Hello! I’ve always wanted to type that so…

HELLO! Yes, we had a very nice chat with Sony yesterday. And by “we” I mean the absolutely lovely Andy White who rolled up in person to Sony HQ to talk to the equally lovely Shahid about bringing videogames and lasers to Sony. Because everyone needs more videogames and lasers.

Sadly, due to being up all night I had to go in via the medium of Skype (“Rob, you can turn your camera off if you want?”) but yes, it was a very nice meeting indeed.

To that end, I can vaguely say that whilst nothing is dotted and crossed yet, Andy and myself are VERY happy with how the meeting went and well, we’re just sort of waiting for the stuff to dot and cross now so we can dot and cross things. Did I mention how much we love dotting and crossing things? We love dotting and crossing things.

After that, providing our legs don’t fall off or nothing else goes wrong, we’ll be making videogames for the Vita. Native, obviously. And as well as being naked, we’ll be making something that runs on the Vita too. Providing nothing goes wrong between now and signing the contracts or anything.

I can’t talk about what the videogame is because we haven’t worked out exactly what shape that’s going to come in but yes, it will be something I’ve already made but not like you’ve seen it before. Because shaders. Andy will be doing coding and a few other things, I’ll be doing pretty pictures, probably some noises and some other things along the way so that Andy doesn’t shoulder the burden alone. It’ll be as equitable a partnership as we can make it anyway. Because Andy is ace. And also has fantastic taste in synthpop and is amazing company whilst you’re drunk at a coach station in Nottingham even if you should have been at a party and not at the pub or something. Yes.

What I’m trying to say here is that Andy is a very good person and someone I’m proud to be working alongside on this thing. Super proud, even.

In the meantime, HELLO SONY. Thanks for having us. And thanks for being very nice too. As a cynical old fucker, it takes a lot to make me feel comfortable. I’m comfortable here. And very happy. I couldn’t go anywhere where I couldn’t trust who I’m dealing with and who I didn’t know looked after the people I respect. That stuff is the valuable stuff. That stuff is the important stuff.

Here’s to staying happy, right? Onwards.

Some edited highlights of the Greenlight chat (no “Where’s Half Life 3?” etc.. ) from Tom Tomaszewski. Worth a read through.

The good news is that Steam *are* moving towards being an open platform. This is great as it pretty much solves all of the issues with Greenlight. The downside is, that’s obviously a massive undertaking and not something anyone can rely on happening any time soon.

As suspected by many, the numbers passing through Greenlight are grim and the large vote numbers will be massively skewed by Mode 7/The Indie Stone and anyone else with an already existing fanbase to motivate so they’re not useful numbers to most people. The stats mentioned pretty much tally with my own experiences on there, only skewed higher from bundling and the odd burst when I get in a bit of a shouty mood over things.

So, upshot is, a minority of people who use Steam use Greenlight to help decide what gets on Steam. It seems fairly obvious to me that this would always be thus but there you go, it’s there anyway. And Valve are obviously bang on, you can’t make people vote so if anyone is wondering how to get 10,000 votes the answer is “find 10,000 people willing to vote for you”.

I feel fairly safe pointing out that most people will have infinitely better things to do than spend their time on Greenlight, scratching their armpits or putting the kettle on or anything other than voting on Greenlight and it seems the numbers back this up a tad. Obviously there’s a multitude of reasons for this including how Greenlight itself is laid out but I suspect it will never be anything but a minority interest as most people go to Steam to play games not to participate in the Eurovision Game Contest.

There’s no clearer way of putting this than this:

IF YOU ARE A DEVELOPER ON GREENLIGHT, YOU SIMPLY CANNOT RELY ON GREENLIGHT TO GET YOU THROUGH THE SYSTEM.

You are not paying for access to all the people on Steam, you are paying to sit in a queue with a lot of other games, all of which get looked over by only a minority of the Steam userbase.

