Project Happy - Dev Diary 7

Well better late than never.
Missed two Sundays. Not so good.
Well I ended up getting pretty sick and then I got a bit stuck with the game.
BUT! I have taken the rest of this week off so I will be working on the game a lot this week which is indeed very needed if I still want the game to be finished around the 12th of June.

So my last task was to make the game run well on Android and I have definitely managed that.
I ended up stripping off a lot of the cool effects and scaling back on some of the models and textures. I found out that the terrain was causing a very high poly count and so was the water. The fade out effect of the trees when you go behind them also seemed to cause the fps to drop dramatically.
What remains that is really expensive rendering wise is the drop shadows and the light cookie (the effect of light coming through tree branches. I think I'll end up with no shadows. This is a shame, but the game still looks OK as long as the light cookie is there.

Other than all the optimization stuff I:

• Implemented the Triceratops.
• Setup a start menu, pause menu and game over menu.
• Made some better UI textures.
• Implemented a point counter.
• Made sand textures for the terrain.
• Made a temporary sky box.

And here is how it is looking at the moment:

So I might have scaled back the graphics a bit too much, but I can always put stuff back in if I have the performance headroom.

So for the week I will have to be very productive if I'm going to finish this off soon:

• Make a velociraptor.
• Make tourists you can eat.
• Make eggs you can collect.
• Make missing animations.
• Make a real skybox.
• Decide on a Final name
• Finish all the UI.
• Probably way more stuff

So if I manage all this in this week then I'll have next week to polish things off and implement Play Games services and in app billing.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it :P.

Project Happy - Dev Diary 6

So another week has gone by.

I feel this week ended up being a bit unproductive.

I did not manage to create quite as many new assets as I had hoped.

I started the week out working on textures and had a bunch of problems making as good ground textures as I wanted, so I have added two a rock one and a grass one, I'm not very pleased with either, but I learned a lot, so hopefully I'll be able to make improvements.

I then did the Triceratops and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I haven't yet rigged it or anything, but I have the model in the game and it is looking good.

I then made a texture to use for the bottom of the screen to indicate not to go farther down and I made a new big tree model to block off the top of the map.

I also got rid of the block rocks I've been using and just used the terrain with my new rock texture, this is OK for now and I think will work fine when I get some boulders in there that I can spread around a bit.

I also played a bit around with the light.

And here is how it's looking at the moment.

Goals for next week:

• Get game to run well on Android

At the moment the game does not run great on my Nexus 5. I don't know if it is due to texture sizes or polygon counts or something completely different, but I believe I have to figure it out before I work on any more assets. Hopefully I'll be able to do a few more things as well.

See you all next week.

Project Happy - Dev Diary 5

So another week has gone by and I've made quite a few improvements.

I got the game back to being playable with a game-over screen and that you get energy from eating. The stegosaurus' are re-spawning after you eat them.
And I've hugely improved the T-rex animation. I redid the walk animation and did a running animation and an attack animation and I have the all set up in a working blend tree.
The stegosaurus now runs away scared when it sees you.
I added some grass and modeled the tree log.
And as you can see I have ugly (but functional) touch controls on it now.

And here you can see it in action:

Goals for next week:

• Model the triceratops
• Model the cliffs
• Model the big trees blocking the top
• Make different better textures for the terrain

I plan to focus this next week on getting rid of all the blocked in stuff so I really get an idea of hold the game will look and hopefully I'll have time to do a few more things as well.

See you all in another week

Project Happy - Dev Diary 4

Today is my 30th birthday!

And it is going well with the project.
I managed to get quite a few things done this week.
I created a tree and a fern for the game, which has really improved the visuals.
I got some animation working on the stegosaurus.
And I figured out using Unity's navigation system for character control and AI.

The AI is still very simple. At the moment the stegosaurus is just selecting a location and moving towards it and when it get there, choosing a new location. This will of course be improved with other actions the dinosaurs can take and reacting to the player. But I am getting all the nice path finding etc.

Here is a video showing off the stegosaurus sped up and highlighted to show their behavior.

And here you can see it being played. I've sped up the player a bit to be able to cover more gound, but you get the idea.

