Time to show off some goodies! And by goodies I mean screenshots from my newest game, Spandex Force: Superhero U. I started the project with a single tagline in mind: “A mix between X-Men and Harry Potter, sprinkled with absurd humor á la Spandex Force,” and so far I think that I’m fulfilling most of what I aimed to accomplish.

The title screen in all its glory.

A friendly dispute with the resident mad scientist head of the Eccentric Research department.

Battle harmless weightlifting equipment!

Diffuse nasty bombs!

Defeat weak old supervillains!

And much much more! Spandex Force: Superhero U is scheduled for release by November/December, and I’m this close to having a fully playable first episode (out of six) ready. Many things will probably change from the screenshots above, but it’s starting to look pretty good now.

“What’s going on,” people who stumble onto this blog wonder. “Where did Karja go? Did he quit blogging and developing games and whatnot?” Of course not! But lately I’ve realized something very important:

A one-man game company is an incredibly fragile thing.

“Well, duh,” the observant and cynical reader comments. “That’s obvious!” Yes, indeed it is. But – as with so many other things – it’s very different to know something and to experience it firsthand.

When I was developing Wildhollow I ran into some difficulties. In the spring of 2009 the game lay nigh-on-finished but I couldn’t bring myself to complete it. Personal issues were messing with me (and of course, I went to China for a couple of months over summer too) and the entire project just came to a full stop. Interestingly enough, almost the same thing happened this spring, with Spandex Force: Superhero U. This time I lost the motivation completely; I watched countless hours of TV series instead of working on my li’l hobby project or writing on Cynical Stuff.

I know that I’ll finish my projects (I was planning on an August release for Spandex Force: Superhero U, but I’m going for a Christmas release instead), but sometimes the amount of work involved feels pretty overwhelming. You think making a polished game is just fun and…well…games? In both the case of Wildhollow and Spandex Force: Superhero U I had the main gameplay in place after a couple of months; the rest of the time is spent on spicing up the storylines, writing dialogue, adding effects, polishing the GUI system, etc etc. There’s always a ton of work to do that you (well, maybe not specifically you but people in general) don’t think about. Here’s a quote from Bytten’s Wildhollow review:

This time around [KarjaSoft] expand their catalogue of excellent games with another polished effort. [...] As usual for a KarjaSoft title, the most striking feature of Wildhollow is, without a doubt, the immaculate presentation. From a seamless install, to a seemingly bug free playthrough, and a clean uninstall – everything worked perfectly. It’s hard to find fault with such a professional offering.

This is not just tooting my own horn; I know that there are gameplay issues with all of my games. But I do pride myself on trying to make the best of what I have to work with. That includes making the game as polished as I can with my meager budget and limited art skills that I apply to GUI work and game design features. And that takes time.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! Even when I have a completed game, there are other things to take care of. The game webpage, writing press releases, contacting distributors, setting up the payment system, playing other games to see what the competition is doing (woe is me – such a hard task), planning where to go with my next game(s), thinking of my long term strategy…and worrying about making the games profitable.

It would be incredibly nice to have someone to share the burden with, but at the same time I feel pretty good about accomplishing what I do.

So, what’s the status of Spandex Force: Superhero U? It’s most certainly alive and kicking, and I have some interesting plans for it. Some of my plans have changed, and some things have been improved – but I’ll save that for another blog post in a couple of days. Maybe I’d better take some screenshots as well by then.

If you’re a productive developer/artist/designer with panache and humor, feel free to contact me about game project collaborations. I ain’t found anyone yet, but I’m open for suggestions!

I have an ever-growing file with ideas for various games and applications. A few years ago it contained a few gems like Grabble (Grammar Scrabble) in which you place words instead of letters and have to form grammatically correct sentences, and DoodlePad which was a text editor much like Notepad, but with the possibility to add simple illustrations by drawing with the mouse. Sometimes these ideas result in an actual product, but most of the time they never get further than concept stage…or a few lines in the ideas.txt file.

For fun I decided to check what I wrote a year or two ago. These are different game concepts that may or may not result in actual games later:

• TV show production game. Create small game shows and try to get good network ratings.
• Ninja school. That’s all I wrote – I guess it pretty much says it all!
• Game continuity. A game where the player dies but continues with his offspring. Affecting the game world results in changes for the next incarnation too.
• SimCity + Viva Pinata. Prepare environment for citizens to join. E.g. a doctor requires sick people and wealth, and provides health. The player never has active control over the citizens.
• Woggle or Worggle. Word-Boggle. Same idea as Grabble, but make a simple Boggle game where you have to string up sentences from words.
• “Modern fantasy.” A fantasy world that was common fantasy ~1000 years ago but have evolved. How would elves, men and dwarves live in a more modern setting?
• Vampire adventure game. Oh, so many snarky Twilight parodies that could be included…
• “Closed system RPG.” Nothing is ever added to the game world: killing enemies doesn’t give experience points – it gives you the person’s life force. Money is never created, it only shifts hands. The same thing with weapons and armor. Includes autonomous heroes/villains that “level up” just like the player.

