... what PC developers have been doing to them for years.

Safari for Windows is out. And so far, I’m not liking it. I am a PC user, but I own a Mac machine as well and I’ve used Safari on it a fair amount.

So what am I hating about it? First and foremost, Apple broke the golden rule that every PC software developer that ported to the Mac was shamed for doing: Apple has forced their OS’s s look/feel and UI conventions onto another OS. Take this screen shot of the Safari for Windows Preferences panel:

Game designer Justin Chin is posting art from his work-in-progress story Fuel and Fire -- at least one pic a day for the entire month of April. The stuff is very cool, modeled in SketchUp and tweaked in Maya. He often sites how the art came together, what tools he used, and behind the scenes bits. I’m anxiously looking forward to the days ahead, as he’s got a really great vision for the look of his comic. Check it out!

In my comments, someone took me to task for calling Kongregate a publisher.

In the CD-ROM and Floppy days, I knew what a publisher was. They were the ones who cut your deal with, and they were the ones who paid you when your game sold. They also normally were the ones who did stuff like make your your manuals, boxes, and discs, and they dealt with getting your games into stores.

Do Publishers like that still exist? Probably. But these days the people I (and most indie game developers) sign deals with and who send me check every month are the Portals. Portals can play a big factor in how many people play your game, how your game is marketed, and how much money you make. I don’t need CD-ROMs and boxes. I don’t need someone to go to the portals for me to get my game on their virtual store shelves.

So what am I missing by not having a “Publisher”? I’m losing out on retail distribution, although some of the portals are getting into that as well .In fact I just found out Rocknor’s Donut Factory is making its way into retail via an eGames collection. I’m probably missing out on getting some generalized marketing like press releases and whatnot. But that’s easy for me to do myself, too.

I can tell you one thing I don’t care I’m missing -- the percentage cut that publishers take. In fact at a GDC session, Merscom’s Lloyd Melnick said you can expect that about 2/3rds of your retail proceeds will go to your publisher if you have one. Ouch.

Portals are the gatekeepers these days. They publish games to their own sites. They are the new publishers. And when you see me use the term “publisher” on my site, I’m probably talking about a site that will get your game into the hands of a lot of players, and pay you for it.

Just a quick note to let all (three) of my readers know about my newest blog: Junkyard Clubhouse. Humu and I are both bloggers there. It is our place to link to the fun, interesting, cool, strange, and wacky stuff that we don’t want to post on our more focused blogs. I’m still going to be posting to this one, and my hope is that JYC will allow me to keep this blog more on-topic with the stuff I write about here (video games, art, programming, and UI) Enjoy!

Another GDC is over and done with. Here’s some highlights:

• Running into Jedi Knight Alumni Justin Chin, Ray Gresko, and Chris Ross.
  
• Day 3: Seeing Richard Garriott (Ultima), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) and Shigeru Miyamoto (Donkey Kong/Super Mario Bros/Legend of Zelda) all in 1 hour time period at the IGF/Gamer’s Choice awards.
  
• Just about every session at the Indie Game Summit but especially Russell Carroll’s insightful session on indie marketing, which I believe was the most valuable discussion there.
  
• Meeting Gene Endrody (Sherwood Dungeon ), Jim Greer (kongregate), Derek Yu (Tigsource.com) and Dave Grossman (Sam & Max) face-to-face after only emailing them for so long …
  
• Raph Koster’s talk on “Where Game Meets the Web”. Nothing too insightful for me, but it was interesting to hear his assertion that the Game Industry more or less is (again, sigh) not paying attention to how the web innovates and evolves.
  
• Discussing the finer points of game design, UI, and “high-art” with the MawSoft crew.
  

The week provides me with more than enough creative energy to get me through another 360 days until the next one. Thanks to everyone mentioned here, and also those I didn’t mention.

