Why no Xblig for me

Today i want to talk a bit about my current decision to not be making more Xblig games.

Simply put. They take too long to make and test and so far the recompense has been way too low.

Now i know some people will put anything up on Xblig. Some reasons given are things like
'It's my first project and i wanted to see it published'. Well guess what, ya probably shouldn't have bothered. There are most definitely some good or reasonably good offerings from first time programmers. They are in the minority though. also the ones that showed promise gave up on the good game before the end and just published whatever state the game was in when they 'thought it would pass peer review'. I know everyone has to start somewhere, and i would rather encourage than Discourage. Only the last 12 months as a peer reviewer taught me one thing. Most people did not really want to do what was needed to get a reasonable quality title out.
'I just made this quick to finance my next big thing' - Another group put out stuff that is intended to make money. A lot of my Peers think this is selling their soul, or selling out. I am also of this feeling. What got you into making a game? Cos ya wanted to make money at something you loved, yet you would bastardize those things you love to make some money. I am very fortunate to not be in that position with a paying job that i do. If however i did not have a paying Job, i am sure i would be on that bandwagon, as supporting my family is paramont to me. (dang i have started to ramble on already!). I could list the stuff, but i will name one thing.. Massager apps, Nuff said.
So what about the good stuff? The games i like on Xblig, and there are many. Only I feel the weight of all the other crap tends to help hide the good ones. This obviously includes my own. I will not be bashful about my games, as if you like the gameplay or not, i would hope you would admit to their basic quality.

In A Shooter (my last Xblig game), I spent more time balancing the gameplay (your movement speed and shooting power vs the enemies speeds and fire rate etc), along with the bosses and design/balancing, than i did coding the game. But it feels like i spnd more time just in balancing my games than the majority did on getting theirs from start to finish coding. Even when they are coded well tend to make me feel cheated by poor balancing, or poor jump arcs etc. Spending that much time is what i do on all my games. So if i make another game, i will be in the same position. And again my game will most likely be invisible. As invisibility is the worst thing about Xblig. I worked very hard on some interesting marketing campaigns, and i believe did way more than most on this. However, i cannot reach the Xblig audience. I cannot make even enough money to pay back my artists properly for their time. that all makes me sad, epecially when my games have a conversion ratio of 25% or close too. this means people who try my games like them. Only not enough see them.

So i am out of Xblig until i can make this Indie thing a more full time job. Then i would be able to do smaller games and larger ones as well. Hoping beyond hope that i could get a big winner one day and allow me to support my games making habit.

Next time i will try to post about why WP7.

Till then, i am gone.
Da Voodoochief

Note: this article does not talk about those teams and people that put real effort and commitment into a game and try really hard to make a complete and well rounded experience. These people do exist on Xblig, and i love what they do. However they are in the minority.

WP7 reviewers List needed

The development of my latest game came and went very fast. I am happy with it as it is a game and not some poor little innocent bit of code that does not entertain. The best thing i can say about this game is the fact that it is liked by my Wife. Yes it is true. My wife likes my latest game. Which means i have created the right game for the demographic i was after.

Now i just have to hope that the game can get some visibility, i sure hope so. As that has been the single most important thing missing from my previously released games on Xblig etc.

Thanks to a Peer of Mine Kakcat (on twitter here). I released my game today, as i undertsand that altough i can publish my game sometime after it has released, it is not advisable to do so as the release date when you publish it will actually be the date it passed suibmission. Ouch, thankfully i only missed a couple of days atop the new releases list, so i have fared better than soem other devs.

So now i am not quite prepared for my Big launch, something i was looking forward to. so here i am scrambling to get stuff together that i was all relaxed about before today. One thing i really need is a nice list of Web sites that are likely to review my game. This means a lit of sites and hopefully contacts that have taken the time and trouble to review other Xna developed windows phone games. As i have not done well so far in my search, i thought i would start by creating a repository of the info i Do gather, so all my peers can use the list too. I really hope it is useful and gets the platform more publicity etc.

So here is the link to my new page that i started late tonight.
WP7 Reviewers List

thanks
Da Voodoochief

Touch screens, great for Flies?

I thought i would share what one of my grumpy peers wrote today. Made me laugh, so thought i would share. I also have one of these screens and something similar happend to me, only i couldn't figure out what had happened till later.

Here is the Quote...

Anthony Ball

5:34pm Jun 27

This hot weather has brought out the flies - it is REALLY annoying when one flies on to the PC touch screen monitor and moves the cursor. Just had one fly on to the screen, pulldown a menu then jump to Quit... Good job an 'Are you sure?' dialog appeared!!!

Am I back ?

To answer the Title i am, and i am not.

I have just recieved approval for my new game. This time it is for the Windows phone platform. The new game is called.

This is my first game on the platform, and i sure hope it will not be the last. I will start doing blog posts as i remember to do them and i'll try to do them as often as i can.

Yes, i am still insanely busy at work, working on at present an undisclosed conversion to the PS3 platform. More to come when they tell me i can talk about it. One thing i will say is the that this has been the most challenging conversion i have ever worked on, and i have done some doozies i can tell ya!

So this game has information on my web site, so you can check it out there, also the video we made for promotional purposes is there.

Thanks for reading and i hope to make it interesting as i possibly follow this new path.

More info on why the change to wp7 from Xblig in the next post (i hope tomorrow).

good night.

Da Voodoochief

Missed a Month.. and why

It has finally ended up being a month since my last post into this Blog.

I was doing very well with my daily posts until that time, so now i am going to explain some of the reasons there has been no posting, and some ideasof why there will probably be very few more, until maybe things change again... there is always change of course. Sometimes however away from developing games.

