Indie games needs more superstars (like Bit-Blot).

To me it is very exciting to be apart of the indie game development community at the moment, and it is largely a result of the awesome bunch of people at TIGERsauce, uhh, I meant TIGSource. For the uninformed it stands for The Independent Gaming Source.

They bring about the vibe that games is all about the fun and entertainment of it and that’s the way it should be. Their competitions like “Sexiest Indie Devver” and “B-Game competitions” is just pure awesome.

Another great example is the guys behind Bit-Blot with their upcoming game Aquaria that is about to be released on December 7 (gogogo).

Indie games should be what TIGS is all about.

This is me before and after TIGS.

Roach Toaster 2 Devblog: A brief intro.

Considering that I am reinstigating a devblog of some sort, I’ll start it off with a brief history of how it started and where it’s gone and where it is (hopefully) going.

Roach Toaster 2 is the sequel to Roach Toaster 1 (what??). My intention with this game was to take the awesome stuff from Roach Toaster 1 and pile it into a new more polished and professional package. RT1 had its merits but was buggy, had crappy graphics and the gameplay wasn’t “that” concise.

A screenie of RT1… Yes, this level really tested your skill:

Luckily there were a few people that saw past its veneer for what it really was! RT1 won 2 competitions, and was acclaimed for its no nonsense “fun” gameplay.

So, wanting to do it more justice, Roach Toaster 2 was born in June 2006. My initial intention was to increase the scale of the game. Instead of defending just a neighbourhood you are now defending a whole city, dubbed “Big City” (what??).

There were teams/enhancements and an intricate team movement system. During the whole process of developing RT2, my mettle as a newbie designer was being tested all the way. After countless iterations, I decided to drop the whole elaborate and stick to what Roach Toaster was intended for: “Simple rules that lead to complex gameplay”. This was the motto for the competition I devved RT1 for.

Like I mentioned in my previous post. Although Roach Toaster (1+2)’s gameplay has its merits, it can’t keep the whole game afloat without adding other over-arcing elements. So… Instead of adding more gameplay elements (which is hard to balance and test), I decided to revert back to just what RT1 so great. A compelling storyline/campaign.

So, as of now a year and a half into development (OMG), I am busy with the campaign. Its up to level 6 moment.

P.S. I am going on holiday soon, so if I don’t post any blogs or devblogs, it means I am away.

I like GRINDING!

A prolific master of feedback, aka Guert from the TIGSOURCE forums, grinded my upcoming turn-based shoot-em-up called Roach Toaster 2.

What is a grind? A Grind is an in-depth (often brutal) feedback to a game, hence the name “grind”. To me there is not a thing like “brutal” feedback. Any feedback with a decent backing is great feedback.

Read the Roach Toaster 2 Grind.

He confirmed what I was worried about Roach Toaster 2 all along. It didn’t quite have enough motivation to keep going. I could add more gameplay elements, but this will just add more balancing and testing (something which I despise, considering I am a lone developer with a small (3) fanbase). Something that was missing from RT2 was the personal involvement (which Guert also mentioned).

Roach Toaster 1 followed a story, albeit not very deep, but gameplay elements were a part of the story. Units were introduced to things happening in the story. In Roach Toaster 2 (before the grind), it was all concise and analytical. New units were blandly introduced after you beat a few levels. The game revolved more on the short-term gameplay. While Roach Toaster (1+2) has great short-term gameplay, it isn’t enough to carry the game without more elements.

Thus, I have decided to scrap “Big City” and start over with a new proper story-like campaign. The old levels will still be used as bonus levels (lol 45 bonus levels, yippee!).

The teams/enhancements have been scrapped earlier. Now that “Big City” is also being scrapped, I am losing about 2 months of dev time.

Although this might be a bad thing to some, I like to see Roach Toaster 2 grow with each iteration and prototype.

P.S. In the vain of Frayed Knights “dev” diary, I am starting a weekly devblog of Roach Toaster 2, starting tomorrow.

Star Wars Medichlorines + the abyss of Google searches.

I like finding where people come from to my site. The obvious places are links on websites, my signature on forums, etc. The other neat thing is to see what people typed in Google to stumble upon my website!

