Blog for Rob Sandbach at GarageGames.com

indieSpring

Rob Sandbach — 2008-07-31T17:43:32+00:00

In light of my new job, I felt it a prudent time to launch an online blog. Whilst considering this blog, I also realised that I wanted to draw a line under all previous game development projects and pursuits and start afresh with the knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm just two months of working in web 2.0 has given me.

To this end I went through my GoDaddy domain manager and looked through all the domains I owned, a pertinant reminder of every project I'd thought up, bought a domain for and then never really got round to launching or pursuing. These domains included "indieSpring", an idea from last year which was to produce an online site for indie developers to get together, aggregate their blogs and content, advertise their games and network to collaborate and help one another through the minefielf of independent game development.

My first instinct was to use Drupal to produce that site. Shortly thereafter I thought it a far more sensible idea to actually start a blog aimed at spreading knowledge and the indie gospel -myself- before trying to convince everyone else to! And so I grabbed Wordpress, hooked into Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Feed Burner (after all I am a web 2.0 geek now, I need to know how things work!) and had myself a nice blog I can update and send photos to from my iPhone, pings out notifications over Twitter and Facebook upon posts, and generally is quite cool if bog standard to most blog savvy folks.

My next dilemna was what to do with the bits of game design docs, the snippets of code, the half finished games and ideas, concepts and thoughs that have accumulated across a number of projects and under a lot of different names in the last 6 years I've been thinking about making my own games. Well, I decided to gather them all into a big zip folder, print what was appropriate and take it as a starting point for a fresh, new initiative which can benefit from a new name, spangly new site, a decent level of funding (thanks to my job) and a better level of experience and comprehension about basic business and product development methodology. Rather than suffer the same problems of seggregation and comparmentalization of online content I've already grown sick of, I'm calling this new initiative "indieSpring Studios".

So I've got a shiny blog, and a new logo under which to develop my first title. Strangely, flicking through those printouts and that zip folder I decided to go back to one of the first games I developed. A small, colourful fun game titled "chainWorks", developed on TGB a couple of years back. The games format lends itself to a casual click and play game on PC or Mac, but even more so to a touch interface such as the iPhone. Cue Torque on iPhone announcement and a very, very happy developer.

And so indieSpring's first title will be the redevelopment of chainWorks. I'm 90% sure I'll be using TGB once more, and 100% sure that this time I'll properly document and plan the games development and feature set. No screenies just yet, but when they come they'll be big, shiney and explosive!

For now I'll thank you for reading this somewhat indepth account of my recent past, and leave you with a grab of indieSpring's new logo.

This post is syndicated from the main indieSpring blog. If you're interested in following my development of chainWorks or the studio please come on over and sign up to the RSS feed at www.indiespring.com.

Casual Connect in Amsterdam & a GG Podcast(Again!)

Rob Sandbach — 2008-02-02T18:38:50+00:00

Well!

It's been a long, long while since I blogged over here. In truth little has happened over the past year as university takes it's toll and I've got my head down to work. The good news is the end is in sight; and I've managed to (almost) secure a job in the gaming sector despite graduating with a geography degree!

I'm going to be going to Amsterdam once more this year, attending the Casual Connect Conference. I'm hoping to get plenty of interviews with some key folk within the casual game industry, in particular with some of the main portals and developers, asking what options there are for independent developers, and any advise they have to those hoping to join this thriving industry. I'm hoping to compile the interviews and discussions, as well as anything taken from the speakers into a pilot podcast for "Indie Games and Tech"; something I planned on last year.

As to later episodes, I'm still working out a format, but it'll most likely be a GG centered news roundup, produced semi frequently, presented from a new names and faces from around the community. Nothing concrete yet, but things should take shape shortly!!

So if anyone is heading out there this week, please send me an email so we can meet up! I'm going alone at the moment!

Rob

Roundtable Podcast - Phil Carlisle, Alex Scarborough, Jon Jorajuria and you?

Rob Sandbach — 2007-01-31T22:40:40+00:00

Join us in the IGaT Podcasting Roundtable Premier Episode

First a help request, taken from the Indie Games and Tech Podcast feed :

Quote:

We are establishing a regular, informed roundtable podcast, aimed at discussing developments from across the indie game development scene. Produced fortnightly, the should be a fun, yet informative way to hear about the lastest game development news. As it is produced primarily by members of the Garage Games community, no doubt in its first few episodes news and discussion will be a little biased towards GG developments, but we hope that in time, and with help from the audience we will be able to aggregate and discuss news from all communities.
Our panel currently consists of:

Phil Carlisle
Phil is a professional game programmer and lecturer. He has been programming games for 20+ years, with several published games behind him. He has at various times specialised in Networking, AI and General Game Programming and has a soft spot for 3D gfx.