While I’m going to be at GDC all next week to soak up as much as I can, I’ll actually be regurgitating exaggerations humbly discussing my misadventures in game development in a panel session about the challenges indie game developers face (although, most of the time I’ll be sitting there silent). It’s titled Challenges for New Game Developers and is a panel discussion including the following superstars of the indie game scene:

• Kalle Wik—President and CTO, Skunk Studios
  
• Patrick Wylie—Vice President, Big Fish Studios
  
• Peter Glover—VP, New Business and Technology, Atom Entertainment
  
• Ritesh Banglani—Product Manager, Director and Shockwave, Adobe Systems

Plus me. It’s on Thursday March 8, from 4:00pm — 5:00pm in room 3004, West Hall

Hope to see you there.

Creating Casual Games For Profit and Fun is a new book by Allen Partridge. Looks like a cool book, Allen contributes to the various Director mailing lists, has programmed a bunch of games, and for the book he interviewed lots of casual game developers. Here’s the description, from Amazon.com:

Thousands of game enthusiasts and would-be developers are searching habitually for an opportunity to expand their knowledge of games. Whether they’re clicking through Amazon or browsing Barnes and Noble, they are all looking for a path to their dream, a secret door into the games industry. The Casual Games Market is that secret passage. The industry, featuring online downloadable games generally delivered through distributors like Real-One Arcade, Shockwave.com and Oberon Media (via MSN Games and Pogo) has exploded over the past five years into a multi-billion dollar annual marketplace. Independent developers have rapidly discovered the field as one of the last remaining venues to break into the public eye. It is now the single most attractive opportunity available to anyone who wants to become a game developer. Casual Games for Profit and Fun introduces and defines casual games, explains the current state and scope of the industry, and describes the various genres, formats, conventions, and business models that define the industry today. It also teaches the basic casual game development techniques in Flash for the web, PC, and PDA’s and cell phones. Throughout the book users will learn how to create a variety of games that they can use for their own fun or sell commercially.

About the Author
Dr. Allen Partridge is Director of the Applied Media and Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Partridge owns Insight Interactive games and has developed a myriad of interactive 3D games. Partridge’s games are featured on Reflexive Arcade and in international publications. He has written several articles and a book on Shockwave 3D games and was the technical editor for Paul Catanese’s Director’s Third Dimension. Partridge is the host of the popular dirGames-l and dir3d-l mailing lists. See attached resume for more information.

Check it out on Amazon.com

Have you noticed that some of the applications you use are rendering text with Cleartype, even though you have turned Cleartype off in Control Panel? So did I. So I tracked down why it was happening and I fixed it.

I hate Cleartype. Cleartype is the Windows OS setting that uses sub-pixel antialiasing to make the curves in letters to look smoother. I hate it because it sacrifices color accuracy in exchange for edge accuracy, and I guess my eye is extra sensitive to the color shift, because it bugs the hell out of me. It also screws up screenhots. Whenever I get a new PC, one of the first things I do is turn off Cleartype. Read the rest of this entry

Popsci.com has an eight page interview with Will Wright, designer of simCity, the Sims, and many other games with “sim” in their title. In it he talks (and talks and talks) about Spore, which I’m really looking forward to. It’s a great article.

Here’s a morsel:

Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. so there’s an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play.

Warning! This is a heavily geeky Adobe Director post! This is something I’ve messed around with in Director for a while now, and I recently brought it up on Direct-L. A lot of people there hadn’t heard about it so I thought I’d blog about it here.

An object’s ancestor property allows you to attach a secondary object that will get events that the original object doesn’t get. For example you can attach a “car” child object as an ancestor to a “Probe” child object. Once you’ve done that, any events sent to “Probe” that the probe script doesn’t process will be passed on to “car”. If you’re confused, look it up in the help docs, because it’s only going to get , um, confusinger.

I discovered a while back that you can assign other types to a child object’s ancestor property and have the resulting object act like the ancestor’s ilk. And by “ilk” I mean lists, property lists, rect(), point(), image objects … you name it and it probably works. Read the rest of this entry