Thankfully, Valve have been a lot clearer in recent times that Greenlight is only one data point of many, this isn’t something that’s a recent change and is something that’s been in place from the start but it’s good to have it reiterated clearly.

Valve are also looking for:

Press mentions.
Awards.
Performance on other platforms (including Crowdfunding).
Something that takes their fancy.

The same as they ever were. I would argue that every single one of these things is more important than Greenlight itself. I would also argue that they’re every bit as problematic for a lot of developers as Greenlight itself is, in some cases vastly more so.

I’ve talked about the problems with press in recent times and how the balance has shifted over the course of time since the second wave of indie started ploughing its way into the public consciousness.

There is another issue here that’s worth considering and I’ve mentioned this before also. There are developers for whom getting press, doing the press work, even when they have fucking superb games is an uphill struggle and something they’re uncomfortable with. With apologies to the honourable Mr Minter for using him as an example here but he’s the most famous person I can think of off the top of my head who absolutely hates having to deal with the marketing aspect of stuff. He fucking hates it. In some ways he’s incredibly lucky that he’s got the legacy and respect that a lot of journos and people will pick up the slack in part for him but still, it remains that he’s limited by what he’s comfortable with. And were his stuff on Greenlight, this would be a blocker.

There are many other developers who are in the same boat. For whom just make a good game doesn’t count because they’ve done that bit and in some cases made some of the best games of the past ten years in my not so humble opinion but the press and marketing parts of things are messy. They’re uncomfortable and they take away from the making fucking brilliant games bit. I’d sooner have them doing the latter personally.

But anyway, point is, not everyone is well equipped to deal with the press and it’s not the sort of thing you can just get over when it’s an integral part of who you are and part of what enables you to have such a laser focus on making brilliant work.

However, take away?

IF YOU DO HAVE GOOD PRESS, LIST IT ON YOUR GREENLIGHT PAGE.

Awards. I think the problems with this are fairly obvious. There’s a limited amount of awards out there for one thing, there’s a limited amount of developers interested in chasing awards. There’s a limited amount of developers with the financial ability to enter awards and attend awards also so this streamlines the pool massively.

For the vast majority of people, this is fairly off the list as remotely useful to them.

Personally, I don’t submit to awards for three reasons. I don’t make the kind of game that sits well in awards, I don’t generally have the money to pay entrance fees all over the shop and thirdly, even if I did my circumstances dictate that I can’t attend and I certainly can’t go running off minding a booth for a day or two or even afford the time to negotiate the details of someone else minding a booth for me. I have things in my life that have to take priority and they do. Obviously this isn’t for anyone else to solve, it can’t really be solved but there’s many developers each with their own reasons why entering awards ceremonies is not really a goer.

But anyway, practically, it seems that to date it’s only the IGF that results in an automatic Greenlight so don’t count on anywhere else being a magical pass to Greenlightdom.

I don’t think there’s much we can take away from this other than “if you have an award, it ups your chance of getting noticed” and I’d like to hope that’s already fundamentally obvious to most people and applies outside of Greenlight also.

Just for the record, a CERTIFIED VIRUS FREE from DOWNLOAD.COM is likely also not a considered award. (Showing my age there, right?). So OK then…

IF YOU HAVE AN AWARD, IT UPS YOUR CHANCE OF GETTING NOTICED

To wrap the final two up, I think it’s fairly sound advice in 2013 that if you can build for alternative platforms you absolutely should be building for alternative platforms. I have (with thanks to Jeff for his kind assistance) DRM up and running on OSX, iOS and Android right now and it all goes towards more people discovering, playing and enjoying the game across the board.

Valve will also be concerned with “was it a big player on another platform” which is where stuff like, I dunno, Fez or something comes into it. Not that Fez went through Greenlight but I’m just trying to pluck a famous-ish console game that came to PC out of my backside as an example here. Bear with me, alright?