Jon Jorajuria
Jon Jorajuria's primary talents center around music and sound effects. Jon has been a professional guitarist for the past 16 years with a total 27 years of playing experience. Jon has also been a sound and recording engineer for 12 years, working with various developers on many titles.

Rob Sandbach
Rob runs an independent game studio, Urban Games; which is currently in talks with various publishers about it's first commercial release - chainWorks. Designing and developing games for 5 years, his interests lie in innovative game design and production of Casual titles.

Alex Scarborough
A die hard coder, with a specialty in rendering and graphics pipelines. Alex is a self taught OpenGL programmer with 2 years experience in general OpenGL programming and six months experience with advanced OpenGL features such as GLSL shaders, framebuffer objects, and vertex buffer objects.

You?
There are still a couple of spots left on the panel (1 - 2), if you are interested in joining us, and are available on Friday February 12th at 11pm GMT for recording, then please send me us an email with your name and brief background.

Likely topics of discussion for our premier episode are Josh Ritter's announced MMO kit, the results of Dreamer's 90 day competition and Torque X's impact on us indies. If you want to help us out, send me an email. You don't have to be high and mighty (hey, i'm the only non associate on there - come support the GG low-lifes!!), just have a good grip of indie development, the english language and Skype!

Casual Connect in Amsterdam
I managed to get a free pass to Casual Connect (saving $450) to attend as a press member for the podcast. Besides meeting up with Phil, Jay Moore and others, I'll be interviewing anyone I can get my hands on from the casual games industry. I've even got access to the press reviews so I might be recording a few of those If I'm allowed :).

The results of these interviews will all go up on the podcast once I get back and clear them all up. Another request for you - If you have any questions you'd like me to ask to anyone there either post here or again drop me an email. Details on whose attending are here. I really need some inspiration for questions and information developers would like to find out!

chainWorks and the GG Pod Cast

Rob Sandbach — 2007-01-16T23:03:47+00:00

Hello everybody,

Wow what a hectic few months. Had virtually no time to work on anything game development related at all, which is such a shame when chainWorks was coming on so well. I stepped back on New Years day to think about the studio and realised that for a small team we had a lot going on. We had 2 2D titles, 2 3D titles and the pod cast - there just isnt time to do all that as an indie. What is more we were trying to do everything at once. So I decided for 07 my resolution was to downscale across the whole studio; something which I seem to do every 6 months now. To this end we have shelved some projetcs and downscaled others.

chainWorks

This is the last time you'll see chainWorks in this veil. Hopefully we should have some new, spiffy artwork in place before long. Just need to rustle up the funds! All thats left with this is to tie up all the strings. A lot has been changed from our last Beta in light of some feedback; and its taken some time to really make it feel right. Hopefully we will have a feature complete beta completed for Feb 1st. After that its polishing, and adding in the new artwork as it comes :)!

Garage Games Podcast
Well this was a cool idea which exploded into a complex radio show with multiple sections, bells, lights and whistles. Too much. I am still incredibly passionate about making a podcast about GG, there is so much going, and so many things to discuss. Instead of the previous grand plans however im planning on just assembling a panal of say 3-5 people, planning some direction pointers and then just recording the convo and putting it out there. Anyone who listens to TWiT, Mac Break or any/most of the TWiT network podcasts will know the format im talking about. Would anyone like this? Or is everyone after a more complex, news, reviews, previews, features etc?

This is something I really want to do. If you are interested in getting onto the panal please email me at robsandbach@urban-games.net. It should be a blast, just a few people talking about something we all share a passion in! All you need is a mic and skype, plus an hour of your time to give for the first show :).

So for now the focus is on getting chainWorks beta ready for Feb 1st and trying to assemble a group of people who want to talk about indie games and tech. If you can help with the latter then please give me a shout, no previous experience necessary obviously!

Thank you all for reading,

Rob Sandbach

Torque Cast Radio - The Introduction

Rob Sandbach — 2006-10-26T11:18:13+00:00

Introducing Torque Cast Radio, the show dedicated to all things Garage Games!
Well I've put on hold nearly all of my game development this past week, and have been organising the upcoming shows. Torque Cast Radio will be a monthly 1/2 hour to 1 hour show, delievered on the 15th of every month. It's my pleasure to introduce to you your hosts for the show, Anton Bursch, and Steve Adamson. It's a genuine honour to have two talented and knowledgeable community members approach me to help out, and between us all we've got the skill set, contacts and knowledge to deliver some fantastic content to you guys.

We spent most of last week outlining the shows format and came up with this.

News Roundup
Self explanatory, take any major stories of the past month, and discuss them as a team.

Show Feature
We take 20 minutes to deliever the "feature" of the show. This includes reviews, previews, interviews, round table & discussions. In upcoming podcasts we can tentitivley confirm an interview with Jacob Fike of PHP Overlord, a review of Rack em' Up road trip, a round table discussion of cross platform development with torque & much more.

Mail Bag
Answering any questions that have been asked by the community. These can be written, but would be much better recorded..get involved!! Rumours? Tech questions? Email them in at the address below, preferably with an audio clip of you asking them!

Developer Spotlight
Our other community contact point. Each month we'll be focussing our spotlight on a new developer, with links on the website, in the shownotes & you'll have 10 minutes to "pimp your project", followed by a 5 - 10 min Q & A from us. *anyone* can apply for spotlight, and we're really hoping for a large influx of interest. You can use your 10 minutes to talk about what ever you wish, a game, a resource a person, anything! If you're interested please mail me at robsandbach@urban-games.net with a summary!!

Torque Cast Radio Weekly Roundup
Should the show get popular there are plans to produce a far smaller weekly show. inspired by Anton's old weekly plans. The weekly show would let us address far more smaller but still cool stories based on people plans. We could even move developer of the week over to the round up

We want to make this show for you guys. We also want to get everyone involved on the show, and help generate interest and publicity for your project. If you have an idea for content, would like to be on the spotlight, would like to be on a roundtable or anything else, email me or get me in any of these ways. Also post your comments here, i can't reiterate enough how much we really need your feedback!

Fireworks, Monkeys, Racers and Podcasts!?

Rob Sandbach — 2006-10-14T19:19:28+00:00

Hi all, just a post to let you know whats going on in the Urban Games world.

chainWorks Reaches Internal Beta!
Our first title, chainWorks, has reached internal beta status, and what-a-relief! It's a fantastic feeling to push my first ever indie title out for people to play. Plenty of feedback coming back which is great, mostly people are enjoying the concept, commenting on it's uniqueness, but offering plenty of suggestions for improvements which is a win-win scenario for me. I posted up some screenshots of the game over at our gallery. So after I get through the bug fixes and suggestions, i've got to sit down and decide what to do with this game...

Monkey Challenge - A New Challenge
I've started work on a new 2d project to take my mind off of the laborious and boring famous "last 10% (90% dev time)" phase of chainWorks. This little game is called monkey challenge, and how much fun is it to just "make games"! I haven't had so much fun programming since I first got T2D, but after 6 - 10 hours coding I have 50% of the final features running in game and bug free. This is the first chance I've had to use the level editor, and it makes creating levels for this game absolutely awesome fun. What's more the code im producing now is levels and levels better than the chainWorks stuff, all nicely commented, tabbed, logical callbacks and effective use of name spaces and classes.... it's that "feel good buzz" that indie game development is all about. I'll be posting more about Monkey Challenge later on, but its inspired by chu-chu rocket (the dreamcast title), but involves monkeys vs tigers, with more exciting puzzle pieces such as rope bridges, tree houses, banana collection and family rescue missions...full write up soon!

Synergy Racing
Our main project of the day is called Synergy. No website or public details yet, just wanted to share a few concept images of ours....

Full Pic

Garage Games Community Podcast
Finally I have the garage games community podcast. A LOT of interest was expressed for this, and since getting a mac (and moving my LIFE to it) Ive wanted to try my hand at this. So I went out and bought a condensor mic & a behringer preamp, and am ready to get this show on the road. What I would love however is a co-host. Someone who is in touch with the GG community, and has time to put aside a few hours once in a while to help present a show to the community. This is all indie stuff, so no technical experience required, but a quiet location and decent quality mic would probably be best... We also have a radio technician onboard who will be "producing" the show, so it's really just a case of reading through what we're planning on talking about and shouting out your opinion.

I'm also on the look out for some cool content for the show. We're after people for interviews, people for roundtables, people for anything! If you want to help co-host, feature in a debate, have shout out for your game, have a cool idea or anything, i've set up a forum just for you :), so come on, drop me a line!

