It Takes a Great man...

So... To put it shortly, one week wasted.
Naturally, this being a blog, I can put it as long as I want it to be, so here goes (the next paragraph is an elaborate whiny explanation of what I did wrong. It is completely plausible that readers might want to skip ahead):

I've started working on my Tower defense game, with the wonderful plan to do it twice: once in Unity for Android and iPhone, and once in Flash for... Flash. However, Unity released a beta version which (drum roll) can compile SWF files as well! So my plan changed and I now intend to make the game only in Unity.
However, in the before before time (long long ago), when I planned for two versions, I intended to create an external engine in which I will create the levels for the game. This seemed like a good idea at the time. 
Last week, that's what I created. It's a nice engine. You can plot enemy routes, and create spawn points and target points and tower limitations. I created an infrastructure to insert tower types and enemy types. I was very motivated. And then I realized it is completely useless.
It's useless, because I can do the same in Unity with much less work, and since there is no other version anymore, there is no point to it. In addition, I had to jump through hoops to connect my game to the engine's output. Eventually, I started from scratch.


Last week's work went into limbo, where socks go when they don't come out of the washing machine.

And now, for something completely different. Every now and then I stumble across a game that touches me in a special way. It's a game done just right, couldn't be better. This happened to me yesterday. It's called All That Matters, hosted in Kongregate. The game is beautifully made, the music is simply sublime, it's exactly the right length, and in the right difficulty. It is the tale of a man named Walter, and his family, but the game tells itself much better than I could ever try. It is completely free.
Why are you still reading this? Go play. Now.

A shiny new idea, I will call it "Tower Defense"

I disappeared for a time, working on Misfortune's marketing. I published it in Kongregate, added support for Twitter posts, played some more with the content. For now I am happy to let the game stand on its' own. I've decided to start working on a new project.

The hardest thing about Misfortune was the immense size of it. Misfortune is HUGE (especially for 3 guys who haven't made any game before). It has a server and a client, a pretty hefty SQL database containing items, monsters, events, dungeons, players and whatnot. I've been working on it for two and a half years, my partners joined me for the last two.

I want a smaller project. I want to start working on something and end working on it in no more than 3 months. 

I have an idea. It's a secret, but I will tell you about it if you promise not to tell anyone. I don't want someone to do this before me. I call this game a "Monsters running around in a maze while the player positions defense towers to kill the said monsters" game. Acronym: MRAIAMWTPPDTTKTSMG. Catchy.

I'll just call it a "Tower Defense" game.

I intend to develop it for flash, android and iPhone. I will use the unity engine for the latter two, and develop the first separately. We will see how it goes.

I hope to describe in this blog the entire process of the development. Who knows, I might actually maintain this promise...

Good luck to me.

Ticking Away

I don't write content as fast as I would want to.
If it were up to me, and I had time, I would write a new event for Misfortune every day. Unfortunately, time is a resource which I don't have much of. We have some vacations right now, which means my three and a half year old son is at home. He is trying to help me work. This usually causes for a very long random string of characters in the middle of any text I write.
In addition, I have some hectic events in my life which I really don't want to get into, which also consume much of my time and mental resources, so the whole content writing is a bit in delay.
I will try to write some more next week, I promise.
Diehard GameFAN wrote a review about Misfortune, which made me blush. In fact, the things he wrote in the review are exactly the things that we though about when designing the game, so it was wonderful to read.
In addition, Misfortune got second place as best Israeli developed web game of the year yesterday. That was nice. I wanted to get first place. Nothing is ever enough for me.

Down With Someone or Other!

I never cease to amaze myself with my polarity.
I've been following Notch's blog for a while now. For those of you who somehow don't know, Notch is the founder of Minecraft, one of the most successful, if not the most successful indie games ever made.
There is a bit of a thing going on with Mojang (Notch's company) right now. Apparently they are working on a game called "Scrolls". A much larger company, familiar to all, called Bethesda, is working on a series of games called "Elder scrolls", in which the latest release called Skyrim is to be published on November. I am actually pretty excited for that release. I've played Oblivion, which is the previous game in the series and it was amazing.
Bethesda served some legal papers to Mojang regarding the trademark of the name "scrolls". It was a cease and desist letter with some mentioning of legal fees... I won't go into that.
This generated some buzz in the net, with Bethesda being the evil malicious corporate and Mojang being the innocent victim. I was caught up with the resentment and anger towards Bethesda.
Now, to set things straight, I have a pretty strong apathy towards things that don't concern me directly. It comes from a belief that the world is an evil place and life sucks, and we can't do anything about it. However I do want to care. I remember days when I was young and innocent and I felt very strongly about... well everything, and I really want to feel that again.
So I decided that I want to care about this whole Mojang/Bethesda thing. I thought about it, got myself pretty fired up, and this morning I started the day by thinking "Today, I am going to start a world wide protest against Bethesda!"
The thought was something along the lines of demonstrating to Bethesda that their consumers are angry at their petty and evil legal tricks. So angry, in fact that some of them will not buy Skyrim... this year. January is good.
So, riled up as I was, fuming and muttering, I went to Facebook and open a page which was called "Bethesda, we can read" (which was supposed to clarify that we know the difference between a game called "Scrolls" and one called "Elder scrolls: Skyrim"). And then Facebook asked for an image for the page.
This never happens in the movies. It should have been a done deal. Open protest page -> bang! millions of angry consumers -> Bethesda retracts their lawyers and I saved the day. An image? Fine! I went to Flickr and searched for scrolls. And then I went for thirty minutes through thousand of scroll images. Eventually I took one myself:

