Written by on in Tutorials.
One step in our polish phase of remastering "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" was to make sure all devices are consistently showing the game with the correct colors. If you aren't a developer (or not one of multiplatform games), you might be surprised at how differently devices can display a game. We ran into an interesting issue in that process.
...Written by on in Business.
I've been a judge for the Independent Games Festival for at least six years. It's been an amazing time to have free access to the best works in independent gaming. The IGF has evolved a bit during that time; the grand prize winner in 2011 was Minecraft. The 2016 winner was Quadrilateral Cowboy. The vast majority of my time as an IGF judge has been in a post-Minecraft world, where developers knew that there was the potential for their tiny one-person indie game to be bought by Microsoft.
...Written by on in Development.
This is the fifth part in a series on applying devops principles and practices to game development. You can read the first post in the series, and see the entire series under the devops in game dev tag.
In our post on what the devops philosophy is, we wrote about revisiting workflow annoyances periodically. Sometimes you get more time and/or money. Sometimes you learn of an easy way to solve a problem.
There's something that got a lot easier for us recently: chatops.
"Chatops" is a trendy word for a subset of devops that focuses on streamlining work using extensible chatbots (e.g., Lita, Hubot, and Errbot) in team communication tools (e.g., Slack, HipChat, etc.). We use Lita on Slack, so I'll stick with those as concrete examples.
As a simple-but-nice examples, you might ask Lita to run an automated build for you, and it will connect to Jenkins and run the build you ask for. You don't need to leave Slack open a tab, log into Jenkins, find the job you need, and run it.
Something really important that well-implemented chatops provides is the ability to add context-appropriate information to conversations that are already happening.
...Written by on in News.
Due to unconfirmed reports of unpurchased IndieGameStand keys showing up on key reselling sites, we've revoked Steam keys which have not yet been redeemed from IndieGameStand and Desura, both sites that disappeared or changed hands without paying us money they owed.
Most people who bought the game should be totally ...
We've been heads down on remastering "(I Fell in Love with) The Majesty of Colors" the last few months (along with getting Rosette Dramatic LARP to a stopping point). We wrote about our realizations on project multitasking earlier this year, so we've tried to focus down as much as is reasonable.
That means that the in-flight game most left alone is Exploit: Zero Day, our cyberthriller puzzle game.
...Written by on in Development.
When Gregory released "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" in 2008, the video game world was rather different. Flash games were big. No smartphones supported Flash, but that was fine; the iPhone App Store only had 10,000 apps, with the best-selling being a peaceful thing called ...
Written by on in Business.
In a slow tale spanning the last four months, the IndieGameStand site (one of the places we sold Ossuary) closed parts down for maintenance, then went down completely for maintenance, and then its domain name stopped working entirely. Somewhere in there, its SSL certificate expired as well. The twitter account is silent and all of the preview images for their articles are broken, giving it the look of a column of blank gravestones.
...Written by on in Development.
If you've played Ossuary, you might have noticed the scrolling text on the bottom of the menu screen notifying you of updates, sales, and sometimes new releases. This is our little Update system.
...Written by on in Development.
We find live-action roleplaying (or LARP) the most fun when the rules work to support interesting characters and dramatic interactions. We designed Rosette Dramatic LARP to allow for this with simple rules that adapt to any sort of storyline or character action. This results in play experiences that showcase the players' creativity and flexible cooperation without disproportionately focusing on combat or any other aspect of storytelling.
To show how this works in practice, here's a summary of a recent plot done via the Rosette LARP rules. Everything in this story was guided by the game's conflict system to keep things flowing dramatically.
...Written by on in Development.
We've written that after the copyediting process of Rosette Dramatic LARP, we'd start typesetting using a document processing system called ConTeXt.
What is typesetting and why are we using something other than Google Docs or Microsoft Word to do it?
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