So another productive week. So for next week I really want to work on the gameplay and logic so:

• Get game playable again. You loose health and have to eat dinosaurs to survive etc.
• Make herbivores act better. Run away from player etc.
• Plan out and implement some simple menus.

See you all in a week.

Project Happy - Dev Diary 3

So everything slipped a bit and I didn't manage to get this blog post written yesterday.

But everything is going well. I have been a bit sick this last week, but I managed to put in some good work anyway I think.

Firstly I modeled the real tyrannosaurus model.

Full resolution:

Low resolution in game:

I then spent a disturbing amount of time figuring out how to properly rig a character. I've never done this properly and it took a very long time. After this I made the following test:

After that I ran around in circles for a while trying to figure out how to best import animations and how to set up root motion.

Finally I sort of figured it out and made a walk animation and an idle animation and got them working with root motion in the game and here is the result:

Additionally after thinking more about the game. I've decided to drop the idea of growing bigger as you eat. You will simple have to eat as much as possible so you don't die and then you earn points of some kind that you can unlock bigger dinosaurs with. This will mean I will have to make more different dinosaurs though.

So everything is going pretty well. This next week I want to really start working on getting the game playable and fun. So I'm going to concentrate on getting enough animation for the T-rex and one herbivore and then work on the player controller and the AI for the herbivores.

• Make run animation for T-rex.
• Rig and skin stegosaurus.
• Make, idle, walk and run animation for the stegosaurus.
• Make a herbivore controller so stegosaurus can run around the landscape.
• Make T-rex able to eat them etc.

See you in another week :)

Project Happy - Dev Diary 2

So it's Sunday again (actually early Monday) and where are we with project Happy?

I have been trying to plan out the rules and think about game on a higher level reading through some of The Art of Game Design again. But I haven't really nailed down the design yet, but I did get a bit more of an idea of the game.

I made a drawing of a simple landscape I could start out with:

I then did some research on making terrain in Unity and using some of the standard textures and some primitives build this little map. As you can see I went for no trees thinking it would be a pain with the camera colliding with them etc. But it turned out to be easier than I though to hide part of a tree when the camera collided with it. You can see this in the video test at the end of the post.

I then started doing a bit of modeling of the Triceratops and the Stegosaurus and after a short while I realised how nice it would be to have a three dimensional reference. And then it hit me: Dinosaur toy figurines! I went to a local euro store and for €4:50 I got these three (Yeah I know one is a velociraptor, not a Tyrannosaurus, but that was all they had for some reason).

I then got a bit sidetracked. I just wanted some simple models for the Triceratops and Stegosaurus, but I ended up basically taking the Stegosaurus to final quality because it was so fun to work on.

High resolution model:

And the low resolution model in game with normal map:

And here is how it currently plays. Basically there is no gameplay at the moment, you can just move around, and not very well. Since I'm pushing the player around with the rigid body it feels like you are controlling a rolling ball rather than a character, so I'll have to get that set up correctly. But you can get a bit of an idea and see the nice triceratops in the game and the test trees that are hiding when the camera gets to close.

Tasks for second week:

• Make the real Tyrannosaurus model.
• Make idle, walk and run animations for the T-Rex and implement them in game making the character move correctly.  
• Start looking into AI for the other dinosaurs.
• Keep working on finalizing the game design.

See you all in a week.

Project Happy - Dev Diary 1

Introducing my new project. Codename "Happy" at the moment. This will be my first game developed in Unity and my first 3D game. I have decided on what direction I'm going in and done some prototyping.

Here is a video showing a prototype with the basic gameplay idea:

So the game is similar to Spore or Hungry Shark. You are a small dinosaur and to grow bigger you have to eat other dinosaurs, but be careful of dinosaurs bigger than yourself. The game will be for android and using a virtual directional pad for controls.

I'm hoping to keep the scope pretty reasonable with only three or four dinosaurs on release and have the landscape you move around be pretty small. I can always expand it later.

I've set up a rather ambitious development schedule:

12/04/2015 - Alpha development

26/05/2015 - Beta. Functionality lock, start serious testing / polish

12/06/2015 - Release date

Hopefully this is doable. I'm planning to try and spend as much as my free time as possible on this for the next two months to make it happen.

