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

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.)

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.

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.

What are the implications of this? Well, I alluded to what this is for in the discussion I had on Bulletproof Radio last Tuesday (hint: the question the Geordie chap phones in to ask).

And on the subject of “that Geordie chap”, you should definitely check out Ringod123′s awesome play-throughs of PZ on Youtube!

Also, if you like Welsh accents (hint: yes you do), you should also check out this one!

This is a bit scary. It’s been a bit of a weird few months – we’ve gone from living off bread and beans, to announcing a game that got spread so far the traffic broke our servers. We’ve had wibbles with payment systems, HAD A CAR EXPLODE near us causing total evacuation, and finally this… the release of our pre-alpha tech-demo.

So yeah, it’s an early build. There are bugs to fix before we go completely public, of course, but its onwards and upwards from here

Link

Note: The above is a picture and not the live countdown

So head on over to our forum to keep up-to-date: Link.

This, as I’m sure you can imagine, looks very silly when you’re moving relatively quickly. So instead of ruining the video by having “Benny Hill”-style comedy walking, we elected instead to only walk while we were capturing the footage.

This resulted in far too many reactions like, “I think it’s a little rubbish that you can’t run. Why can’t you run? Seems like poor design to me”, etc.

The same logic applies to everything else a human ought to be able to do, and the same answer applies to nearly all of them:

“How come you can’t climb out of windows?”
Answer: Because the art hasn’t been done yet.

“How come you can’t climb over obstacles?”
Answer: Because the art hasn’t been done yet.

“Why are the zombies bald?”
Answer: Because the art hasn’t been done yet.

Actually, this last one requires a slightly longer answer. Characters in the game will ultimately be assembled out of component parts – head, headwear, shirt, trousers, etc. So you’ll be able to customise your character to your heart’s content. The same goes for the NPCs which will use the same system. And since any NPC or, indeed, you the player can become a zombie, the zombies need to reflect the look of the character from which they turned.

So the zombies will have a head that matches the character. Because there are no other heads in the game yet, rather than having all the zombies use a head that looks like the player, I instead made them completely generic and bald – a template, essentially, to work on top of – adding hair, gruesome zombie effects, and whatnot as relevant. But since you can only work on one thing at a time, all this stuff has been left for post demo.

There we go then – now that I’ve finished the sprite frames, in the demo release you will be able to run. The zombies can’t though.

So in previous posts I may have come across a little mean about designers. Evidently there are some amazing designers out there or else there wouldn’t be any good commercial games. But the trouble is, the designer holds the key to the quality of the game (and the studio) regardless of how good or bad the art and code team is, or they themselves are.

When you’re under pressure, you’ve got a huge amount of work in front of you and, let’s be honest, most of it is going to be a bit of a chore, what you really need is somebody to be passionate, enthusiastic, and brimming with confidence about the game. The best person to fit this role is the person who wrote the design in the first place.

When you have a great designer, everyone gets motivated.

On the other hand, someone writes a design and it sucks. Various parts of it can be fixed by the coders if they just ignore the design and implement what a good design would have suggested in the first place. But will they? They have task lists derived from that sucky design to get through, they can’t just veer off on a tangent on a whim. So you have a meeting where it transpires that the person who wrote the document really couldn’t give a rat’s arse about the game or if they do, they’re hiding it extremely well by pretending to fiddle with a pencil and ignore you. Or stubbornly refuse to budge on issues which anyone who’s ever played a game will immediately see are stupid – hey let’s implement a control system for a platform game that only a fully-trained helicopter pilot will be able to handle! That sort of thing.

So the team gets irritated and productivity drops making everything turn out a bit worse than it would have done before. So another meeting is held, and productivity drops again. Before long, literally nobody cares about the project and the whole things turns out as predicted like a rubbish self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s a surge of motivation when the next project arrives but it’s short-lived before the same process happens again, and before long you’re looking at a succession of games spiralling into the bargain bin. When this happens you can kiss your chances goodbye of ever signing a decent project, and so you’re doomed.

So here’s the thing. Obviously it makes a whopping difference to the quality of the game depending on how good the designer is at actually designing. But it also makes a surprising difference depending on how likeable and enthusiastic they are. If you’re shit but, heck, you’re trying and everyone’s in your corner because you love this stupid game and you want everyone else to love it too, you’ll get a higher quality product than if you’re a better designer but a mopey sod who doesn’t care and everybody (except possibly other designers) hates.