However, mobile to PC devs also suffer from a larger and more difficult to deal with problem when it comes to Greenlight. It is not unusual to be informed that you are wholly unwelcome just because you’ve made a mobile game. In some ways, Greenlight is the last great battleground for this. This makes Greenlight a vastly more hostile place for many than it should be where games will and do get downvoted just for being a mobile game. It’s not just consigned to mobile games, there are lunatics who truly believe that flash games are also terrible things and all manner of other bizarre-o beliefs. When you factor in just how vocal these people are it’s uncomfortable even when there’s ten people telling you your game is a lovely thing indeed. It’s also uncomfortable because what the fuck does that actually have to do with whether something is a good game or not?

Two takeaways from this one then.

IF YOU CAN PORT TO OTHER PLATFORMS, PORT TO ALL THE PLATFORMS YOU CAN.

THERE’S A BUNCH OF NOBS OUT THERE WHO WILL HATE YOU FOR ARBITRARY REASONS. BE PREPARED AND DON’T LET THEM GRIND YOU DOWN. ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE MOVING FROM ANYTHING PORTABLE

Which leaves us with make a game that takes Valve’s fancy which is pretty much JUST MAKE A GOOD GAME in any other form and yeah. OK. We’ll just leave that one right there.

So what to do then? Well, in a perfect world, Greenlight wouldn’t exist and there’d be a better system in its place. We don’t have that perfect world though so to a large degree we’re all left to deal with what we have.

What I would absolutely recommend is that if you are a dev, you think carefully before putting anything on Greenlight knowing how it works, knowing the things you will need to achieve in order to get Greenlit. I would urge caution in supporting Greenlight as a system on the vague off chance you might get picked up or to try and fight your way to the top. The chances of that happening are somewhere between slim to none and you’ll have pissed $100 down the drain on a gamble where the odds are currently stacked against you. Unless you can “do” a Mode7/Indie Stone/Dave Gilbert and fire over your fanbase or you’ve got something incredibly zeitgeist-y on your hands Greenlight will not serve you well.

As it stands, Greenlight is a pit where games go to get lost. There’s just too many good games getting lost in the system right now.

Valve have every intention of changing that and working towards it not being that but until they do, think carefully before you throw that $100 down as the time spent fretting over Greenlight and dealing with Greenlight is time you could probably spend better elsewhere. Like scratching your armpits or putting the kettle on.

Fiddling with ideas for a new thing. Don’t know if it’ll come to anything, not even certain what it’ll be but it’s been fun fiddling with something different for once.

So I had a back and forth with @MikeBithell earlier. I respect Mike a lot but I found the article he tweeted and his interpretation of it to be problematic. I’m taking this to the blog because it’s too much to do in 140 characters without sounding tremendously blunt and insulting and I don’t want to do that here so…

You know what, I think this blog post by @overallverdict is my favourite thing written about Thomas Was Alone yet.. overallverdict.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/cas…

— Mike Bithell (@mikeBithell) April 25, 2013

Mike read the piece as a call to arms, that we should break down this perception some people have of indie and lose the big box hate.

I read it as a not very nice piece of work that uses a few examples to drag down a vast amount of people, vulgarly painting its picture of neckbeards, AAA hatred and snobbery as what indie developers are, using a single example of “a self proclaimed (can you be anything but?) indie developer with a twitter following” and their opinions on Bioshock Infinite to show how horrible indie developers are but that Thomas Was Alone, that’s alright, that didn’t let me down like the rest of them.

The thing is, it’s not an attitude I haven’t come across before. I’ve heard it all before, all of it. There’s probably little along these lines I haven’t heard over the eleven years I’ve been in this game. Christ, I’ve sat there recently in discussions where I’ve been told that RPS is too generous to indie games, reviews too many of them and they get a free pass -because they’re indie-, I’ve heard that indie developers are this, indie developers are that and well, that’s fine. I’ve also heard so many things from developers where players are this and that too. Jesus, I grew up reading the music press, I’ve read it all.