Tasks for the first week:

• Plan out all the game interactions
• Skim through The Art of Game Design and ensure game has a decent Aesthetics, Mechanics, Technology and Story balance.
• Plan out the size of the game world and get a simple landscape working in Unity with the prototype dinosaur running around in it..

The plan is to follow up here on the blog every Sunday with the progress on last weeks tasks and a new set of goals.

Busy With Games and Busy With Work

So I've been back from my vacation for a little while now and I've been quite busy ever since.

I'm still working on porting over Jungle Jumper to a libGDX version and I'm quite far along. At the moment it is mostly just a lot of boring copy paste work that is necessary to set up all the different screens. When that is done there is some more complicated work of getting Ads and Play Games Services back in there, but hopefully it is not too far away. I don't have a huge amount of time at the moment so it is not going as quickly as I would like.

At the same time I'm doing a complete re-factoring of the code for Space Sheep and fixing some bugs. I really wanted to rewrite Space Sheep so the code was better and it has become a bit of an involved project, but it is moving forward, at the same time I would like to implement a couple of new sheep for the next update.

Meanwhile I'm quite busy at work. This week I'm during training in VMware, which prepares you to do a quite comprehensive certification, VMware Certified Professional 5 – Data Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV). So that is really exciting and I'm learning a lot.
I've finally gotten serious about taking advantage of the free certification program at Dell. Two months ago I took my first certification ,Comptia Network+, which was a lot of fun.
I'm now scheduled to take, Oracle Certified Associate in Java, next month. And I've requested the first certification in the Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Windows Server 2012. So I'll be busy studying for the foreseeable future.

Well that is all for now. Hopefully it wont be too long until I have either the Space Sheep or the Jungle Jumper update ready and when both those are out the door I can turn my attention back on Jorvis and the Sea Rats.

Jungle Jumper Progress and Vacation

It's going really well with the conversion of Jungle Jumper to libGDX:

As you can see the game is now able to run as a desktop application. I'm running into several issues, but I'm handling them quite easily. It won't take me long before I have all screens and strings displaying correctly. It will probably take a bit more time to figure out all the implementations (Admob, Google Play Game Services ...).

So everything is looking good for a soonish update to libGDX. But I am going on vacation, back in Denmark, for a week tomorrow. I will be bringing my laptop and might do a bit of work, but we'll see.

That is all for now.

Space Sheep Reviewed

Playandoid's review of Space Sheep is up and it is very nice. There is a nice 10 minute video of them showing off the whole game and they generally have very favorable comments about Space Sheep.

Read and watch the review here.

Meanwhile I've gotten started on porting Jungle Jumper over to libGDX and it is going way easier than I had feared. I think in a day or two I will have the gamescreen running with all game interactions and graphics. As soon as I reach that point I might export a browser version and put up on lonelygiantgames.com.

That is all for now.

Post Space Sheep Update

So I released Space Sheep two weeks ago and it has been great to release another game, even if it is not doing very well at the moment.

The game has only been downloaded 21 times at the moment. But there are several reasons for this.

Since I released Jungle Jumper it seems it has become way more difficult to get visibility in the Google Play Store when you launch a new app. I thought there was a lot of spammy games filling it up back then, but it has become way worse.

I have not been able to display house ads in Jungle Jumper about Space Sheep like I had hoped to. The reason being that Admob has been updated and I need to implement the new SDK before this can happen. The problem with that is, that I have still not gotten around to updating Jungle Jumper to libGDX like I had planned and it will just be a lot of unnecessary work if I updated the Admob SDK, that I would have to do again after the update to libGDX.

I've also not been able to get much free PR. When I released Jungle Jumper, there were quite a few places that were willing to show off the game on their homepage / blog, but a lot of these places have closed or changed their policies. However www.playandroid.com is still doing reviews for free and are doing a review of Space Sheep that will hopefully be out soon.

It's a bit sad that I've gotten so few downloads, but I'm still really happy that I managed to get a second game finished and published, even if it is just a little silly game and I feel way more motivated to finish more games and get more serious with the PR.