This month, someone typed in “Star Wars medichlorines” and apparently saw a link to my site and clicked on it. I can’t remember that I ever posted about it, but apparently I did. The page straight from Google is this:

CLICKY!. As I realised it was my Starcraft 2 hype post.

The link was on page 5 (of the Google search).

Its weird how people stumble upon my site. During the Harry Potter 7 craze, I created a mockup of how the book will end and that month I got the most hits from Google (ever)!

——————————–

So, everyone uses Google (search that is), but if you don’t find something after about the 5-7 page, you try to “optimise” your search. So, no one really knows what the nether regions of a Google search looks like.

I typed in “Roach Toaster” and I was astonished not to find orcs and dwarves dwelling in there!

This is interesting links I found:

Page 3 (just out of town):

A reggae band

Page 9 (the deep woodlands):

A christmas carol (look at 311 downwards)

Some blog . Uses an awesome pun: “appROACHable”.

Page 59 (the swamps of death level 5):

Some guy talks to his toaster.

Page 78 (the end of the world):

The Taming of the Screw . WTF?

Is alphabetical order important when thinking of a game’s name?

Something I have been musing about is a game’s name. I for one always apply 1 vital rule to it. If I search the game, it must come in the top 20 (page 1-2) of Google’s search results.

It should obviously be something unique, like my “Roach Toaster”.

But another thing that has been bothering is alphabetical ordering. Will a game with a higher alphabetical order get more hits?

Most sites rank games in categories, but within those categories the games are alphabetically ordered.

This has occurred to me and it has most likely occurred to someone else too.

You think… hmmm, lets download some games. So you start at the top and whenever you see something interesting you download and… play. No-one goes through the WHOLE list, so the last games in the list didn’t even have a chance.

Now I know that a game which is naturally good will get downloads, but what about these odd times like these?

I am sure that having your game’s name high up in the alphabetical WILL get you more downloads…

What do you think?

Rant: My Next Project

I think the reason why Roach Toaster 2 gets so few feedback is because the game looks pale when you look at the screenies. It does not really show why it is so AWESOME and original. So I am going to rant about graphics.
I see games where the graphics are awesome, but the gameplay is “meh” to say the least. They get tons of replies…

I hate it when these things happen. I have an original game, but due to a lack of budget I can’t “spice” it up to be more presentable… So, in this case, a decent game gets lost in internet niche obscurity, never to be appreciated by those unwilling to try it because the presentation, ie screenshots, look dull.

Well, what can I do? You don’t really get quality “free” spriters that hang on until the end…

So whatever my next project is going to be, it is going to have loads of pretty nice-y-ties and an overkill of graphics. Perhaps then people will try it (and comment).

This leads me to think about casual games… In the future sometime I might see if I have the design skills (and patience) to design a casual game. It would an interesting experiment.

Roach Toaster 2: Need testers for last public version.

Hi everyone. Roach Toaster 2 has come a long way. It is getting close to its final stages now. I don’t really want to post full “public” versions as I fear that those who play it might not buy the final version.

So, here I have the latest version of Roach Toaster 2 (and probably last public version).

v0.83 aka Last Public Test (and Guert’s Grind) version – 2007/11/02

-Solved several bugs.
>There was a bug where your units sometimes did not fire.
>A Save game bug.
-Increased the range where the tiles are cleared when placing a unit.
-Other Polishments.
-The 1st 20 levels is considered 80% polished.
-Removed “Old Big City” talk from previous versions.
-Replaced Melee with Quaker unit.
-Added a new secret.
-Made UI nifty-ier.
-Removed “emanating” ring effect. slows down game.
-Made Big City show more rewarding progress.
-Added a Icon-thingy!

The previous screenshots were all too low-res so I decided to upload proper high-res versions.

High res menu

High res level

It is 4.2mb:

Roach Toaster 2 v0.83.

If you feel inclined to comment please do so here on this blog or at my forums.

New Website Updates.

When I started with this blog, I started to neglect the “News” sections on the main Shotbeak site and on the main Roach Toaster site.

So, I decided to make that part of my web empire (I can dream) just a “showcase” area. So yeah, the check it out if you want to.

Since this post is rather empty, I decided to do a random comic: