Please don’t read the other one. It’s out of date. I was hoping that it would have slipped off the first page by now (I wrote it over a year ago) but, unfortunately, my blog post output is not nearly high enough. I could have deleted it I suppose, but then that seemed a bit disrespectful to the people who commented. So instead I’d like to update it with some things I’ve learned:

1. Don’t write a blog post while whatever it is that fuelled the post is still incredibly raw
2. Always start an argument by defining your terms

This second point I learned after listening to the Cynical Brit Mailbox episode where I got utterly berated. What he does in his argument, is start off by defining what he means by the term “professional” and then metaphorically punching me in the face with it. But to the best of my understanding, we almost entirely agree – it’s just we differ in terms of what we mean when we say “professional”.

So. This is what I should have said over a year ago:

For me, acting professionally, has nothing to do with business practises – ways of handling money, methods of work, all the stuff connected with actually developing the game. All those things are a given - you’d have to be utterly insane to suggest that it is not important to back up your data off-site, for example. When I say that it’s okay for indies to act unprofessionally, I am not in any way suggesting that it’s okay for them to take your money, then throw their half-finished game in the bin and run off to Spain.

What I mean is, that it’s okay for an indie to act like a human. To me, acting professionally is to stand there smiling while somebody tells you to your face that they hate you, your work, and they hope you die in a horrible accident. Professionals have to act like this because they have a boss, or shareholders – they are not personally in a position to determine the way that the company interacts with their customers – either the nice ones, or the ones who’d turn up at the door to spit in their face.

You’d have a point that so far as “official” responses go, things should be nice and polite regardless. If you sent an angry email to info@indiedeveloper.com and then got a reply back calling you a twat, you’d have a pretty rock-solid argument. But Twitter is different – it’s an ‘always on’ environment and one in which there is no ‘leaving work at 5pm’. To say that somebody must always act a certain way on their personal Twitter accounts is to suggest that unlike almost all other people on the planet, certain people are never permitted to leave work – or, at the very least, must maintain a private account and be extremely cautious about who they allow access. Which would not only suck, but pretty much defeats the whole point of Twitter.

Consider the way Bioware’s Aaryn Flynn responded on Twitter to the horrific abuse thrown at writer Jennifer Hepler:

Source

Unprofessional behaviour? Sure. Understandable behaviour? Yeah, I’m kind of with Aaryn on this (apart from his use of the term ‘Flynnsanity’ – ghastly) – I have no idea what happened afterwards, whether he was reprimanded or secretly applauded but I rather suspect that it didn’t go down entirely well with those which held the coin purses.

But this sort of thing is all that I personally mean when I talk of professionalism. You’re entitled to think that while maybe understandable, Aaryn Flynn’s response was shocking and appalling and I can’t argue with that at all. You might be right. But to me, he acted in a very human way and my respect for him shot up considerably. I like it when people act like people instead of machines and this is why I like the indie games scene so much – because developers are all vocal about the things they believe without having to worry about what their boss or their publisher might think.

I’m in no way comparing the events of what happened with us with the vile abuse towards Hepler, by the way. I will say that some of the comments which sparked the whole thing off were a lot worse than you’d probably think, though. The trouble with these sorts of things is, much like that image of Flynn’s Twitter timeline above, people only tend to capture the reaction and not comments which triggered the reactions – which makes it awfully difficult to decide with certainty whether the response was justified or not.

We all disagree on stuff, we all draw our own lines in the sand – have our own boundaries. It’s up to you to decide which developers (if any) you like and/or respect and which you don’t. I regret most of what happened with us and the damage done to good will. But I stand by the principle that it should not be a requirement that small indie developers should just stand there and smile while somebody smears faeces over their face.

Yeesh. Believe it or not, I was intending for this blog post to be relatively up-beat. I’ll end with a joke.

A man with a long face walks into a bar. The barman asks, “why the horse?”. Shit. That’s not right. A spirit drifts into a bar and the barman says, “we don’t serve ghosts here”. Ah forget it.

Short Answer: Who cares?