So what happened on the 15th ?
Several things happened or were in the proces of happening. I will describe a few of them in no particular order of importance (i think it took all these reasons and more to stop me).
1. Was in the middle of upgrading Berzerkatron to Xna 4.0. this should be something fairly straight forward, but it isn't. It wasn't realy designed to be either, which is a pity. However the real reason this is on my list is the fact that doing this kind of work and research smacks of my day job. The job where i write games occasionally, but lately have ben converting games from one sku to another. This kind of work is NOT creating games, and that is why i was on Xna. It would be interesting to see how my time would have worked out if the upgrade had been automatic, or even if a little upgrade script had been provided.
2. When i am coding my Xna games, i spend an inordinately large amount of time doing it, though in all honesty i think more time is spent on balance and level design than actual coding. Spending all this time means that my other creative endeavours always end up on the back seat. I figured that if i wasn't coding Xna games (too much fun), then i could be pursuing my other ideas.
3. February is exactly 1 year from when i sent off my book to 17 places. they said they would get back to me in a time frame anything from 60 days to 10 months. That time is now used up and expired. So it must be time to try something else, i still believe in my childrens book and how helpful they can be to teach kids to read and more importantly find enjoyment in reading. So how can i be writing games while needing to spend time on these books.
4. It was a break for the holidays and i got ill off and on the whole time. So taking time off to be ill seemed like a good thing.
5. I always wanted to Blog more about the development work here at work at Mass Media, only... My boss and i also think some of the other employees are a little scared i might reveal something that we have signed a non disclosure abuot. So i feel really restricted on what i can say. Which realy bums me out. We do all this great Sony Home stuff and yet, i can hardly say a word, no reveals, no secrets.. nothing. So with that pressure i have hardly ever mentioned what i do, apart from some stories etc I wrote a long time ago, and thoroughly enjoyed, as i hope you folks did.
6. Work is gonna kick my butt more. Yeah, work pressure has mounted, i am now working a 6 day week and this is tough on my family as well as me. With this reduced home time, it would be hard to code much anyway. Still the poducts we are working on are gonna make people very happy.

So whats next ?
I think i will be altering my Web page for SorceryGames once i get something to edit it with, my hard drive crash 6 weeks ago really put a pain into doing a lot of stuff i was really organised to do. Once it is locked up, i will be working on my new web site, which should be http://www.ab4k.com/ That stands for Adventure Books For Kids. I could not get the 'C' for children, bah!  I need artists if any of you out there think you are talented enough for childrens adventure books. I need approximately 22 pictures per book. I am going for high quality, though i am not too concerned about art style so much as quality level. So if you are interested, please drop me a line at voodoochief@sorcerygames.com.

As for this Blog, as it is my Sorcery Dev blog, I think i need to take a break from it. which saddens me cos it also means i need to take a break from my fellow Xblig peers. this group of indivduals has really impressed me in the last year, through their dedicationa nd commitment to not only help themselves, but also to help each other, and also me. I do not know of any community like it and I certainly hope i can get my books going to a more sedate pace (hours commited by me a week), and then hopefully i can come back and get on with more Xblig codiing myself. My one man army is suffering from not enough hours in a day.


Special Mesage to Xblig Devs,
Fellow Xbligers, you know you can find me on twitter, i canot leave the community, it is too cool. So if you need a reveiw of a game done, i will still try very hard to do these. Though i will not be going and lokoing around for stuff to reveiw. Instead i will rely on people tweeting about needing one done, or just plain DM me, i would love to keep up with what everyone is producing.

So for now, i have to say bye.. I hope this will only be for a short time.

Da Voodoochief (Rob)

new VertexBuffer() Xna3.1 -> Xna4.0

My latest errors seem to revolve a lot around vertex buffer api changes. There is  nice blog post here by Shawn Hargreaves.
Post about Vertex Buffer Changes

simply put though you remove your VertexDeclaration lines of code and just put 'typeof(RoundLineVertex)' the declaration in the second parameter of the VertexBuffer call, like these following two lines of code.
vb = new VertexBuffer(device, typeof(RoundLineVertex), numVertices * bytesPerVertex, BufferUsage.None);

// vdecl = new VertexDeclaration(device, RoundLineVertex.VertexElements);
 
After going through that it was very easy to change the VertexBuffer setups... Only now i have IndexBuffer to sort out. I did not write this original code and so have no real working knowlegde of the finer points required to make this stuff work. However I hope it wil be fairly straight forward once i under what has changed in the API. I understand what the buffer is for, only not whats changed at the moment.

Laters

Blooming fixed some more Xna3.1 -> Xna4.0

So i had 28 erros, ALL of them pertaining to the Bloom component. Interesting. I know by experience that this is not the last of the errors. They are just being masked by the current issues. So i was not surprised when i fixed the Bloom to see a new selection of errors, 48 in total.

So fixing the Bloom was easy. I just compared the New 4.0 sample to what i had and copied over the changes. I would have just copied verbatim, but i knew i made several small changes to the Bloom and i did not want to do that again. This process only took about 5 minutes anyway.

So now onto my new Errors which include
does not conatin a definition for 'MinimumVertexShaderProfile'
and
VertexElementMethod does not exist

These are all to do with Roundline which i am actually not using at the moment in this game. I may remove it for now. I will bring it back when i want to use it (gonna be used for the Menu button descriptions I hope!)

So ever forward we go.

Now tomorrow night is my works party, i am sure i will not be posting then :)

G'night