Fun fun fun! A few of these might actually end up in real projects, if I only get my game development up to speed. I wonder if I should have a look at the ideas from five years ago too, to see what else I was thinking of…

I recently saw a couple of blog posts discussing the price point of indie games. Here’s a good writeup by Dave Gilbert, author of games like The Shivah and The Blackwell Legacy. Another good piece is the How to Afford that $15 Indie Game comic. Be sure to read the comments there for a variety of opinions.

Like so many other indie developers I’m finding myself on the fence regarding this. $15 and $19.99 is often a lot of money for an indie game, but I think that a price point of below $5 is ridiculous. That’s pocket change. That’s also one of the reasons I’m not considering porting my games to iPhone or iPad or i-whatever – it’s impossible to charge anything worthwhile there, and the amount of sales required to make any kind of money is ridiculously high.

All in all, I think that $15 is a good price for a decently long indie game. Maybe $10, if it’s just a couple of hours’ worth of gameplay. But that means a proper game of course – not just a cute single-screen timewaster with a clever innovative game mechanic. It’s a little like calling the kettle black, but in my own mind there’s a difference between simple flash games and a game that’s crafted to deliver a story or provide a progression of sorts.

“Wait a second,” says the observant reader. “If you’re so bleedin’ keen on selling games for $10-$15, how come your newest game Wildhollow is priced at $19.99?!”

Good question! The answer is that I don’t want to charge $20 for a game, but due to simple economics I’m pretty much forced to do so. My business model dictates that if I want to continue to make games, each game must make more than it costs to produce. This is so that I can afford higher production values for each new game – which in turn (in theory at least) will generate higher profits for the newer games. My ultimate goal is to produce very good games with very good production values.

With Wildhollow I made a couple of bad design decisions, and the end result isn’t perfect by any means. But the game has sold more than it cost to make, which means that it’s good enough for quite a few people to buy at a price of $19.99. My guess, before launching the game, was that the amount of extra people that would have bought the game at $10 or $15 would not have resulted in a higher profit than what I’m getting right now. And I firmly believe that that assessment was correct.

For my next game, working title Spandex Force: Superhero U, I have high hopes for a larger potential customer base which might mean a lower price. However, I’m also increasing the production budget, so nothing is set in stone…

My latest game Wildhollow was released before Christmas, and while I’m still no millionaire it’s selling enough to finance my next project. I’ll do a proper Wildhollow postmortem later, but right now I’m going to babble on about upcoming things. Interestingly enough, when I started working in Wildhollow it was just going to be a quick intermediate game before my next real project, Spandex Force 2. Stuff(TM) got in the way, though, and in the end I got delayed about a year. But now I’m back on track again, and the next game has the working title Spandex Force: Superhero U.

Just a crappy placeholder logo. Artwork and final title is still pending.

I’m pretty excited about this game for a number of reasons. If everything goes as planned, these are some of the highlights:

• More puzzles and more game types
• Battle mechanics innovations
• More customization with skill trees, sidekicks and items
• Wacky superheroes/villains combined with a superhero university setting. “X-Men meets The Tick meets Harry Potter.”
• Larger budget for backgrounds and (hopefully) GUI artwork
• Some voice acting, if the budget allows
• Possibly some online battles…
• And finally, I’m aiming for a release before summer

Another big thing about this game is that I’m trying a new development platform: Actionscript 3/Flash, which opens up a lot of new possibilities… I have some very cool ideas for that, but I need to see if everything is feasible first.

So yeah, this is what I’ve been occupying my time with for a number of weeks now. If nothing unforeseen comes along I think the schedule might hold, but we shall just have to wait and see…

In my last post I complained about the lack of a perfect silver bullet game engine that would fit my needs as a small indie developer starting up a new game project. My three primary target platforms are Windows, Mac and the web, in roughly that order.

“But Karja, haven’t you heard? iPhone/XBox Live 360/Android/etc etc is the new indie platform of choice! This guy I read about made six billion dollars on his game there!”