So with all that in mind here is my plan for the near future:

• Quickly update Jungle Jumper to libGDX. No real improvements or new features, just running on the new engine and new Admob SDK.
• Do an Amazon version of Space Sheep with Amazon IAB and leaderboards rather than Google Play.
• Finish the sailing game. I've shown this game of earlier, it is quite far along and I should be able to finish it in the near future, at the moment the working title is "Jorvis and the Sea Rats"
• Acquire an iOS test device and start working on iOS versions of my games.
• Start working on my new game which I plan to be a 2D platformer.

In other news I've updated Space Sheep, fixing a few bugs and improving the graphics and there is now a web version available on my homepage. Try it here: www.lonelygiantgames.com/space

That is all for now. Hopefully there will be lot of updates in the near future.

Just a little update

The Pirate Game

It's been a bit over a month since I announced the new game and it's been going really well since. There is still a lot left to do, but it is really shaping up. Expect an update with a new video soonish.

New Frontiers Program

I mentioned I was applying for a business grant, I have since heard back and I unfortunately did got go forward in the process. I'm not too surprised about this, but still a little sad. For now it just means that I'm putting all my energy into getting the Pirate Game finished. I can of course always apply again next time they are open for applications.

Oculus Rift

Since I posted about buying the Oculus Rift a lot has happened. Oculus VR announced the second development kit and were then bought by Facebook. I like many had a negative first reaction to this. I didn't really think that Facebook would require you to log on to use the headset or anything that drastic, but it was a company that I really like and admire being bought up by a giant corporation that I really dislike. It was more a feeling of loss over having lost a good friend to a bad crowd, than a real worry about the future of virtual reality. It seems now that the future of virtual reality is more certain than ever, within a years time we will probably see the consumer product and at the same time Sony has entered the race.

I haven't used my own Rift as much as I would have liked. I really have enjoyed playing around with it, the experience truly is unlike anything else, but using it is a bit off a hassle. I end up getting the lenses fogged up very easily and using the rift together with my 2 other screens means constantly changing my screen setup as my Nvidia card cannot handle 3 outputs simultaneous. It's silly things I know, especially when the experience is as cool as it is and this is of course still a development kit and I think they will have done a lot to improve these things by the time the consumer product arrives.

I don't think I'll end up buying the second development kit, not for any lack of wanting, but it seems the final product is not too far away and I don't really have the time to try and develop anything for it at the moment. And I do believe I'll need to upgrade my hardware for when the consumer edition comes and I do not have unlimited resources.

That's all for now. I'll try to get back to posting a bit more consistently here. And after the release of the Pirate game I plan to start doing revenue reports again.

Jorvis Goes to Sea

Presenting my new game, which still doesn't have a title, for now I will just call it the Pirate Game.

I've been working on this game since the beginning of the year more or less and it is starting to shape up. There is still a lot to do and the game is full of temporary graphics at the moment. But the core of the game is beginning to settle in.

Here is a little video of how it looks so far:

I hope to have game finished within a month or two. But it all depends on how much time I will be able to put into it.

Back on the Horse

It's been a while since my last update and I'm happy to say that there are lots of news.

New Game

I've been working a lot on a new game and it's really beginning to shape up. I'll make another post presenting the game with some images and a video later tonight or tomorrow.

New Frontiers Program

I've applied for the New Frontiers program here in Dublin. New Frontiers is a program to help technology oriented start-ups. Next month I will know whether I get into phase 1 of the program which will last around two months and include evening classes where you learn more about managing your start-up. After phase 1 there is a chance to be accepted into phase 2 which includes a 6 month grant to help you spend your full time on your start-up. I don't know how difficult it is to get accepted in to either phase, but I'm extremely excited about having applied.

Oculus Rift

Yesterday I ordered an Oculus Rift development kit. I'm super excited for this to arrive so I can play around with it. I have to admit that I bought it mostly because I wanted to play around with it, but I hope to also try and develop a bit for it.

New Job

I ended up changing jobs again very quickly and this time I'm very happy where I've ended up. I'm now working at Dell as a Server Supporter. The job has good pay and benefits and I work together with two good friends from my IBM time. The job is also technically challenging and gives a lot of opportunity for bettering myself.