Lack of designer enthusiasm kills projects. If the designer isn’t motivated then in the end, no-one else will be and it won’t matter a jot whether or not that initial document was a work of art or a wet fart on a hanky – the game will be bollocks either way. At which point, you will probably blame the coders and artists for doing it wrong which will make them hate you even more.

However, if you’re likeable but shit then presumably you’re going to improve over time. Each game will be a smidge better than the last so the studio’s profile will slowly rise, the key staff will stick around and not have nervous breakdowns and divorces, and instead of a descending spiral of despair, you’ve got a gentle incline of awesome.

So for the love of God, be nice or everything will go wrong and it will be all your fault.

So that was nice. Not terribly surprising, though – I was hardly a model employee during those last few months of my stay. There’s a certain trouble you see, a rather delicate dance you have to perform if you want to be successful at the sort of place that, while it doesn’t make anything particularly amazing, is chock full of people who would be perfectly capable of amazingness given the right circumstance but constrained by a small number of utterly useless, yet bafflingly well-regarded people.

The trick is, to be vocal and passionate… but only a bit. Definitely not too much, and especially not if your passion is focussed on what isn’t working, because no-one that matters will care about the why unless the why is to do with somebody disposable. They might enquire earnestly the first time but the second time, after they’ve failed to address it, they’ll care less. And certainly five years later when the same problems are popping up they’ll really not want to hear them and will probably tell you to change the record or just yawn off your arguments as “that thing you do”.

So despite the fact that in between these moments of heated outrage you are, you know, actually rather good at what you do and (if you’ll forgive the blowing of one’s own trumpet) certainly beneficial to the project, when the opportunity arises you’ll be quietly let go. A bit like that bit in Titanic – morning dawns and there’s an empty space where Leonard Di Cappuccino used to be. Except in this circumstance, nobody is crying in the audience.

So, that was that. Forced into the indie business way sooner than I had intended. Fortunately for me, Lemmy had found himself in a similar position – indie games were always something we intended to do at some point, so it was either now or try and get a job somewhere else.

Had we had gone for the second option, perhaps I would have found myself at a great developer, one which would have immediately quashed all my frustrations. There are plenty of commercial games I love, and plenty of industry figureheads I hugely respect. Maybe working for them would be different. I have to rather hold on to that hope or it would utterly crush whatever remains of my love of the industry.

But in the indie scene I find myself and now I’m here, I discover that the gulf between ‘commercial’ and ‘indie’ is not as wide as I had expected. There are indie games out-selling commercial games, and suddenly you realise that gamers aren’t just some hypothetical statistic but actual real people who don’t really give a damn who made a game, providing that the game is completely brilliant. It sounds daft to say that, but in the commercial industry as an artist or programmer (even if you’re senior or a lead), you really are massively divorced from the people who actually play the thing you make. At least in my experience, anyway.

And so you find yourself able to actually have a dialogue with the people that may buy, or have bought, your game without having to send off your responses for approval or find someone else responding on your behalf with a slightly warped version of what it was you said. And then you start to wonder why in the commercial industry there tends to be so little communication with gamers because, you know, they’ve got quite a lot of stuff to say.

For example, there is a thread on our forums concerning the way our game was going to handle the player’s mental health. Me, Lemmy, and Nick have our own ideas about this, of course, but as it transpired some of our posters were qualified in this very area. Who better to discuss this with, if not 1) people who know one hell of a lot more about the intricacies than you possibly could with just your own game-based ideas and access to Google and 2) people who like the sound of your game?

When I remember games that I used to play on my C64, I typically remember them with fabulous graphics. It’s usually a massive disappointment to see them later and discover all that atmosphere was just a smudgy blob scrolling around making unconvincingly loud footsteps sounds. But your mind filled in the gaps. There’s something to be said for really simplistic graphics – the more you leave up to the player, the richer their experience. Games like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft demonstrate that unequivocally. So really, what do you gain from having Hollywood stars doing your voices, or actors mo-capping animations? You get wonderful-looking visuals and exciting cutscenes, of course, but we’re not in the business of making films, we’re making games – an industry born as much (or more) from table-top adventurers than table-tennis players. The cross-over between games and films is not a new phenomenon but rather than being an inevitable evolution feels more like species divergence. In the future there’ll be a term for each (and not a rubbish term, like ‘interactive movie’).

When that happens, one of those types will be a game and one will be something else. Something probably cool and exciting, but not a game. When it comes down to it, a game is just a set of rules and a playfield. You can dress it up with swanky graphics, but the more you force the direction, the more complicated the rules or constrained the playfield, the less gamey it becomes. And eventually, no matter how exciting you make your presentation, everyone will just want to play Pacman.