I have a number of reasons why that is utter bull excrement:

• iPhone is flooded with games. Literally flooded, with thousands and thousands of games that make it hard to gain visibility. Also, iPhone relies on Apple’s SDK, objective-C (to some extent at the very least), touch screen, low-end hardware, etc etc – and all of these aspects have to be hand-crafted for the iPhone release without being reusable on other platforms.
• XBox 360 is good if you only intend to target Windows and XB360. But that would be incredibly stupid for me, since my target audience isn’t the XBox lads.
• Android is interesting. It would be neat to get in quickly just in case the market suddenly explodes á la iPhone. But, and this is a big but, Android requires Java which is utterly incompatible with web deployment (Flash is the only viable option there).

After some consideration, I found that my options are as follows:

• Java – Windows and Mac deployment is possible, and I can deploy on Android as well, eventually. I also looked at Java-to-Actionscript converters, but…that feels desperate and unreliable. So, web deployment is a no-go for this one.
• BlitzMax – What, BlitzMax? That only supports Win/Mac! Yes, but I seriously considered trying to write a BMax->Actionscript converter since I already have a lot of BMax code and an abstraction layer API in place. (This means that I would have to write the APIs for drawing/sound in Actionscript from scratch, but convert the game logic at least.)
• C++ – Screw web deployment, and go for a full-fledged C++ engine! That would be the most fun to code in. But… No. 2010 is coming up and the web is the new black.
• HaXe – This would allow web deployment, and there’s a neat HaXe->C++ converter that can be used along with NME/NEASH, an SDL version of the flash API. Essentially, what this promises is that the same code could be used to make a Flash version and a compiled standalone downloadable (…as well as an iPhone version!). Alas, things aren’t as good as they sound. I did some quick tests and NME/NEASH lacks a lot of bitmap manipulation support. For example, BitmapData.colorTransform() support is missing – and this means that the alpha channel of bitmaps cannot be modified in the downloadable version. Things like this make HaXe seem way too shaky at the moment.
• PushButton Engine – If I’m considering pure Flash (well, Actionscript) engines, this is a strong candidate. It’s a well-designed library intended to be used for larger game projects. However…. After looking at the code a bit, I fail to see exactly what it will bring. The rendering, file-loading and game state management seems to be the biggest things that it provides but to be honest those aren’t all that tricky to write by yourself.
• flixel – Another Actionscript/Flash engine. This one seems very attractive at first, but the main problem with flixel is that it makes assumptions. “You only want to make a platformer style game, right? You’ll want to use pixelated effects, right? You want to embed all files since you’re deploy for the web only, right?” And so on.
• Actionscript/Flex – Finally, the last option is to go for pure Actionscript with Flex. No no no, I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel and have a NIH (Not Invented Here) mentality. But to be frank, writing the main framework that flixel or PBE would provide is…not that much work. Also, I have specific needs: for example, I need to target different platforms and handle files differently on the different platforms (embedded/external).

Nothing is decided at all, but I’m currently leaning towards using PBE, flixel or pure AS/Flex. My main beef with that is whether or not it’s fast enough to look good on the downloadable versions. HaXe seemed like an interesting choice for a long while, and I’m sure that it will be in the future, but I simply found too many flaws in it to provide any actual benefit at the moment. I’m (probably) going for a double-buffer approach with quite a few alpha effects on bitmaps (not in the least for the particles), so the current unstable alpha support in the SDL parts makes HaXe’s NME/NEASH solution for downloadables and iPhone pretty dubious.

In the end maybe I oughtn’t spend so much time investigating this, and just choose something and start developing instead. I guess all engines and choices have their flaws, so nothing’s going to be perfect.

This post is going to get a bit technical, so if you’re easily bored by the gritty details of game development you might want to go somewhere else right now. Maybe to Cute Overload or something.

My latest game, Wildhollow, is released and I have some great ideas for my next game. Let’s just say that it might include puzzles, RPG elements and some online functionality. Oh, and superheroes or monsters too. Not really sure which yet. Either way, in order to get the game done I need to decide what to implement it in. Sheeplings, Spandex Force and Wildhollow were all developed in BlitzMax, an object oriented BASIC language that’s extremely easy to develop cross-platform games in.

As long as your cross-platform needs are Windows, Mac or Linux, that is.