Longer Answer: Actually, the short answer pretty much covers it.

This question has been discussed an obscene number of times and will probably continue to be forever. A noteable person in some vaguely related field will exclaim that games can never be art for some half-baked reasons which only really make any sense if your only exposure to games is some vague sense that you can lop people’s heads off and steal cars in them. Then the internet will burst with fiery indignation before everyone forgets about it for another couple of months again.

For a fabulous example of the ridiculousness of the debate have a read of Sophie Houlden’s humourously written rebuttal.

Art is defined as, “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture” and “works produced by such skill and imagination”. Well, that pretty much leaves it open for anything to be art, and ‘art’ as a term therefore is even more useless than ‘indie’ (good grief, I’m going crazy with these hyperlinks). ‘Skill’ and ‘imagination’ are pretty whoppingly hazy things to rest the entire debate on, though, since… well… this:

Art, apparently

Skill? It’s certainly uniform – all the bricks appear to be correctly placed. Imagination? Er… well… it’s imaginatively lame, I guess. Place this particular piece of art out in the street and it instantly becomes a pavement and therefore without any artistic merit what-so-ever. The fun in stuff like this is reading the bizarre way it’s justified as somehow being much more thought-provoking than it actually is. Behold:

“The sensation of these pieces was that they come above your ankles, as if you were wading in bricks”, Andre has commented. “It was like stepping from water of one depth to water of another depth.” (from the display caption)

Yeah, whatever you say. They’re bricks. This, is why games are not considered art. It’s because developers don’t come up with a bunch of bollocks to explain their games (apart from maybe Catherine – yeesh). And more to the point, nobody has the authority to decide one way or the other anyway. You think those bricks are art? Good for you. You think your five year old’s finger painting is art? Knock yourself out. It’s subjective, isn’t that the whole bloody point?

Oh dear. I’ve potentially just opened a can of worms there with objective vs subjective art. Well tough. You’d be hard-pressed to find anything which can really be said to be objectively true let alone whether something is art. Is that statement objectively true? Ask a philosopher. The point is, you can say that a drawing of a mouse is bad art if it’s got too many legs and wonky ears if you like, but it’s not necessarily objectively so. The artist may have produced the mouse to make us question the nature of mousiness. You can only claim something is bad if it falls short of the intent. Lowry’s matchstick men are incorrectly proportioned – if we were to assume that he was actually attempting photorealism then his paintings would be laughable.

Step away from the visual side of things and everything gets even more fun. Is gameplay art? A boardgame? Chess? Say we unanimously decided right now that all of these things are indeed art, what happens? What difference does it make?

Short Answer: None. This is a pointless discussion – I’ve just wasted my time and yours.

Few things irritate me more than failing to follow standard interface conventions. There are tremendously good reasons for these standards existing – I should be able to grab the mouse and immediately get to work without weird things happening, forcing me to trawl through the help pages.

Consider something like 3D Studio Max. It’s a 3D program – functionally it could not be further away from a Word Processing application and yet consider how the mouse actions work:

Left Click: Select an object for interaction as you would place the insertion point for interaction

Left Click & Drag: Select objects as you would select words

Right Click: Context-sensitive menu as in everything

Mouse Wheel Scroll: Zoom in and out, as you would scroll the document up and down

Middle Mouse Click & Drag: Pan the viewport as you would scroll the window

In the same way, there are certain conventions used with gamepads – ‘A’ should ‘accept’ and ‘B’ should be ‘back’ and while obviously all controls should be customisable (you may have physical reasons why using your index finger for accelerate is not ideal), that out of the box similar driving games should use similar controls is sensible.

There is, of course, room to move – not every game has the same requirements. But you’d be mad to decide that, really, the camera should be operated using the left thumb stick with movement handled on the right for… well, no real reason really – just the designer happens to prefer it that way round.

Gamepads are designed with these conventions in mind. Some buttons are nice springy analogue triggers because these are the buttons located in the sensible place for actions which require sensitive analogue control. Attempting to use a button designed for digital use (like the face A, B, X, Y type buttons) for sensitive acceleration is almost always completely awful.