However, something happened during the time I was looking for an image. I stopped caring. I suddenly couldn't be bothered. I also read this post by Russ Pitts which made me doubt Mojang's stance... Who is right? who is wrong? Meh, what do I care.

Eventually I deleted the page, and went on with my day.

Final thoughts: I am still with Mojang about this issue, but I also don't want people to cut the rain forests in Brazil. However, I am not doing anything for either things. 

A new version in the game! The skills have tooltips which explain them! Events with skill tests have some clear explanations! Yay!

I Think the Butler Did It

There's a lot of mystery in Misfortune.
Some of them are short term mysteries, like the "death in white" story, in which detective Dranus hires the protagonist to help him find out who murdered Mr. Popshaw. No, it was not Colonel Mustard.
However, some are encompassing mysteries - who tried to kill the protagonist in the beginning, and why? Why are there secret passages within the city? What's the deal with the fortune teller and her predictions? And so on.
The thing I hate most about "Lost" (and that's the reason I stopped watching the show), is that there is clearly a mystery, and the creators clearly don't know the explanation behind it. A mystery has to have a solid explanation. I don't think it necessarily needs to be shown, but if it doesn't exist, people can feel it. The question stops being "I wonder how this all ties in together" and starts to be "How are they going to tie this up?"
Don't even get me started about Fringe.
I make sure that everything I write ties up. If a question is asked, I already know the answer to it. Perhaps the player doesn't, and it is even possible he never will, but hopefully he will feel that the game isn't simply pulling rabbits out of its hat. No, it had these rabbits beforehand.
I am working on several events which will hopefully amplify the touch of mystery in the game, and they will be published later this week.

The Topography of Success and Failure

I've never been addicted to any substance, except for coffee. However, I would imagine that my compulsion to check the statistics of my game on a daily basis is comparable to heroin addiction. Without all the sickness and death involved.
There are a lot of ways to check statistics of web sites, and I'm usually using Google analytics. I sometimes use the Facebook stats as well, but it's a much more mellow substance.
The statistics look like an insane topography map of mountains and valleys. The mountains usually occur when me or one of my partners go on a marketing spree, and new users flock to our site. The valleys... well.

My reaction to these statistics can be a basis for an extensive psychological research. At the beginning I was elated whenever I saw a peak in the graph. It would make my day perfect. The decreases would depress me, making me think I should take a different profession, such as gardening or sheep herding. After a while, the peaks started to frustrate me as well. "Why now?" I would think "What was better Yesterday than the day before? Why can't users enter my site without my help? It's easy enough, you just have to enter the common search string 'Loadingames Misfortune' and it's the first result!"

Last week, apathy sunk in. A peak causes me to think "huh. check this out.", a valley gets me to say "oh well", and the long plains of mediocrity invoke "well, that makes sense."

So why do I keep entering day after day?

My name is Michael, and I'm addicted to my site's statistics.

This image was take in the tiger leaping gorge trek in China. There were days when the mountains and valleys I saw were much more breathtaking.

The fortune of Misfortune

So... here I begin.
I've been a bit manic depressive lately, very cheerful one day, depressed the next. I got really tired of myself. Publishing my first game did that to me. I talk about it... a lot. With everyone. My wife, my 3 year old kid (who is never sure what game I am talking about), my friends... But everyone has a certain amount of tolerance. So, the obvious venting option - the wonderful internet, where you can spew whatever drivel comes to mind and no one cares!
Here it is - I am Michael, and I founded a small indie company called Loadingames, with two very good friends of mine. We've been working for two years creating a game called Misfortune. It is, to quote myself: a steampunk RPG browser game. In the game you follow the protagonist, as he finds himself marooned on an unfamiliar island, in a strange and violent town called Rodnia. 
It has been one of the most emotional times of my life. I've always thought of myself as a calm person, lacking ambition, breezing through life... What bullshit. The truth is this. When it comes to things that matter to me I am hysterical, obsessive and faintly annoying. However there is one thing certain. This is a dream come true.
So we launched the game a few weeks ago, reviews are coming some are good, some are not, players are slowly joining in, some of them giving very good feedbacks, some report horrid bugs. I eat Misfortune, I dream Misfortune and as of today I blog Misfortune.