As an indie casual games developer I find myself wanting to maximize my potential market (of course), and that means maximizing the number of platforms I can distribute games too. To make things easier for me I’ve constructed this table of feasible game engines/libraries as things are now in 2009:

Note that I said feasible engines and libraries. This is not close to a complete list, but they are the ones I’m considering. I can list some criteria:

• There must be decent performance, which means preferably no software rendering
• All Windows only, Xbox only, etc libraries are of no use to me. I’ve listed a few anyway just for consideration
• I want to be able to create mostly 2D games in an efficient manner. 3D engines are often bloated and unusable. Unity may be free but it’s of no use to me, for example
• Finally, I have a prioritized order of platform preference. You may note that the columns in the table are ordered rather strangely. That’s because I’m going from most important to least important platform

A quick glance at the table shows that there’s no single engine or library that fulfills all my needs. An X demarks that the platform is supported, and an (X) means that limited support is possible. That could mean that it’s possible but requires a lot of messing around (e.g. HaXe for iPhone), or that the solution isn’t practical (e.g. Java web applets aren’t very useful), or that it requires unreasonable things (e.g. Unity on the web requires a specific plugin).

Most engines and libraries support Windows and Mac, so that’s not really a problem. The real problem comes with my third platform of choice: the web. And by the web I mean that it should run seamlessly for most users. Which means that Java is doubtful (too…clunky, and portals won’t accept it), and that leaves only Flash. Which, of course, is mostly incompatible with “normal” programming languages and engines.

This is not an easy decision…

My latest adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow is released and things are progressing fairly well. Many seem to like it, and thanks to Pätr a game-stopping bug was found in time. It could have been immensely embarrasing otherwise…

For the ones curious what Wildhollow is all about, here are two reviews:

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/wildhollow.php

http://www.gamertell.com/gaming/comment/gamertell-review-wildhollow-for-pc-and-mac/

Also, I’m constantly googling “Wildhollow” to see what people are saying about the game. One thing I noted this weekend is that a cracked version of Wildhollow has popped up on various file networks. Trembling with fury and sorrow and trepidation and other things I downloaded one of these files to see if it was a bona fide copy of the game. Were people downloading my precious little game and playing it for free? Were people ignoring my hard work for a moment’s instant gratification?

It turns out that the answer is no.

If anyone feels tempted to download the “Wildhollow RIP” that’s circulating on warez sites you should be aware that it’s technically cracked but you won’t be able to play further than Steinheim Keep. You see, for the trial version I made two modifications: I added a time limit of 60 minutes, and I content-limited the game so that nothing from beyond that point is included. The warez version available only removes the time limit but – obviously – cannot add the missing content.

I guess that it’s just a matter of time before a real version pops up, but I feel pretty happy that for now loads of people are going to play the game an hour or two until they realize that they’re playing a trial version after all!

Juuso of the Game Producer blog has initiated a cool project: an indie games xmas calendar. The concept is to reveal a new game each day, until…well, you can guess what day. For obvious reasons there’s only one game revealed so far, but I’m interested in what games are going to pop up during the following weeks. This is an excellent opportunity to see what’s brewing on the indie development scene.

Oh, and one of those games just might be a certain adventure/pet raising game called Wildhollow.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Get Ready for Adventure! KarjaSoft Releases Wildhollow

Sweden, November 27, 2009 — Independent game developer KarjaSoft proudly announces the release of tongue-in-cheek adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow for Windows and Mac.

Wildhollow introduces the story of a young boy or girl returning home to find his or her parents missing under mysterious circumstances. The player is tasked with solving quests and ultimately discovering the fate of his/her missing parents, while also restoring the titular Wildhollow ranch to full glory. The game features an original mix of dialogue driven adventure gameplay and pet simulation elements in which animals can be raised and crossbred. A wide variety of breeds can be discovered, and varied food gathering minigames spice things up even further.

The game world is filled with colorful characters and humorous dialogue, and provides many hours of open-ended entertainment. The player encounters inept adventurers, cowardly dragons, greedy merchants, dwarf lords in love and much more as the story progresses.

“If you enjoy funny dialogue, adorable pets to raise and clever jabs at common fantasy cliches you’re going to love Wildhollow,” says Miro Karjalainen, owner of KarjaSoft, not at all deterred by the fact that his opinion might be slightly biased.

Wildhollow is available for Windows and Mac at the price of $19.99. More information, screenshots and trial downloads can be found on the official webpage:

http://www.wildhollow.com

Features:

- Loads of wacky characters to interact with
- Adorable animals to breed
- Tongue-in-cheek humor poking fun at fantasy cliches
- A colorful fantasy world to explore
- Hours of adventurous quests
- And much more…

System requirements:

1 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM. Windows 2000 or higher, or Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

About KarjaSoft

Founded by Miro Karjalainen in 2006, KarjaSoft has previously released the fluffy arcade game Sheeplings in 2007 followed by superhero puzzle/RPG Spandex Force in 2008. KarjaSoft focuses on developing casual indie games with a twist, including lots of humor and genre blending. Visit KarjaSoft online at http://www.karjasoft.com

Contact:

Miro Karjalainen
www.karjasoft.com
info@karjasoft.com

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