So, it’s taken many console generations. But we have finally arrived at something approaching a sensible generic controller design which it is possible to assign sensible control standards to.

HOORAY! LET’S THROW IT ALL AWAY! WOOOOO!

It seems that the controller is perceived as a barrier to the sort of mass-market person essential to get if you want to take gaming to the masses. No, we must instead develop a more intuitive control system like pointing a wand or waving our arms around like lunatics. But none of these control systems are particularly intuitive either – you still need to learn how to interact with them but the point is, having learned for one game then intuition can take over for every other game.

But now that control schemes with controllers are reasonably standardised, the same applies to conventionally controlled games too. Hand my mum one FPS game, and after being thrilled blowing the heads off civilians she can move onto blowing the heads of slightly different civilians in another game without many barriers. At least in theory. Assuming sensible control decisions were made.

So. Touch controls.

If I pick up my phone right now, and attempt to interact with an e-mail application – it’s pretty obvious how it will work. Flick up and down to scroll the messages. Click and swipe to the side to pan between the various windows. There are guidelines for all these sorts of things in tremendous depth because it’s important that applications on a phone behave consistently.

What about a game? How should that be controlled? Should you draw some buttons on the screen and have me press them? Should I click and drag the main character around directly while simultaneously obscuring it with my finger? Should I swipe gestures to get it to do stuff? Bollocksed if I know – there’s no good standard because there’s a bazillion ways to make a game for a touch screen, and only a touch screen to control them with.

You can argue that it is this very freedom which makes developing games for phones so exciting. I’d argue that it’s not tremendously “free” when you’re basically attempting to design the least awful way of interacting on a device that’s clearly not designed to do these sorts of games. It’s kind of like playing Gianna Sisters using a joystick as opposed to playing Mario on a SNES controller. You can certainly argue that Gianna Sisters was brilliant (it was), but you’d be mad to say that playing Mario on a SNES pad wasn’t better.

I once made a pinball game for the Palm III. It worked pretty well since pinball only requires two buttons (plus one for tilt) which need to be on the left and right. That’s great, but you still need to tell the user that they need to press “Calendar” for the left flipper and “Memo” for the right. It’s stupid, but that’s what happens when you take a personal organiser and whack a game on it.

The closer your game matches the purpose the device was designed for, the better. Make a game for a touch device which is menu driven – like some sort of management game – and those highly developed and tuned standards come out to play in force and you end up with something that anyone can pick up and immediately feels right.

There is, however, almost bound to be an unexpected genre that’s the perfect fit for touch controls – nobody designed the keyboard and mouse with the idea of developing something which 30 years or more later would turn out to be brilliant for shooting civilians in the face, after all.

We’ve had a few people contact us for specifics on the process we’re using to translate the 3D source models for Zomboid into 2D sprites. So I thought it’d be a good thing to go into here.

The Goal

The result we’re striving for is all the advantages of being 3D (ease of creating animations in all directions, simplicity in terms of adding new costumes, hair, accessories, props, etc) without the look straying too far from our original hand-drawn sprite look.

The Process

The models are built and animated in 3D, and were we just to render the frames directly, they’d look something like this:

…which is not particularly great. Even shrunk down to the size it would appear in-game, it would obviously be a 3D model and stick out like a sore-thumb. So what we have, then, is a  two-stage process.

Firstly, we render the model to a render target that’s twice the size that it would need to be in-game. We apply a shader which applies some basic lighting (using hard edge, cartoon-style lighting) and uses Point sampling to preserve the crispness of the source texture.

We then render the contents of our double-sized render target to a game-resolution quad and apply a second shader process. During this stage, we allow anti-aliasing (we’re basically doing super-sampling here, since our source is twice the resolution of the destination) and then in the shader we clean up the image data.

The cleanup involves several layers of quantizing.

First, we ‘snap’ the colour value to the closest available colour in the source palette (the palette is passed in as a parameter to the shader, and is calculated once per model processed).