Anyone is welcome to hold those opinions. I disagree with them for the most part but they’re welcome to hold them. In this case I’m just glad the guy found a game he did like.

To be honest, I don’t really want to get into the content of the article too much but discuss this whole “perception” lark because that’s the bit I really have problems with.

Mike’s right in that it is about perception and perception is a powerful thing. But perception!

I speak and I’ve spoken to lots of devs and I’ve not met or spoken to a single one that hates big box games. Maybe they hide it really well but I don’t think they’re that clever? These criticisms? Generally, it’s from wanting games to be better and they’re criticisms not in any way exclusively confined to big box. I’d be willing to bet that anyone who found problems with Bioshock Infinite and is willing to be vocal about the problems with it conceptually and as a game would be willing to say the same of any problematic indie titles. Categorising that as big box vs Indie is, well, it’s wrong. It’s selective. It ignores a wider body of discussion. It’s reading but not really taking the time out to listen to the why of all this.

When we’re talking this great indie/big box divide, it’s a massive misrepresentation of the positions of a few. Mike’s not wrong to say that there are people who truly believe this is a thing but y’know, people perceive lots of things in different ways and we should consider more than just perception when assessing things.

I have a very good idea of how most of the people who look at games perceive indie developers and it isn’t like the article in question. Most people don’t give a monkeys about us devs. They genuinely do.not.give.a.toss. Sure, some might get up in arms at Phil Fish’s latest comedy escapades and how-very-dare-he-Frankie-Howerd-shocked-face at them or something but the vast majority of people do.not.care and are very nice. In my experience the vast majority of people who do care are incredibly nice too and don’t think someone a whatever-the-hell-a-neckbeard-is-supposed-to-be for having an opinion on a game.

The vast majority of people don’t even know who the guy who made Fez is. The vast majority of people don’t know who Jon Blow is, who I am or who most of my peers are. They might have read about us in the press sometimes but the great big wider world? Nah. Pull the other one, bells on and all that. At best, we might be a name that cropped up in Eurogamer once or something.

It’s not just about dealing with perception, it’s about perspective. We all have more players than Twitter followers, right? Just think about that for a second in terms of how the internet works and how people are exposed to our words and our works.

It goes something like this:

Most people: have not played our game or heard of us.
Quite a few people considering: have played our game.
Not quite as many people: have player our game and heard of us.
Even less people: have played our game and followed us on Twitter
Even less people: have played our game, followed us on Twitter and really give a toss what we think about anything.
Even less people haven’t played our game or followed us on Twitter but have an opinion on something we might have said somewhere on the internet once.

Generally, the internet is an amplifier. Especially with social media and quick reactions bang, bang, type shit, we’ll worry about it later. Shit gets amplified massively. Cutting through the noise, cutting through the clatter and it turns out the vast majority of people, players and developers are fairly alright and fairly happy with things.

Every time I’ve stepped out the door and met people and most of my exchanges on the internet with human beings has proven this to me. Most reviews I’ve read of indie games have proven this to me. Most forum exchanges have proven this. My mailbox has proven this. Maybe I’m lucky but I’m certainly not secluded from the internet out there, I’ve read the downers too.

Most people are in it for the games. Most people are in it for the love of games and indie or big box be damned. There’s not that much of a divide between audience and dev opinions as this argument likes to paint. Games come in for criticism, not just big box.

Big box just happens to so often write the problems with games larger because that’s what big box does magnificently, it does the good things on a large scale, it does the bad things on a large scale and when something as big box as Bioshock Infinity comes along, man, so many gamers are talking about it, not just indies. For better and for worse.

