Category: News (page 1 of 2)

How I Sell Sky Photos to Make Video Games

May 25, 2017 / / 2 Comments

TLDR: 15 years ago I left AAA racing game developer, Ratbag, to form Hyperfocal Design, which sells only sky textures (hemispherical sky photos). I’ve since been able to develop indie games mostly full-time using the passive income. AMA!

From 3D in high school to race tracks in games

I was in high school when I began working with 3D software, and this new obsession eventually landed me a job at Ratbag. While there, I helped make tracks for the PC racing game Powerslide, and designed Dirt Track Racing. We made it part way toward an unreleased car combat game that looked a lot like GTA meets Mad Max, before I left to form my own company. I’d been inspired by reading Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Leaving game development to start a business

With a little background in photography, and experience using textures in 3D, I somewhat blindly jumped ship with the thought to make some random texture maps and sell them on Turbosquid. I drifted towards doing skies, because no one looked at me like I was a big weirdo, as they would when I was taking photos for dirt textures! Plus I could go to the same location every time and get a different end product!

To fund the business, I sold my Nissan Silvia sports car and promptly ran out of money a year later(!).

After scraping the bottom of my bank balance for another year after that, Hyperfocal Design began making decent money, and since that point has been a fairly solid, reliable source of passive income, meaning I don’t have to actively work on the business to make money. That’s only partially true, of course, since the longer I neglect the business, the less it gets promoted, the less updates go out, the more competition comes in, and the less money I make.

The time-line

…went something like:

  • 5 years at Ratbag
  • 2 years of scraping through to get Hyperfocal off the ground
  • A few more years doing well (during this time, Ratbag ‘went under’ – closed by the publisher, Midway)
  • A year trying my hand at professional poker (I really love the game, but boy is this a stressful career choice!)
  • A few more years at Hyperfocal
  • After getting a real creative itch again, went back to developing games with Saxon Druce from Ratbag
  • A few years of making Zombie games with Saxon before parting ways
  • 1 year creating Unknown Orbit, solo (first Unity title)
  • 1 year back to Hyperfocal
  • 1 year making prototypes + vr prototypes
  • Now: Over a year working on Exo One

During this time, I very rarely ever worked on Hyperfocal every day, except for the latest 1-year stretch. Mostly I’d put in a few months here and there, which allowed me more time to do whatever else I liked – semi-professional poker, training for triathlons, traveling, surfing, bread making, and whatever else I was interested in at the time.

While I’ve been comfortable from Hyperfocal’s income, it doesn’t bring in the big dollars or allow me to hire employees or anything like that. But with a pretty low-key lifestyle I haven’t had to worry too much about money, while simultaneously not being chained to a desk 8 hrs a day. I’m also confident that if I had a higher income target, I could have certainly made it happen (as I did recently in 2015 where I dedicated the whole year full time).

When Ratbag went under, I was particularly glad that I’d gone and formed a business where no single entity (a publisher in this case) could ‘fire me’ or cut off my entire income stream. For Hyperfocal to die off, I need to lose every one of 100’s of customers a year, which isn’t likely.

Back to games

So since I began making games again with Saxon 8 years ago, I’ve been mostly making indie games while Hyperfocal pays the bills. If Hyperfocal ever started declining too much, I was perfectly free to take some time to prop it up. I wasn’t forced either way to do one or the other, and I was never at risk of sudden and complete income loss.

I’ve also been fortunate that the zombie games we worked on together contributed a little to some additional passive income, which has certainly been a nice additional safety net.

Setting up your own content creation/passive income streams

If you’re a game developer, or someone with skills in 2D/3D art, coding, sound, music, etc, there are good opportunities to create niche ‘content’, plugins, assets, etc that may help supplement your income, or fund your lifestyle entirely. Especially since so many game developers use Unity these days.

If this sounds interesting to you, I’d ask myself:

  • Where do my skills lie
  • What do developers need (in my case, choosing skies was a nice choice, since so many games take place outdoors!)
  • What niches are under served or don’t suffer as much from multiple, similar assets.
  • What could I teach? (unless you’re a complete beginner, there’s people out there who know less than you!)