Next, we quantize the intensity (the length of the colour vector) to one of 5 possible values (0.0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0)

Then we quantize the pixel alpha to one of 3 possible values (0.0, 0.5, 1.0)

Finally, the colour is re-constituted from those parts, and spat out of the shader.

It’s a little difficult to show a fair comparison between the first version of this system and the current system, because a few things have changed with the source (an obvious example being that hair is now a separate overlay rather than being drawn onto the texture), but this should give a reasonable idea:

While there’s definitely a ‘personal preference’ aspect to which you prefer (and the new system is still work-in-progress at this stage), the new sprites are considerably cleaner, and much more closely match the original sprites.

There’s still work to be done in terms of finding that ideal sweet-spot for the lighting which will help add definition needed particularly on the side-on frame.

But one of the tremendous advantages of the new system is the speed that we’re able to convert the 3D data to sprites. Almost all the work of the process is now done on the graphics card, which means you can spit out all the frames for all the animations in all directions for one model in a matter of seconds. Beforehand, the process would be something we would leave running overnight.

One of the main reasons I was made redundant from my position at the studio I worked at prior to going indie was that I was (ridiculous as this sounds) too interested in the quality of our games. It caused arguments, stress, it made me a problem. I got so angry – I just wanted to make games which were good, that we could be proud of. You’d think this would be in the best interests of everyone, the studio included, since if you make consistently bad or, at best, mediocre games you’re on a downwards spiral towards the company exploding. Which is what happened.

This is the problem with financially driven entertainment. It’s easy to lose sight of the point – that games, primarily, are supposed to be fun - and instead focus on hitting those milestones so that you get your completion bonus. Balls to whether the game is good, have you technically fulfilled all the requirements of this month’s milestone? Yes? Move on.

Of course, all those development costs need paying so while it’s easy as an employee to stamp your feet and scream that the game is utterly awful, unless those milestone deliveries are met, that bonus which the studio relies on will disappear and suddenly people are losing jobs. It’s a vicious circle and a spiralling problem as development costs rise and team sizes bloat.

Everybody knows this. That, generally, games are just a business and there to make the developers and publishers money and, primarily, not there for the well-being of the gamers. But for the most-part it’s easy to separate yourself from this. You run home, clutching your copy of whatever it is you’ve been looking forward to, and you immerse yourself in it. All cynicism regarding why this game exists in the first place or how you have been moulded into thinking you need it, evaporates. From this point on it’s all about the game, and you.

Not so with Free-to-Play which reminds you at every opportunity, with a sledgehammer, that this is all about money.

Scenario A – game costs $10

You buy the game, it’s fun. You do well, but you get to level 10 and you get stuck. God this is hard. You consult guides, you ask friends, you try anything to get an advantage. You succeed, you feel great! Man, I’m good!

Scenario B – game is free.

You grab the game. Hey this free game is fun. You do well, but get to level 10 and you get stuck. Why is this so hard? What’s this, there’s an item here for $10 which will make this considerably easier. I can buy that, but where’s the satisfaction? I’ve bought my way to victory.

In both scenarios, you spend the same amount of money. But the trouble with F2P is that it makes you feel like the entire structure of the game, all design decisions, all difficulty spikes, everything is there to force you to buy that item. Is that really the best way to design an enjoyable experience? Frustrate the player to the point they give you cash (edit: or, as is often the case, bore them into giving you cash. Save yourself this arbitrary hassle! Only $5.99!)?

Or is it better to get that financial exchange out of the way, right at the start? It’s paid for, forget about it. Now the game can focus on entertaining you with no ulterior motives in play. If the game is hard, it’s there to challenge you to make you feel good about beating it, not sell you something.

Which model is ultimately better for developers and publishers is another issue entirely. But a gameplay experience should ALWAYS and EXCLUSIVELY be about the gamer.

(Other opinions are available)

What does it actually mean to be indie anyway? Yes, technically, to be indie simply means you are independent, but in the context of talking about ‘indie games’ the word carries more baggage than simply the lack of publisher.