Will some devs believe the game to be an abomination? Yeah, of course. For some, this is what informs their work, empowers them to make the games they do make that aren’t Bioshock. Rather than excluding big box, this goes towards giving us a wider spread of games. That’s a good thing, right? Same way some players will think it’s an abomination because it’s the polar opposite of what they want to be playing or what they want Bioshock to be, that helps support games that aren’t Bioshock. That’s a good thing, right?

If we want games to be better than absolutely leave no stone unturned in criticism. We can weed out the good, the bad criticism as we go along but let’s throw our ideas out there, let’s see what we like, what we don’t like and let’s talk about that openly because it’ll all help us make better games. We’ve got to talk about what we find comfortable, what we don’t find comfortable, what we like in a game and what we find utter utter guff. And let’s do it whether you’re a player or a developer.

That’s the really uncomfortable element to the Indie vs Big Box claims however unintentional a side effect it may be. You should just shut up and be quiet, make games and don’t criticise other games else people think you a terrible person and you reflect badly on the scene. Especially when talking big box games because… because why, exactly? Because indies need to stop hating on big box, obviously. Even if they’re not actually doing that in the first place. CliffyB said so, you should stop.

But yeah. the mass perception of indie devs and this so called scene isn’t one of neckbeardery and big box vs indie battles anyway. I’d argue that painting it as such does everyone involved a far larger disservice than any big box vs indie arguments ever would because out there, people like games whether they’re people who make them or play them. And that’s really why we’re all here.

Let’s not overplay and overcook the opinions of a few, right? And that goes for when we’re talking about developers and when we’re talking about players.

And if you find the corner of the internet you’re in constantly reflects darker, nastier perceptions and opinions of people, widen the fuck your view because the big old world out there isn’t like that for the most part and it’s easy to forget that on this old internet of ours. So easy to forget that. I know I very often do.

Fairly early on I’d decided that Death Ray Manta was to be, mainly, about bringing all the things together, lots and lots of threads from what made me and what I love all bound together in a single package. I didn’t want to be subtle with this either but I also didn’t want it to be one of those things where you’re like EH EH GET IT? EH? at the player because just y’know, I’m tired of all that in games. So very tired of it.

I’m tired of the “I KNOW YOU PLAY GAMES YOU GET THIS ONE, YOUR JOKE IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE HAHAHAHAAHA AAAAAAAAAAH KILL ME” stuff and I’d be a whole lot happier if that just fucked off*. For a start, I don’t want anyone walking into playing my games and feeling like I’m screaming THIS IS NOT FOR YOU, YOU DO NOT KNOW GAMES LIKE ME at them through my design, that’s just gross insular bullshit. And partly because it’s not and never has been even remotely funny. No, I didn’t want any of that, I wanted it to be wherever possible absolutely respectful to the folks who made these things and to the player.

All the threads are things that are part of what went into making me what I am, some are parts of the things that inspired me to make games, some are just cultural things, fleeting moments in my life, things I love and have loved, things I just do. They’re not there to be laughed at or to elicit a nod and a wink. They’re just things that are and I wanted to treat them as such. That doesn’t mean I can’t amuse myself by finding ways to shoehorn them in, obviously.

(pic source)

When I was growing up I stumbled upon a set of Dennis Wheatley books in my mum’s bedroom (yes, I was rummaging when I shouldn’t have been) and the weird combination of tits and magic on the covers I found both captivating and enough to completely fucking freak me out. There were also a number of books on black magic and witches, a binder full of The Unexplained and all manner of things where as a kid you end up thinking “man, I really don’t know my parents that well”. I had to fess up a few days later when I couldn’t get to sleep because I’d convinced myself that the books themselves held immense magical powers and were probably going to do something really, really horrible like unleash a demon or something, I dunno. I was a kid, shut up. I didn’t think that far ahead but I knew it’d be really horrible and we were all going to die.