I’d personally (as an artist type!) look at assets that tick one of these boxes:

  • Don’t require constant updating as new Unity versions come out (or even assets that are completely untied from any software)
  • Can be sold for a higher price. Lower prices typically = you dealing with more support issues.
  • Has a creative aspect that can’t be easily copied (so making yet more 3D, real-world gun models would probably be a poor choice! )

Since working on Exo One, here’s just a few things I’ve noticed, which may or may not be of interest:

  • Substances and procedurally generated textures are now pretty amazing, and there’s not enough of them
  • Despite already having music in the game, I get a deluge of emails from musicians wanting to help (good luck, musicians!)
  • But zero emails from voice actors, despite, as above, already having voice/story/narration in the game
  • “Sim-lish” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1_NVYPMmhE (voices that sound like a language, but are just gibberish, to go with text), is popular in games, but there’s zero libraries out there as far as I can see
  • Real time volumetric skies are starting to look rather awesome!
  • Having decent support and response time from plugin developers is incredibly important, especially when so many people like myself are solo or small teams that rely on that support to put a game out.
  • Ensuring plugins work with other plugins is pretty huge
  • Platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter can help you get things started

To end with, I’ll just say I’d encourage you to think about whether you have some skill that you can use to create products to help create your own passive income streams. As real-time graphics have gotten increasingly realistic, often a product or ‘content’ can also be sold to people in film/vfx and architectural visualization as well.

Depending on your skills, products could include art assets, sound/music libraries, plugins, a course where you teach something, etc.

Market your stuff!!

Perhaps the biggest challenge these days with almost anything, is that everyone is doing it – you will absolutely need to do some marketing and promotion! I also encourage you to put your face and name behind your business, to give it a personal angle.

Throughout Hyperfocal Design’s life, I’ve rarely put much if anything into promotion for my products, outside of sending an email to my newsletter. “Back in the day”, I got by with newsletters + Google search, but you can no longer guarantee a good Google placing. In 2015 when I finally decided to stop being a wuss-bag and actually market Hyperfocal’s latest product, I had my best year ever! It is hard, and your ego is on the line, but power through!

Tell me your experiences

If you’re currently selling on the Unity asset store, I’m curious to know your experiences as well!

I’m happy to answer any questions you have in the comments. 

I’m currently Kickstarting Exo One, and the campaign is now in its final days. If you like the look of it, please consider spreading the word, thanks!

New EXO ONE trailer and Kickstarter campaign coming soon!

April 21, 2017 / / Comments Off on New EXO ONE trailer and Kickstarter campaign coming soon!

kickstarter-logo-light-large

Very excited to be taking EXO ONE to Kickstarter to complete the game, and at a higher standard than would be possible on my own.

I’d really appreciate if you’re a fan of the game, to help me spread the word, whether that’s simply hitting Like on social media, Re-Tweeting, or just telling friends. You can follow Exbleative’s Kickstarter profile page here, and when the campaign goes live, you’ll be notified immediately.

Here are some other ways you can track the project and keep up to date:

At the same time, I’ll be revealing a shiny new trailer that will be featuring in the Kickstarter. Here’s a taste!

EXOONEKSTrailer

I’ve been really working hard to get this all out since I returned from Rezzed a couple of weeks ago (hi again if I met you there!), and look forward to sharing the Kickstarter URL and trailer with you all very shortly.

Thanks for following along!

EXO ONE’s EGX Rezzed Wrap-Up

April 10, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE’s EGX Rezzed Wrap-Up

Earlier this year I got a rather excellent email notifying me that I’d been selected to show EXO ONE in EGX Rezzed’s Leftfield collection, a curated selection of indie games. I had set my expectations and hopes for Rezzed to go something like this:

  • Have some fun at the event
  • Meet some cool new people
  • Hopefully appear in at least 1 or 2 articles
  • See old friends and family

All of those things happened + more!

The things as they happened

Day 0

The day before Rezzed, things started off super rocky. As I arrived to set up and test the game, it was rendering with a pure black sky. I had backup builds, but this appeared to be more a bug or incompatibility with a graphics card. Luckily, I checked the build logs and pasted the error line into Google and one other person reported the same issue, solved by downloading the 2010 Direct X SDK.

The phew’ing was deafening. Almost paid $1500 for a ticket to Rezzed to look at some other people’s games! Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. I’d of had to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.

Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. It’d be awkward to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.

I put my poster up, chatted with a few people from Leftfield and grabbed food with Jai from FINIFUGU.

Here’s the poster at my station, drawn by Tim McBurnie:

IMG_0612[1]

Day 1

Used my London coffee app to find ONLY THE BEST coffee, in this case, the closest was LMNH Kitchen (look mum no hands). Truly an important step that cannot be overlooked!

IMG_0646[1]

Bumped into Andreas of Promoter app fame, who thought I was the event organizer, David Hayward (this seemed to happen to numerous, different people throughout the event, which was odd). Andreas was also showing his game, Future Unfolding.  I had some really amazing moments after playing it for just 10 minutes. His description goes like, “Future Unfolding is an action adventure that is all about exploration. Your goal is to unfold the mysteries and solve the puzzles hidden in the beautiful landscapes around you. There are no tutorials, and no one is telling you what to do.” I definitely advise not to look at trailers or anything before playing.

We had breakfast/coffee here on all three days and I really enjoyed chatting game dev, promoter app/biz stuff and events in general. It was nice to start each day at Rezzed with such great food, coffee and company! Andreas is a real dude, and his app looks quite good too, I’ll probably try it on the lead up to EXO ONE’s release.

This was just one of many real-dude encounters I had during the show. I’m not sure what it was about all the people in Leftfield, but I seemed to get along really well with everyone. In particular, since they shared my wall/opposite wall, I got to chat a lot with Jai, the guys from Alpixels (A Place for the Unwilling) , Joe from Four Last Things, Richard Boeser from Chalo Chalo , the PjamaLlamians who are making Flotsam, and the girls from Oniri Islands. Some of these peeps I felt an instant connection with, and it makes me kinda sad they’re now on the opposite side of the world.

This first day was kinda quiet, and there was occasionally some down time, but it was nice to be able to ease into things.

I had one press meeting that went well and resulted in me appearing in this:

After the first day I went and met an old Londonian friend for drinks, but I was so dead from not taking a break all day that I had to return to home base and eat, immediately followed by sleep. Didn’t seem to get much in the way of jet lag, luckily.

Day 2

This was a little busier than Day 1, got lots of good feedback, ideas, etc, all of which I wrote down during the day. Had another press meet up today which resulted in EXO ONE being included in this article, which painted the game in quite a glowing light!

Then this happened:

IMG_0623[1]

This is the Outside Xtra trio who came and hooked up their gear to do a bit of an impromptu Let’s Play of the game. The video isn’t out yet (and there was some sound technical issues) but I can’t wait to see it. Outside Xtra have quite a fan following, and during a ‘meet’ event at Rezzed I heard they had a line that stretched half of the building.

After the day was over, there was the The Rock Paper Shotgun drinks night, and a bunch of the Leftfieldians went out for dinner beforehand, which was at an old pub overlooking the Thames. Then I met and hung out with another old friend from when I used to live in London, who introduced me to some cool people. I didn’t do much in the way of networking with press, though.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m trying to befriend them partly to improve my chances of them writing about my game. Maybe a missed opportunity, I dunno. I seemed to do fine regardless.

Day 3

This was the busiest day, and I’d often be standing a couple rows deep behind my game. I’m still told Rezzed is a pretty quiet event in the scheme of things. Again, nice to just ease into my first big event instead of DIVE in the deep end.

Met up with and hung out with a couple more friends and contacts on this day as well. Despite the larger numbers of people, I possibly talked to players less because I was just pushed back (or wanted to get out the way so others could watch). So it wasn’t manic or anything.

Had dinner after with some Leftfielders again then I was convinced to attend the after party, which was good fun with yet more games in every room. Checked out some of the retro games and played a bit of Joe Bain’s new game, Yucatan, which was super madness fun! There was some crowd based game in another room I think, but didn’t get to see it!

Press

I think my press strategy was pretty ‘normal’. I suppose I often thought I needed to be doing some secret tricks or ‘know people’ or something special to really get noticed and stand out, etc. But now that the event is over and I got basically the best response I could have ever hoped for, I guess the basics worked pretty well.