To some, ‘indie’ is literally just short for ‘independent’ which qualifies Valve as an indie studio. Others deem Mojang as ‘not really indie any more’ purely on the basis that they’ve made loads of money. Personally, I’ve always had a rather hazy definition where ‘indie’ is kind of a subset of independent studios – basically if you have full-time staff, you’re now independent. The trouble with a definition like that is that there is some perceived value in being indie – like the indie scene is where the cool kids play and to be indie is therefore to be cool. But if the term includes everyone from Joe Bloggs making a game for shits and giggles right up to Valve, then there’s practically no meaning to the term what-so-ever. So what’s the point of it at all?

As much as there’s a positive element to being indie, there’s also a drawback. It’s really not at all uncommon to find people questioning, “why is an indie game more than $15?” because obviously it couldn’t possibly be worth that if it’s indie, right? There’s no way the game could have cost a sufficient amount to fund that it would warrant a price tag like that – heck, many argue that if you’re a proper indie your game should be free, “I thought you guys were doing this for love?”

It all comes down to everyone having different ideas what it means, both within gamers and developers. And while there’s confusion and no concrete definition, it’s going to remain an almost entirely useless term.

That said, what being indie does somewhat consistently say, is some sort of development philosophy – openness with your user-base and willingness to tackle niche markets. That said, there’s nothing to stop you from calling yourself indie, tucking yourself behind a pseudo-corporate wall, and making a Farmville-clone – and you’d have every right to call yourself such. So even that hazy general-philosophy angle comes with the caveat, “well… most of them are like that. Probably. I haven’t done extensive research.”

There wouldn’t be a problem at all with any of this, if the term wasn’t so damn in vogue. With so much disillusionment with the commercial industry, DRM, online requirements, price tags, etc, there’s never been a better time to say, “hey! We’re not like those guys! We’re indie! Support us!” – and maybe that’s all it does mean: “We don’t really know what we are, we just know what we’re not. We’re not THEM”.

Now that the first version of Costume-Ed has been released, it’s full-steam ahead on female sprites for Project Zomboid. There’s still a little bit of work to do getting all the base sprites cut out and imported into the tool, but once this is done I’ll be migrating my workflow from D-Paint Animation to Costume-Ed.

This will hopefully result in a speed increase in costume production as well as ensuring I’m on the case as far as bug-fixing the tool, and adding improvements here and there.

Features which I would like in Costume-Ed include:

o Various brush sizes
o Line tool
o Dither brushes
o Separation of hair onto a new layer (instead of being part of the head)

There’s no fixed timescale on when those features will be added because, in the grand scheme of things, they’re not terribly high priority.

Sorry that something as fundamental as “female characters” has taken so long to add to the game – hopefully anyone who’s had a squizz at Costume-Ed can appreciate the amount of work involved in adding just a single new costume, let alone doing all the base frames. Almost there now, though

Hello. Merry Christmas for tomorrow, and all that.

If you’ve not been following the, frankly, obscene amount of Tweeting I’ve been doing over the last few weeks (who could blame you – I’d have unfollowed me by now if it were possible), you may have missed a couple of screens I posted. These will mostly be interesting (or at the very least, relevant) for those of you into the whole modding thingy – and in particular, visual modding.

Firstly, there’s Costume-Ed – which is a tool we announced a while back, but which was one of the casualties of The Event. It’s now been almost (because it’s not quite done yet) entirely re-written, and is much better than it was before.

And next, because half the code for it could be ripped straight out of Costume-Ed and plonked straight into this, is a little tool for making isometric floor tiles called Iso-Edit. Draw (or import) them in conventional face-on 2D, and have them squidged automagically into annoying isometric 2D in real-time as you draw.

You can paint in both windows so any little errors that happen as things get squidged can be tweaked. So, for example, squidging the word “hello” resulted in some wiggly rogue pixels, so I cleaned them up and those rogue pixels can now be seen in the original window which we don’t care about because that won’t be going into the game.

So there we go. That’s the tools stuff which will be coming to a PC near you shortly after the update is released.