A few years later and I’d read most of the books. My mum figured the easiest way to dispel any ideas I might have had was just to say “ok, well, give them a read and see what happens and then get back to us” and so I did. From there I ended up being allowed to watch old Hammer films, just not the later ones where they’re all tits and grooviness. At the time I figured they must have been much, much worse and more gory than the ones I was allowed to watch but now, now I’m older, I know they were just mainly a bit rubbish.

Anyway! It worked! I’d race through adventure-y black magic novels with barely a blink, horror films were just films and not like real things so I was fairly cool with all that but I was still convinced a Gorgon lived in the back alley after watching Clash Of The TItans but hey ho, you can’t win them all, right? Nearly, mind.

By the time I’d hit FULL TEENAGE years later, I began working my way through all manner of classic horror and sci fi films but mainly horror. A pair of massive hardback year by year guide books as my guides, the horror one being edited by Kim Newman and I can’t for the life of me remember who did the SF version but we’re not talking about SF anyway so ONWARDS! Throw in a fascination with VHS covers, scouring the local flea market on a Monday for traders who’d carry 13th generation copies of video nasties and well, yeah, horror.

So when it came to wanting to name each and every level, I chose to go with mangled horror film titles. Nothing else made quite as much sense.

The full list and IMDB links to the relevant films…

And Now The Manta Starts
To The Devil, A Manta
Manta AD 1972
An American Manta In London
Zombie Manta Eaters
Don’t Manta Now
Crucible Of Manta
The Abominable Dr Manta
Manta Of The Red Death
In The Manta Of Madness
Night Of The Living Manta
Curse Of The Manta’s Tomb
Manta The Thirteenth
Whistle And I’ll Manta You
Texas Chainsaw Manta
The Manta Of Dr Caligari
The Wicker Manta
Mantafinder General
I Was A Teenage Manta
The Turn Of The Manta
I Spit On Your Manta
The Mantaitou
Manta Horizon
Invasion Of The Mantasnatchers
Tales That Witness Manta
La Terza Manta
The Manta Rides Out
The Manta That Dripped Blood
Dr Terror’s House Of Mantas
The Manta Of Usher
Manta Of Wax
The Last Manta On Earth

*I’ll make an exception for the way Yak does this on the score tally screens of his games because at least there they make some sort of sense.

Gosh, this is a long overdue post. I’ve been meaning to write some of this stuff up for a year or so but anyway, here goes.

So right, Death Ray Manta then. It’s a thing I made and it’s a thing that whilst there’s days I look at it and I audibly shout I FUCKING HATE YOU, GAME and wish it never existed, the vast majority of the time I’m really, really proud of it. I’m still amazed at how fucking -good- it looks, I’m super proud of that. It’s all a big fat hairy cheat but I don’t really care, it still looks good.

I’m super proud of what Jeff’s done in bringing it to mobile. I sat there this afternoon on the bus home and I played DRM the entire 3/4 of an hour journey and I still enjoyed it. I was playing it on the iPad quickly before I went out thinking “man, yeah”. As I said, there’s days where I have massive doubts about it, there’s days where I hate it and they’re usually days where I’m trying to push through working on part of it and really, my brain wants to be elsewhere, doing something, anything else but overall, DRM works for me as what it was intended to be. It brings together the threads of stuff I’ve been working on for the past 5 years and brings together a lot of the stuff that I love and appreciate into one package. It’s a Greatest Hits package for me and a Thank You package to others. I’m glad I made it.

Yet it very nearly wasn’t a thing.

I’ve mentioned before that last year in the wake of a turbulent few years with my own health and Mrs B’s ever-wonky health I was incredibly close to packing up and walking away, never to write a game again. Not because I didn’t want to write games, I just didn’t know how to or whether I could write them. Nearly losing yourself and nearly losing your nearest and dearest has that effect. You like to think you’re stronger and you can just carry on but it doesn’t quite work like that in practice.

So it’s with the utmost thanks to Konstantinos (Gnome) for suggesting that “no, really, you should probably make a game and here’s how I can help you make it happen” because he was right, I really should have. I owe him lots for helping me make this happen.