That about wraps up news and gossip for me! I'll check in later with more news on Monkey Challenge, and hopefully chainWorks Beta2 :)

GG Comunity Podcast

Rob Sandbach — 2006-09-30T15:02:32+00:00

Hi all,

Back in January Ben put out a GG podcast which I believe was insanely popular. Jeremy Alessi suggested he would enjoy a regular podcast, as did the comments all over the forums and the origional blog. A few months later a community magazine was proposed which I volunteered to help in but it seemed to die a lonely death.

So I figured why not try and create a semi regular podcast, maybe fortnightly, perhaps even weekly, dedicated specifically to Garage Games and it's community. My studio has good relations with a high bandwidth supplier, and audio experts, so technically we could achieve it. The community could get serious air time with reviews, interviews, previews and features about popular ideas, technology, games or people. A lot of discussion occurs every day in this community, and most of us are tech savvy, so I figured why not try and produce something.

So I came up with a basic plan of different ideas, as well as some sample content if we were to do this podcast right NOW:

GG News
First up would be news from the community, just the core headlines.
This Weeks Examples :
TSE (T Advanced Tech) reaches MS4 and EA days are numbered, latest TGB release, and new distribution method for media.

Community news
Very brief summary of interesting community blogs or posts recently...

Development Roundtable
Pick up on one or two of the key contentions, and grab a couple of people who obviously feel strongly (preferably opposed) and have a round table.
This Weeks Examples :
TSE name change.....

Mini Reviews
Nothing long winded, just comment on any released content packs, games, tools etc.
This Weeks Examples :
Shaper 1.0 maybe? I

Mini Previews
Nothing long winded, just comment on any demos, screenshots of the day etc.
This Weeks Examples :
Illuminia Demo

The roundtable could be substituted for an interview perhaps with a leading developer of a game or resource. Speaking of resources, useful ones could be plugged, we could offer tips and hints of the intricicies of torque... I think the possibilities are endless for content. So before I go and grab a mixer and decent mic I wanted to get some community thoughts..good idea? Bad idea? Stuff you'd like to see / not see? Maybe you want in on a discussion?

I'd love to hear your thoughts guys,

Rob Sandbach
Urban Games

chainWorks Reaches Alpha & uPlayer Accounts

Rob Sandbach — 2006-08-31T19:31:51+00:00

Hi all,

uPlayer Account
Our new website has entered a brief beta phase. We have integrated user registration, which allows our customers to tie Urban Games products they have purchased to a "uPlayer" account. Once their product key has been tied to their account, uploading scores, replays and custom games to our webserver is streamlined, with no need for logging in within the game. Also we have implemented an activation system for beta builds that allows the client to check if a keycode is still valid every time a game is run, meaning once beta is over we can shut of builds. Just small stuff which lets us keep control of our builds. We are unsure how we will integrate this system with any final product releases.

chainWorks reaches Alpha
Urban games has just announced their first title chainWorks has reached an internal alpha stage. What does this mean? Well my first ever self made game is coming to a close after 12 months in development. Theres still quite some distance left yet, mainly optimising the images, tweaking the level boundaries and a few minor features to finalise. It is important to note that the artwork in the game is *not* coming to a close, just the coding side of things :) The screenies below are just to illustrate some of the stuff we've been working on.

Firstly we introduced some new, far leaner firework effects. The old fireworks (see www.urban-games.net/chainworks/Downloads/5.jpg ) used 1500 particles for each explosion, the new ones around 350 (which is still too large for a final build, but we're working on that). I also would like to implement a scaling system that delays the explosion of some fireworks in a chain to prevent a sudden hammering of the particle system when 10 fireworks all demand 350 particles at once.

There are a few gameplay bugs left to work out and we need to work on scaling, and optimization of memory usage. We're hoping to enter BETA in mid September, as well as taking a build to the community weekend for people to check out. I shall leave you with some images from our internal alpha 1.5 build.

More can be found here : http://www.urban-games.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=1

Thank you all for your time,

chainWorks, IGC, New Website and more!

Rob Sandbach — 2006-08-06T19:12:43+00:00

One third of a year! A long time huh? Since my last post here!

A LOT has happened in the past 4 months, for myself, my studio, and most of all my games. For those who don't know me I run Urban Games (http://www.urban-games.net/) and we are currently working on two titles. The first is a 2d puzzler called chainWorks, and the second is currently under wraps but will be a TSE futuristic racer. Anyway thought i'd run through some main events, and ideas I've had!