That's all for now. but a big update on the new game will be coming up very soon.

Quick Update

Where are the reports?

If you've been coming here for the monthly reports, I'm sorry for them missing these last two months. The reason is that Jungle Jumper isn't doing all that great any more and it really isn't all that fun to write them when nothing new is happening. For now they will be retired until I release my next game.

What are you wasting your time on?

If anyone is wondering why no reports or blog posts or new games are coming. The answer is simply. I'm trying. I've started a new job. Once again one that doesn't leave me much free time and I've had trouble finding the time and energy to finish any projects while balancing my social life.

What are you going to do about it?

I really want to get another game out. I really want to be able to do this full time, so I will be making a few changes.

Treating development like a full time job. Through 2013 I've only been working on my games a few hours each week, feeling bad if I spent too much time on it because I neglected my girlfriend and my friends. This is simply not getting the job done. So I've made a deal with my girlfriend that I'll have two full time jobs for a while. My office job and my game development job when I get home. Hopefully I will not have to do that for too long.

Onward to greatness!!!

Hopefully that gives you guys a bit of a idea of the status of things and hopefully I'll be able to have some more interesting news to share soon. 

June Report

And the June report makes its late entry. Lets get down to business.

Total installations end of June 2013:

Google Play	48,203	+7,797
GetJar	???	+???
Amazon	1,511	+323
Handster	696	+56
TOTAL:	???	+???
Active installations end of June 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE	11,631	+419
Admob stats June 2013:
Impressions	318,221	-23,263
eCPM	$0.38	+$0.02
CTR	0.81%	+0.04%
REVENUE	$122.32	-$0,15

Conclusion:

The numbers from June were very similar to the ones from May. I implemented Google Play games services in the game and I think that is awesome, but it did not improve my download numbers at all. This is obviously not the $400 which has been my next goal for a while now, but I'm hopeful for several reasons. The reason for the missing numbers is that GetJar's developer console is down. I'll go back and fill in the remaining data when it is back up.

Next:

My long term goal is still $2000 to make a full time living of my games. I'll keep my next month goal on $400 until I reach it.

So I think that Jungle Jumper is more or less done, it will keep earning a bit, but I really don't think it will suddenly start downloading and earning like crazy. I will keep improving the game, but I think it's safe to assume that it's glory days are behind it. Jungle Jumper will however be passing it's 50,000 download mark on Google Play very soon which is a bit exciting.

It's all about new games... I've talked about working on other games and one in particular several times, but I still don't have anything to show for it. I can only say that I've had very little time for it and that I have not really hit upon the right recipe for my next game.

But my situation is changing, I should be getting considerably more time to work on my games soon and there are several other things going on that will hopefully make it easier and make my games better.

I'm not going to go into any details because I'll be doing a big status update about it all in a few days.

It looks like July will be a really bad month and that I won't make it past $100 which is quite sad since that will be a first since getting above it. Maybe it's all the nice weather making people go outside and play in real life. But I'll keep my $400 goal just to spite everyone :).

Jungle Jumper 1.30 - Google Play games services

Jungle Jumper 1.30 is out, or will be very soon at least. I finally managed to get an online leader board implemented in there by using Google Play games services.

If you're wondering why I didn't mention this in my monthly report, it is because I didn't know I would get to do any work on Jungle Jumper. I've just had a weeks vacation and it turned out I suddenly had the energy and time to do some really productive programming at the end of it.

I've wanted to have an online leader board from the moment I made Jungle Jumper, but I've been hesitant to implement other peoples' middle ware to do it. I was seriously looking at doing a Facebook integration, but it never really felt right.

Then Google announced Google Play games services at Google I/O and it seemed all my prayers had been answered. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how exactly it all worked, but when I finally did, it turned out to be a very simple implementation (good work Google). The leader board looks good and the login flow is easy and problem free. I also set up five online achievements and that part is looking good too.

I'm really excited to see how many people will log in and how high peoples' scores will be and whether it will make more people play.

I actually fixed a lot of other small issues with this update and I believe that I got rid of the rendering bug that has been plaguing the game ever since update 1.2.