Anyway. Tools then. That seems like a good place to start. Here’s what I used to build DRM so you can see how in reach this sort of thing is. HINT: It is very in reach.

Gamemaker. http://www.yoyogames.com

It’s served me well for the entire time I’ve been making games and whilst there was most definitely a few heavy hearted years with it, it’s tough to fault what it’s become. Studio is now such an amazingly strong piece of kit that I can’t imagine why I’d need anything else. I like that feeling. Security in tools is good. More so having the security that the tool has your back because you’re a shit coder and would sooner pull out your own fingernails with pliers than have to get down and dirty.

I started DRM in version 8.1 of Gamemaker. Despite owning Studio at the time, I wasn’t comfortable running for a release with what it was at the time, all a bit too in progress, a bit too in dev. Fine if you know what you’re doing, I don’t know what I’m doing.

By the time I’d failed at making my first idea for what DRM was to be and gotten halfway through the version you know, love and adore now (more on all that later, right?), Studio felt stable enough to go with and so I made the move. It was thankfully fairly painless. I had to be slightly less lazy with how I handled stuff compared to previous but nothing that wouldn’t take me a day or so to adjust as I’d made the leap so early in DRM’s creation.

So yes, Death Ray Manta is built in Gamemaker and wouldn’t exist without it. Gamemaker has always been the right fit for how my mind works and now it’s like some sort of super strength best fit that’s only some shaders short of perfect for me. And yeah, making the shift to Studio was the best choice as it enabled me to pass the code over to Jeff to handle the ports and later for me to tweak it round to get another port out of Jeff’s work (that’s the Android one, obv) and hopefully will enable more ports in the near future. Huzzah.

Pro Motion http://www.cosmigo.com

I’ve not found a pixel art package I’m more comfortable in than Pro Motion and that’s why I doodle all the pixelly bits using Pro Motion. You’d never credit it, would you? I’ve tried quite a few and there’s always something that niggles at me with them, always either a bit too streamlined or a bit too faffy for my tastes. Pro Motion wins by virtue of a) being quite like DPaint and b) by niggling me the least. I like things that don’t niggle at me a lot.

Incidentally, were I making it today, I’d be tempted to use Hexels which is an amazing piece of kit that’ll get you out of the gate and creating pretty pictures far more easily than you’d expect.

Photoshop http://www.adobe.com

Through the Creative Cloud because fuck me, do you think I’m made of money?

It’s a horrid expense to pay out per month when you haven’t got much money as it is but given just how much pain it saves me, how much faster I can work in it than in a lot of other packages, it’s a price -just about- worth paying.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I entirely choose my tools by how much effort they save me. There’s a reason for this. I spent years scraping round with whatever I could lay my hands on, making do. For quite a few things I still do and it slows me down. Not having the best-fit-for-me tool means I have to spend more time fucking around with things that aren’t making games, wrestling with things I do not want to be wrestling with. So wherever I can and within my means, I try and make sure the tools I use work for me. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself every month when the £17 goes out of our bank account and the cat looks at me with that “and how many tins of food is that, fucker?” face.

I use Photoshop for a lot of the bigger stuff and to help mould the effects. There’s not a lot going on under the hood of DRM and most of what you see on screen is the result of me spending many, many hours messing around in Photoshop trying to get the look for the effects just right. It’s used in DRM for so many things, creating the scanlines quickly, drawing out the borders, adding glows, all the stuff where it’d take me far too long to pixel or would be wholly inappropriate to pixel. Which is most of it, really.