(And yes, it’s all backed up. Off-site.)

Updated Thoughts: The following was written in the heat of the moment.

There are three types of indie studios. There’s the independent studios, who are only really indie in-so-far as indie is sort of short for “independent”. But when you’re making a game for Sony or equivalent, it’s not quite the same line of business.

Then there’s indie indies. Of these there are two. There’s the type of studio that really, if they were honest, they’d like to be the first type of indie – everything they do is onwards an upwards to this goal. Legitimacy. A proper company. And then there’s the other type.

This type of indie never pretends to be professional. The “company” is probably just a name. It technically exists, but really what it boils down to is a guy in his underpants making a daft game. Sometimes that guy has a day-job, sometimes he’s taken a whoppping gamble and is working full-time from home.

The point is, if you’re going to throw your money at one of these indies, it’s important to know who you’re throwing money at and why. You can’t necessarily have your cake and eat it too.

If, unsatisfied with the tendency of commercial games to repackage the same basic game in shinier packaging, you decide that actually the shit looking 2D game with blocky graphics and dreadful production values is actually more worth $10 support than the latest bland corridor shooter is worth $40 then that’s great. But know who you’re supporting. Don’t throw that guy your money and then be shocked when he or she throws a hissy fit on Twitter. You’re dealing with real people – not a PR guy sat behind a wall of publisher validation.

Since I’ve had my blog, I’ve said pretty mean things about Oblivion and Skyrim. No doubt, there’s some poor sod sat there at Bethesda who would love to repudiate those sorts of statements. Either to justify why things are as they are, or to lament why they’re not. But he/she can’t. They have to sit there in silence and suck it up. It’s a horrible situation to be in but as sympathetic as I am, the feelings of an individual artist / animator / coder / designer / etc are not a terribly good reason not to say things how they are.

And neither should be the case with our game, Project Zomboid. The difference being, that with this there is no publisher wall to deal with. You hate our game? We’ll find that post on a Google alert and if we disagree we’ll either register and post or tweet a whinge or two. Why not? Why shouldn’t we? We might even call you a twat in the meantime. So what? We’re people, and we’re as entitled to get angry, upset, or annoyed by something on the internet as you are.

Oh no wait, but we’re selling you a game therefore we must be professional. Who says? Why? If we wanted to be professionals we’d never have left our jobs in the first place. What we actually want to do is make a game which we’re proud of and not be pre-occupied by maintaining a decorum on the internet. Don’t want to read our actual personal thoughts on shit? Don’t read our personal thoughts on shit using Twitter.

Don’t feel comfortable throwing money at an indie dev who replies to insults with insults back? Don’t throw money at that sort of indie dev. It’s really terribly simple.

Edit: For some reason, some people have written of this post that I’m somehow saying all indies are unprofessional. What I thought I’d made clear is that all indies are different. Know your indie, that is all.

Currently in production (as seen in my last blog post) is an “underpants man” version of the character sprites. What does this mean, besides confirmation that the survivors in the apocalypse do indeed still wear underpants..? Well, the screen posted before was the first pass of the anims, the second pass takes it one level further:

Oh dear, no head. The final pass will involve slicing his legs off too. This means that the final “characters” in the game will be assembled from a head, a torso, and legs and clothing will be sliced up similarly. Shirts, trousers, heads, hair, etc. will all be overlaid on these base elements meaning that not only will NPC costumes/look be randomised from these components, but that the player himself will be able to wear any clothing which he finds. And not only that, but he’d be able to have his head lopped off.

These components will also represent “final” character sprite layouts, so any custom mods produced after these have gone into the build which conform to this layout will be “future-proofed” for any further updates. And combined with the modding support currently being added, instead of replacing Baldspot’s permanent look, new costumes can instead be loaded in addition to whatever we put into the game.

Once these are complete, a similar pass will be worked on for the zombies so that any survivor who turns will be a zombiefied version of their human look instead of swapping to a preset “zombie sprite”, and then after that, a set of female equivalents will be produced so that you can choose your gender and meet female survivors in the world.