Moving time

Lack of time

Its always a bit difficult getting time to develop when you are a part-time indie. But when you are a part-time indie AND do contracting work, it can get even more hectic.

Given that last summer I went round the world visiting many countries, this summer has been quite a contrast. For the most part, I have mainly been either trying to sort out the legalities in buying a house (which I'll be moving into a week this sunday) or working on some contract jobs. What little time there has been left, I've put into Air Ace.

Air Ace

But even though time is limited, I think we've really made some big strides this summer. The highlights are:

We signed a deal that gives us the final list of plane models (still got to do a news item on that)
We got a load of content into the game otherwise
We got a shedload of code done, mainly game related and server setup stuff
We've fixed up a ton of stuff
We started to look at the user interface and the general user experience

There is still a huge way to go of course. Not least in terms of actually making things hang together properly. Our aim was to have a demo ready for IGC, but as it is, its not an issue anymore, even though we are intentionally keeping it in mind as our milestone date.

Tiki Tennis

On other fronts, things have been coming along nicely too. Gabe has done a great job so far on picking up Tiki Tennis coding. Mike, my other student who was working on it seems to have gotten too busy, so seeing it moving along with Gabe is really satisfying. We still need artwork for it, but I'll be looking at contracting that out after I've moved.

Ai pack

The AI pack stalled for a few months while everyone had various issues, like broken internet connections and other contracts, but the guys are back on it. I'll be back on it in a few months.

Research and moving forward

Other than my main contract job, which has been incredibly time consuming, I've been doing some research into various design and technology issues. Mainly this has been to inform me on technology directions to look at for online games. What I mean is things like infrastructure developments, server backend technologies and management. I've been toying with the idea of creating an online only games portal for a while (i.e. a place where people could pay a single payment and access a number of online-only games). Trying to break out of the MMOG mindset in many ways, but thinking more about aggregating customers over a number of games.

I think my interest in multiplayer oriented gameplay has been fuelled by Air Ace and some other games I'm playing, coupled with the feeling that there is still potentially a market for smaller online games developed on an indie scale. Torque is pretty much an ideal platform for many of the games I envision for this thing. But I've also been wondering how to create games beyond the scale of just a single torque instance. That has led me down many paths of discovery and with my research year coming up, I plan on actually doing some investigation work around this whole issue.

I think Josh R is doing a fantastic job of evangelising the whole "indie mmo" thing. Clearly you dont have to be a huge company to be able to produce something people will want to play online. If you can stick to something of the scale of MOM or A tale in the desert, then I think there is potential.

Conclusion

A while back, I was really depressed about the general games industry, but right now, I'm kind of excited by the whole indie space again. I'm waiting to see if Defcon (by introversion) lives up to my expectations. I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of other games made by indies etc.

The coming months should see us start to get some of our products together, with the artwork, soundwork, codework and everything shaping up seperately, it will be cool to see it all finally slot into place in the final products.

For the remainder of the year, I'll likely be working on tools and technologies. Doing research and prototyping of various game design ideas and infrastructure code. Of course, plans often dont quite work out the way you expect, but I've got a good feeling!