Earlier this year I decided to sell Artifact (and Samu Games with it).
As of 1 June 2010, the new owner took control. So, no, I’m not looking for offers.
I expect this will actually help the longevity of Artifact (10 years and counting!), since it will now be run and managed by someone who is still enthusiastic about it. Instead of someone who burned out on the game about … oh … 2004.
But, no, I know what you’re thinking, and this wasn’t a celebratory selling out, like an IPO or a buyout by Google. Don’t I wish! No, it was more of a rummage sale, where you apply prices that are only a fraction of what you remember paying and try not to think about it too hard.
Despite not being an overjoyous good thing, though, it’s not a bad thing, this rummage sale.
It’s more like closing a chapter, mixed with a bit of overdue moving on.
No drama (or at least none is planned), and only this small announcement.
Best of luck to the new owner!
-David
PS My Samu Games email address still works, BTW. And if you have a Samu Games email address, yours still works too. I stipulated that in the sale contract.
As in, I am once again a victim of my own optimism.
I had hoped to be finished with my silly little game project by the end of May. It’s not going to happen. There was a mild hiccup with the art in the middle of April, a need to build some tools, and a big family event … but none of those are to blame. At least, no more than the normal amount of blame life must always take for slowing down projects.
But I’m not put out, upset or anything negative. Just acknowledging a simple fact: I won’t be done by the end of May.
Maybe by the end of June. (Optimism? Of course.)
Every project has good days, where you think you’re almost done (very common near the start), and bad days, where the end feels a century or more away (ugh).
Despite realizing I won’t hit my end-of-May target, today is a good day. I’m very pleased with how the project is progressing and look forward to being able to show it off soon.
This week, as I started getting usable graphics for my project, I realized that I was going to have to pause actual game development and build some simple tools.
By a pleasant happenstance, one of the tools I need (take a collection of individual images and arrange them in a “texture atlas” or “sprite sheet”) I’ve already written. I built it last year while working on The Journal 5 (to manage my new set of toolbar icons and calendar charms). I had forgotten how much functionality I had put in that tool (cleverly titled “ImgArranger”). I don’t think that I even need to tweak it. Woot!
The other tool (take one or more sprite sheets, identify frames, arrange animation sequences, spew data out in a game-usable form), unfortunately, I’m going to have to build from scratch.
Hopefully it won’t take more than a few days to whip up something useful with Delphi 2007. Since I have no plans to *market* the tools, I can make them as slap-dash as seems safe and entertaining. Then I can get back to working on the game itself. I’ll probably have even more artwork stacked up and waiting for me by then.
About the same time I was contemplating my current indie game project, it turns out my brother, Dug, also decided it was time to try out the whole “video game thing” again. His new game, WordDrain, is now available for Droid, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. (I’d link his Web page, but it’s rather primitive right now. Just look up “WordDrain” in the various “app stores”.)
Dug & I partnered under the banner of Samu Games from 1996 through 2005, and created the original Paintball Net and Artifact games. Dug bowed out of Samu Games at the end of 2005, though, and hadn’t done anything game-related since then. Now he’s back.
Didn’t see that coming. Maybe I should talk to my family more often … ?
On the other hand, I didn’t see my current project coming either, back at the beginning of the year. Maybe I should talk to … uh … myself? … more often … ?
I haven’t had to build this many FSM’s in years. All for one very small, rather silly single-player game (or hot-seat two-player; or, as of today, a no-player game where you can watch the AI play with itself; <ahem>).
The overall game application needs an FSM.
The game itself needs an FSM.
The bunnies need an FSM (and its getting more and more complex).
The flowers need an FSM.
The dog will be getting an FSM very soon now.
There are features still to be implemented that will required FSM’s.
Here an FSM, there an FSM, everywhere an FSM.
Too bad FSM’s are too simple, and yet too case-specific, to really generalize in code. I’d love an elegant, drop-in solution. But most of the attempts I’ve seen make FSM’s even harder to read than long vertical switch-case configurations. “Elegant” always seems to be far, far away.
With 25 years of programming under my belt, I’ve become pretty good at predicting where I’ll screw up.
I’m a sucker for what I call “automatic behavior”, what could also be called “functions with side effects”.
It’s a progression I go through on almost every project. I start out with a function A() that, of course, calls another function B(). Because any time I call A(), I always call B(), so, sure, save a line of code (sorta) and do ‘em both at once.
Inevitably, though, I’ll have a case where I need A() without B()–or, perhaps more often, I’ll discover that a bug I’ve been hunting is because A() calls B() every time. The really fun times are when calling A() sets in motion a recursive loop as it calls B(), and B() ends up, through fair means or foul, calling A(), which calls B(), and so on.
Because, oh yeah: Recursion is another bit of kryptonite for me.
This goes back to my recent post where I said I had to “get past my crippling need to ‘do it right’.”
Here’s what I meant: I tend to want to solve a problem in the general case, not just the specific case.
I don’t want to build “just a sprite engine”, I want to build “THE ULTIMATE SPRITE ENGINE”. I want to solve this problem once and for all and never have to deal with it again. Ever. I want the finished product to be drop in useful for every conceivable sprite-related project (usually called “games”, but why think small?) that I might tackle.
This approach is great, I suppose, if you want to be in the tools market. And the tool you’re making has an actual market.
But I don’t want to be in the tools market.
Plus, all I need is a “sprite engine” (if you can call it that, really) that does what I need in the current project. If the next project needs something else, I can extend what I’ve already built, or, hell, build it all over again from the ground up (which would be silly; but, yes, I’ve done that too).
Taking the time in my current project to add features that I don’t need–on the off chance that I might need them in a future project–is idiotic. Possibly even retarded.
This is a large part of why I adhere to my policy “Build Before Buy” any time I can. Once I start building, I have a tendency to keep building.
You can’t reach the finish line if you keep stopping to take off your shoes and redesign them every few steps.
Well…maybe you can. I can’t.
If I want to maintain any momentum I have to resist the urge to make every component useful in every possible project. All that matters is the current project. Future projects must wait their turn.
I seem to be struggling with my descriptions of the look I want for my current project.
It doesn’t help that I expected the look I want to be more common than my ability to type words into Google Images is proving. OK, so maybe “slightly cartoony” isn’t all that clear…
On top of that, it turns out I should’ve mentioned in my original “call for artists” that I assumed, based on the quantity of animation desired, that the bunnies would be created and animated in 3D and “stamped out” in the various facings and animation frames. Next time, I’ll explicitly state that. Nothing against 2D artists, of course. They just charge more by the frame…
Overall, though, it’s been interesting to see the variety of work the respondents have done. I love looking at good artwork. And it’s been re-educational in how to describe what I want.
2 types of bunny, with animations (scurry, lope, bolt, sneeze, scratch, nibble)
a dog, with animation (run + bark, walk + wagging tail)
4 types of flower, with animations (blooming, waving in a breeze)
background screens (about 6, including game logo)
The project is a 2D game from an isometric viewpoint.
I’m looking for a whimsical-but-still-natural look for the bunnies and dog. The game will be brightly colored, spring-like (Easter-ish, but not so pastel).
If the project goes well, I will want additional types of bunny, dog, and flower. And more animations.
If this sounds like a project you’d be interested in, send me a quote.
