Blog for Brandon Pollet at GarageGames.com

A new games channel for the Wii?

Brandon Pollet — 2007-01-25T23:30:41+00:00

I just ran across this article and wanted to post it for everyone in the garage. John Lee, Hudson Entertainment's director of marketing, recently said in an interview that there may be a new Games channel for the Wii that is tailored to downloading new game content, basically like the Xbox Live Arcade. I know Microsoft has been really good to the GG community but if this is true it's pretty exciting stuff!

Here is the quote.

Lee is asked point-blank about whether Hudson might be considering developing a new Bonk game for release over the Wii's VC. Here's the response, verbatim:

"Well, the VC was specifically designed to bring back classic games, not to introduce new content. So to answer your question specifically: No. However, in the future, you should rephrase that question to: Are there any plans to launch original content on some downloadable service on the Wii, and you might get a different answer."

Anyway, this isn't much of a blog post but it would be pretty awesome to use some of the Wiimote hacks floating around here to make a downloadable game for the Wii.

Hardware Advice for TGE and TSE

Brandon Pollet — 2006-12-26T06:23:40+00:00

I've got a quick question for the community. I'm looking at purchasing a new development laptop in the next couple months but I wanted to see if anyone has any advice on what to pick up.

I'm definitely going with Apple hardware so that puts my options between the MacBook and MacBook Pro. The Pro is obviously better but I wanted to see if anyone out there has a MacBook Core 2 Duo and what their experience has been. Especially if you have any experience with TSE under Windows. If I can get away with the MacBook I can save at least $600 but I'm stuck with Integrated graphics.

For a $600 difference you get to choose between...

MacBook Graphics Hardware

Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory

MacBook Pro Graphics Hardware

ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor, 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM on 2.16GHz configuration

I know that the Pro is obivously the better machine but choosing it will probably set back my purchase by a couple months during which I could have been working on the go.

Anybody have any input?

Merry Christmas,

BP

Why Gears of War costs $60

Brandon Pollet — 2006-12-20T23:01:23+00:00

This is an interesting breakdown, from Forbes originally, of why next-gen games cost $60 bucks a pop. I thought it might be of interest to the crowd.

-* From 1up.com *-
Here's the skinny, as far as Forbes' article breaks it down:

ON A $60 GAME OF GEARS:

* 25% (aka $15) goes to pay the art and design guys.
* 20% ($12) goes to pay the programmers and the engineers.
* 20% (also $12) goes to your friendly neighborhood retailer. EB / GameStop, whoever.
* 11.5% ($7) goes to a "Console Owner Fee" - ie. whichever one of the Big Boys made your hardware (Sony, MS, Nintendo.)
* 7% ($4) goes to marketing, and puts Mad World and Marcus Fenix on MTV.
* 5% ($3) goes to "market development" -- paying for cardboard Standees of the Gears Crew and elbowing other games out of the way for shelf space at your local retailer.
* 5% ($3) goes to actually manufacturing and packaging the disc.
* 5% ($3) is spent paying the Man for IP licenses or maybe hiring some big name voice actors. If your game isn't an original IP, here's where you get dinged by Marvel, Disney, or Ray Liotta's agent.
* 1.5% (just $1) goes into the publisher's pocket.
* 1.5% (also $1) goes into the distributor's pocket.
* 0.3% (about 20 cents) goes into corporate costs. Management, overhead, lawyers, etc.
* 0.05% (less than 3 cents) go into the cost of paying for the Developer's Hardware. Who knew an SDKs can cost tens of thousands of dollars?

And there you go. $60 of Gears, a la carte.

I think it's interesting that the Art guys take a larger cut than the programmers, but that also factors in Cliffy B's cut and I'm sure he gets a sizeable one ;)

And here's my picture... since we have to have one!

Back in the Saddle again...

Brandon Pollet — 2006-12-19T22:40:15+00:00

I'm back, although most of you probably never noticed that I left. I've been around the forums though, I've posted a few threads, working through some problems, I've just never finished a game. Although, I think alot of us are in that position, we have great ideas, big dreams, lots of energy, but we can't get it done. This isn't all our fault, game development is HARD and indie development is even harder, but we all keep trying and thankfully GG keeps making it easier for us.

When last I left you I had started a game dev company that consisted of 4 people I knew from Grad school. We were coding on TGE and TSE, we had beautiful cel shading implemented on our zombies both in shader form on TSE and after some effort, in the graphics belly of TGE. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves when we realized.... we had no artists, and the art we could cough up wasn't anywhere near good enough, not even close. There was hope though! I had a call with a certian member of GG, who shall remain nameless, that was very promising. The hope was that they would be able to help us with our art problems by matching us up with artists in the community that could share our vision. The only problem is... the call didn't go so well.

I want to say up front that I am in no way upset or bitter at this person or Garagegames. The entire community, and especially the guys at GG, have been nothing but helpful to us and to me especially as I have struggled with Torque. But I was told that our vision was to grand, our project to large, and our experience to small. I was told that my postings on the forums and other places had led them to believe that I understood what it ment to be an indie and that I would be able to share in the keep it small, keep it simple, keep it fun idea. Our project was none of those things.... and you know what? He was right. We were over-reaching and we paid the price for it. The bills piled up, there was no income, and I had student loans that were coming due. It was time to get a job and leave the dream behind.

Well, I'm not done that easily! I'm back, and it's time to do this for real. I've been working on various things over the last year. One of them, a website called Klipboardz www.klipboardz.com which is based on the idea of sharing the internet with your friends, is nearing completion and it has sparked something inside of me. I think it's the feeling of actually completing something, actually following through on a project that you care about. It's a great feeling, and it only makes me want to finish a game even more.

So this post is all about new chances and starting over. I'm getting the band back together, as the Blues Brothers would say, and we are going to make it work this time. I'm not going to let feature creep distract us from the fun and simple gameplay that we know will be great, I'm not going to get bogged down in polishing the game before we have a playable prototype, and I'm not going to try and go it alone. When a helping hand is offered I'm going to grab hold of it with two hands. Hopefully, a year from now, I'll be making a blog post about my finished game instead of my finished website.

Here's to being back in the saddle!

P.S. It also helps that the Wii has completely rekindled my love for gaming. ;)

Saturday Feb 19 7:33

Brandon Pollet — 2005-02-19T07:33:18+00:00

The beginnings of a game design company....

Welcome to my first plan file. The first time I saw torque I couldn't believe my eyes, it amazed me that an engine like this was available for me to create the games I wanted to play. I literally would start up the torque demo and run around the water to watch the sun reflect in it, or just take off running over the hills to see what was out there. The entire time I felt like I had found some treasure that everyone knew about but not many people understood how great it was. This was exactly what the game industry needs, an Independent Game Community that can take chances and push innovation, especially when EA seems to be buying everything they can get their hands on. After a few days of exploring the torque demo I broke down, bought the engine, and I've been trying to figure it out ever since ;)

Over a year later things are looking up. A few weeks ago a few friends and I, (all from the computer science department), decided that we were going to start our own game company and develop using torque. I've started diving into the code trying to mold torque so that it will better fit our gameplay design and it is finally getting there. Right now I am stuck on creating a top-down crosshair that will allow the player to shoot targets that are above, below, or level with them. I had a working 3d crosshair a few days ago but it used server-side objects and wasn't useable for a multiplayer game, so I'm here at 1:30 Saturday morning looking for the answer, but it's all worth it for that awesome feeling I'll get when I find it. :)

//This first post was more of a story followed by a rant, hopefully they will get better