a single month of 3G+voice+text service for one of the phones I already have. Or maybe I’d want to pay for some really basic voice service year-round and upgrade to 3G fancy stuff during the couple of conferences I go to. Or maybe pop on some service for like a weekend once in a while when I go to a city or something. Either way, I’m entirely unsure how to navigate the wide-world of cellphone plans.

Help me!!!
-Phil

P.S. I have a Nexus One, a Droid, a Palm Pre, and soon: a Palm Pixi and a G1. I’m entirely unsure what I can do with all these phones, but I want to be able to make calls and use 3G from time-to-time!

Hey,

I’m going to make a piece of custom artwork as a prize for a Galcon tournament! It’ll look something like this, but not exactly, because I already gave this one away to someone else:

That image was actually colored pencil + markers + water color on paper. Then I scanned it in, inverted it, and added a bit of glow. The winner will be getting a new piece of artwork – I’ll send them the original in the mail as well as display a slightly enhanced version on the website for everyone to envy

Anyway check it all out here.

-Phil