Qneo Voice Synth http://qneomusic.com/

It’s for the iThings! It’s not the best thing ever but it’s cheap and you can export the wave files out so I could do the speech on the go. Yes, that does translate as “I could do the speech whilst having a shit” in case you wondered and yes, yes, I did just that. ASTRO ASTRO ASTRO STAGE! *plops*

Indie development right there. You don’t get that sort of luxury in AAA development where you can make games and poo at the same time.

bfxr http://www.bfxr.net/

Increpare’s mutation of sfxr, the everyone uses this, right? tool for proper sound effects creation. I have a very technical method for making sound effects in bfxr. I HIT BUTTONS A LOT. Eventually it makes a noise I like and I save it out and use it. Then I HIT BUTTONS A LOT AGAIN. And rinse and repeat until done. Sometimes I hit different buttons but that’s scary. Mrs B does not like this method.

Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Because it’s free, quick and easy to fuck around with the sounds you’ve already made using Audacity. Which just about covers everything I’d need it for.

Aaand that’s it, really. That’s all I used. With the exception of Gamemaker itself, you can find free alternatives to everything I’ve thrown money at (obviously you can find free alternatives to Gamemaker but they won’t be “mainly like Gamemaker” because there isn’t one of those yet). If you need a head start in parts, don’t forget that I offer up all my sprites and stuff for anyone to use for whatever reason and you can find them all here. Most are fairly game specific but hey, maybe you can repurpose them?

ANYWAY! This is getting to be quite a few more words than I anticipated so I’ll take a short break and write up the next part of the making of a manta tomorrow.

Okay, so this is where I’m up to right now…

The iOS build is done and with Apple awaiting review. As soon as, and assuming they do and it all goes smoothly, Apple give us the nod that will be live.

The Android build is done but will be out in a bit as Jeff’s still ploughing his way through contract work so time isn’t on his side. It is finished and it will be in your hands soon, promise.

The Windows update is built, finished and complete. It’s not anything especially major but it is bringing it closer to my original vision of how the game would look and sound. Some of the stuff, like the speech, had winged its way back down into the portable versions. The graphics not so much but there’s only so much I can do in that department given I’m fairly winging it blind on my parts in those.

Right now, I have to do my bits and fire them over to Jeff to test and build. This is obviously messy and loses the BANG! ITERATE! route I normally go through when dealing with stuff myself.

Anyway, the update will be out for Windows in the next week. Promise.

Mac and Linux… Well, there’s a thing. The Mac update is, unfortunately, going to have to go on hold for now. I’ve tried but I simply can’t do it. When I built the previous Mac versions of DRM, it was already shaky. I’ve an old 2006 MBP before the introduction of some semi decent graphics grunt under the hood. Death Ray Manta is a very graphics intensive game as you might have noticed. Upshot of this was that I could just about build to the machine and test the inputs were working in slow motion, fire it over to a few Mac folks to confirm nothing else was broken then put it out into the world.

It was really only a matter of time before this became either futile or impossible.

That time is now. Between the initial release of DRM and now, building to this old MBP running Snow Leopard has become impossible. Aha, why don’t you get someone else to build it? I did! I’m not happy with having to rely on someone else for the desktop versions anyway but fuck it, desperate times, right? So I did. And some things weren’t working right and it’s stuff I’d need to BANG! ITERATE! into submission to get to work. We tried me pasting the code into a chat box but come on, that’s really no way to make games. It’s a massive pain in the arse for everyone involved. Mega thanks to Jeff for taking a night out to try and wangle this though, above and beyond isn’t in it.

So yes, until I can lay my hands on enough money to get hold of a more recent Mac, any Mac updates and any new stuff for the Mac is on hold. I was always pushing it trying to get them done anyway so I’m sad but not surprised that this is a route I can no longer take. For a while, anyway. There’s a few things on the horizon to hopefully alleviate the worst of the expense.

Aaaanyway, upshot is, I won’t be able to get the Mac update out at the same time as the PC version. It’ll turn up eventually but not yet, new baby is the priority spend right now, y’know?

And Linux? Well, I’m going to set me up some Ubuntu next week and see what happens. At least that’s one I know I can definitely do with all the gear that’s in this house so fingers crossed, right?