1) New website
We designed and implemented a new website with a new host. The old website was a real swxy, sleek flash based website but just contained no real information whatsoever. As a result we decided to develop a more content based site in order to house the online statistics systems our 2 new games will feature. The new site is therefore functionally and visually a large step from the old one. I'd love to hear your opinions on it, the link is http://www.urban-games.net. I haven't proof read it yet so consider this a sort of "Beta" :P!

2) chainWorks
Speaking of beta's my first ever, EVER, game is coming towards a feature complete status. chainWorks (http://www.chainworksgame.com/) is developed on TGB and is the culmination of a life long desire to make a game. Ive posted some screenshots below. The game now has all the levels built in, the options menu in and configured, the custom game creation all in with appropriate error checking, the score tracking & profile system and finally a working replay system, whereby a player can save their cool looking displays and sejnd them to friends to watch.
Last July an indie developer came from London to stay with me and we had 2 people working 24/7 for 5 days. This was a pretty exciting time for me as its the first time Ive met someone for the sole purpose of game development, really syked me up and felt like a strong "step" on the path to working full time in games.

3) IGC
Im stuck over IGC. The cost of me going to IGC would come to approx $1500 - $1800. I was set for going when I founded the studio and planned to have both projects ready for a demo, but its apparant that only chainWorks will be ready anyway, and even then not ready to be sold. I'll definetly be going to next years as both projects will be ready for a strong demo. Is the experience worth $1800 (I do have the money in an investment fund)? Im serious about making it in this field and have been working with torque for 2 years now, so it's not just an "on the whim" thing i'm feeling. Ill have to think it out I guess :P!

I could go on but im going to save all the news and ideas I have for anothe post as this one is getting long anyway. Please check out the new site and tell me what you think (http://www.urban-games.net/), and if you have any input over IGC id love to hear it!

Thanks everyone
Rob

chainWorks Development & Media Update (Video and Images)

Rob Sandbach — 2006-03-26T20:31:39+00:00

Hi all,

Well it's been a long while since I started the complete rewrite of chainWorks. I released the old demos over here, and since then have been scripting away like crazy! The main aims for MS1 of my project were : Basic game loading, seeding, and playing, Level system, score tracking, saving/loading and a confident GUI system developed.

I first of all added the basic gameplay mechanic, and toyed with a few item ideas. Then came some ideas on my own GUI system. What finally came around was a set of about 10 flexible functions which load/animate/destroy/link and track GUI's which can be built in the level builder. I put so much effort into actually scripting the system I haven't had time to play with it enough to show it off completely but you can see it in the video (!) down below.... The gui's you see are all completely script created and driven..

Next came my own method of text output. I haven't really read into the torque ways of doing this, but it seemed to me that seeing as though id bypassed the standard torque GUI system, getting text ouput onto the screen may be a bit more difficult than first envisioned. So I made a few more functions (inspired by the available T2D resource) which load a font imagemap, and outputs strings of characters to the screen. It can left, centre or right align, have multiple colours (using the scripted blending functions), be integrated into the gui system and can be an size, colour or orientation... again you only see this briefly in the video but it makes a small appearance on the campaign screen.

I've also been working closesly with an affiliate to create a GUI scheme. You can see the workings of it in the video, we decided quite early on to not have anything too snazzy or extreme for the game, keep it simple and efficient for our target audience. The simple blue borders and boxes make a nice scheme, and focus the attention on the gameplay at hand.

Finally the other component of my first milestone was a persitant saving/loading system as well as a score tracking and updating method. This has all been handled now and the game will save/load scores automatically, and is ready to be integrated with network and encryption in MS3.

And that brings us to the end of MS1! I've been toying with the particle engine (got to escape code sometimes right??), not much to show at the moment but the effects can be seen in the video, and they look pretty sweet :) They are far too expensive at the moment and we will be adding a scaling feature, but the first effect looks nice, and you can see it in all its glory below.

This video was produced at first to show off to a few contacts, friends and family just for that needed morale boost we all enjoy ;)! When it was created however I figured why not post it up here? I was in two minds at first as MS1 is all about scripting and not artwork or visual polish, so a video does it little justice, plus it may be miss interpreted as a video intended to demonstrate the final game, for the record its not. It shows some quite random and unlinked parts of the game, its just a collation of the work through the last month :)

Anyways! I hope you all enjoy it!

chainWorks Concept Prototype Demo Movie - Quicktime Movie (13mb)