May Report

Here comes the May report. Again a bit late, sorry about that, but again the numbers are not so good and it makes it a bit less fun.

Total installations end of May 2013:

Google Play	40,406	+9,465
GetJar	31,884	+2,421
Amazon	1,188	+245
Handster	638	+29
TOTAL:	74,116	+12,160
Active installations end of May 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE	11,212	+1,120
Admob stats May 2013:
Impressions	341,484	-108,627
eCPM	$0.36	-$0.08
CTR	0.77%	-0.09%
REVENUE	$122.47	-$76,82

Conclusion:

May was not so great, but actually in some ways it was better than April. All the way through April the amount of players and the daily revenue was falling. Through May the numbers have been steady, going neither up or down. But I'm obviously not reaching my goals at the moment which sucks.

Next:

My long term goal is still $2000 to make a full time living of my games. I'll keep my next month goal on $400 until I reach it and who knows maybe something good will happen.

I still need to do a good update of Jungle Jumper, to fix some issues and hopefully get Google Play game services in there, but I don't have much programming time and what I have is being used on the new game.

The new game has stagnated a bit, I'm trying to figure out how advanced I want to make it and whether I want to port it over into a newer version of libgdx. But I still feel good about the game, it is just not coming as quickly as I hoped.

More programming time. So a big reason that I haven't gotten all that much done, is that I really don't have all that much free time at the moment. I'm working a full time job and I have a bad work schedule and very long commute times. So I've quiet my job, I'll stay through my current project, but then I will be looking for another job. Hopefully one that will give me more time to work on my games.

Now It's Even More Official!

So I set up an official homepage for Lonely Giant Games a while back and have updated it a few times since, but the homepage has been at the domain www.lonelygiantgames.co.nf. Now I finally took the leap and bought www.lonelygiantgames.com. The homepage is live and I'm busy making sure all links are now pointed at the new homepage. I'll leave the old one up for a while as I guess quite a few things have crawled it and they need a bit of time to find the new one.

I've also finally gotten around to printing out the registration form to register as a sole trader and hopefully I'll get it filled out and filed soon. There are quite a few things that need doing when that goes through, like getting a business bank acount and figuring out how to file my taxes when the time comes. I'm thinking that when I get a bit further in the process I'll do a bit more of a practical post on starting your own business.

April Report

Here we have the report for April. Sorry it's a bit late, it's not quite as fun to write the report when you do not reach your goals as when you do :P.

Total installations end of April 2013:

Google Play	30,941	+10,671
GetJar	29,463	+4,322
Amazon	943	+161
Handster	609	+62
TOTAL:	61,956	+15,216
Active installations end of April 2013:
GOOGLE PLAY ACTIVE	10,092	+1,836
Admob stats April 2013:
Impressions	450,111	+19,718
eCPM	$0.44	-$0.13
CTR	0.86%	+0.03%
REVENUE	$199.29	-$70,39

Conclusion:

April was a bit of a let down compared to March. Downloads went down, impressions went down, and the big reason for the downturn in revenue, the eCPM went down. My goal for this month was of course $400 so I didn't even hit half of that. I can't control the eCPM of course, but the downloads have gone down rather than up. I'm not completely sure why. GetJar really seems to be loosing a lot of steam and Google Play has lost quite a bit as well. I think part of it was my bad judgement In-App Billing update which is now luckily over and done with.

Next:

My long term goal is still $2000 to make a full time living of my games. I'll set next months goal at $400 again. I don't really think I will reach it, I might not even reach $200 as the game still is doing poorly, but things might turn around.

I need to make another update to Jungle Jumper to get rid of the bug that is plaguing it and causing quite a few bug reports, but I'm spending all my programming time on my new game at the moment. And after my two last updates which really haven't added much of value I would like the next update to actually add some content to the game.

That content might come in the form of the infamous high score system that I've never gotten in there. I hear rumours that Google will be announcing a game platform for multi-player and social aspects for Google Play and if they do that I would love to use that system as opposed to a Facebook implementation. We should know more about that soon at Google I/O on May 15.

New game! I'm still not ready to disclose anything on my new project. But it is going really well, it will however not be coming out in May so it won't have any impact on this month.