Before the event, I made the following Rezzed trailer that I pinned to my Twitter, saying I’d be at Rezzed, along with my email address (no it wasn’t even spammed):

I emailed around 20 writers/game sites/YouTubers with somewhat personalized emails (more so if I knew more about them) saying essentially, “come play EXO ONE at Rezzed Leftfield”, and included the above, very short video. Got 2 solid meeting times, maybe 2-3 “I’ll come over at some point, whenevzies” and a bunch of ignores. Some ignores ended up turning up regardless, but I don’t know whether that was from my email or just because they happened to be in Leftfield. I talked to a handful of other developers in Leftfield about their press outreach efforts, and most did nothing at all, so if that was common within Leftfield or Rezzed in general, then contacting the press potentially puts you a step ahead just by pressing send.

I ordered 3 t-shirts online which I could have spent too much time on, but ended up just using my EXO ONE logo on the front and back, with “developer” written on the back, so if anyone was looking to chat with the developer, they could easily spot me.

JayAtRezzed

Press Stealth Abilities

Something I noticed about press at the event was that almost all of them (unless I’d set up a meeting) liked to fly in under the radar and play without me spotting/recognizing them. That worked for a few people who I saw write/tweet about the game afterward, but otherwise, if I recognized someone I just said so. Otherwise, I’d risk being weird (sorry, person I was totally weird to!). I imagine this is done so the developer doesn’t bug them too much or affect their play experience any more than it should. Generally, I just said something like, “the tutorial is kinda bad right now, so if you need any help lemme know”, then I left them to it.

I definitely felt that fan-boy factor a little with some people I met, but I had some great chats with press, gamers and devs alike. For the most part, with press, they’d come play the game, ask between 0 and a dozen questions then take off pretty quickly. Wasn’t overly hard, and while I practiced a bunch of practice answers to questions, many never came up.

After the event, I wrote and thanked anyone who wrote about EXO ONE, if I had their email address/Twitter.

Tweets ‘n Articles

Here’s most of the press/tweets I got during the event and after:

Damn it, I didn’t meet Terry! Terry is one of these darned people who don’t use a photo on their Twitter profile, I didn’t recognise him! I do recall seeing he was showing his game before flying over, but slipped my mind once I was there. I may have met him or Ruari as I recall one of the State Machine (his game) devs chatting to me. Tried to go play before open one day but someone was on it. Huge fan of Super Hexagon, so would have liked to have gone and been a weird fanboy/say hi briefly :P

Not bad!

Biz Cards

Ordered about 500 and used a quarter of them, mostly taken by gamers. I put a screenshot on the front and some words (game name, my name, contact details) on the back.

Newsletter

One small error perhaps I could have improved would have been some way to sign people up to the newsletter at the event. The Flotsam guys had some kinda small iPad with a sign-up form on it, others went for the handwritten method. I guess the handwritten way stands out as being a mailing list quite obviously due to the email addresses on it, while the iPad kinda requires prompting (“hey you, sign up for our newsletter?”).

I’m not sure how many people went home then signed up for the EXO ONE mailing list, but over the entire event I added about 80 people to my list. Really don’t know if this is “good” or not.

Resources I Used

I’m a big fan of both Thomas Reisenegger’s games PR/Marketing videos on GDCVault, and Indie Game Girl, who did a specific games event article/slide show.

Maybe just search for Thomas on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thomas+reisenegger

Emmy’s site is http://www.indiegamegirl.com

General Help

Before the event, I asked everyone I knew for advice, including some people I didn’t know. This resulted in a couple of meetings that might not have otherwise happened, various tips/tricks for events, who to look out for (I hadn’t heard of OutsideXtra for example), introductions to press, how to keep my expectations realistic for a single, small-ish event and more.

What did I learn about EXO ONE?

The biggest stand out problem with the game was the first tutorial level, which is going to be getting some major love and redesigning soon. The camera I’m using hates the kinds of movement you can do in the starting level, and I throw a bunch of controls at the player and pray they remember (they never do). So this resulted in many players not ‘getting’ the game as they were missing pieces of the puzzle. Most people that I helped out ended up getting the hang of it, and luckily all press did too.

I got mixed feedback on the story, but I’d say fairly overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the story as-is, but also some very convincing “you should make it less literal” arguments.

Also received a handful of comments that there were too many controls. Mentioned this to some other Leftfielders and of course heard the opposite, “I had no problem with the controls”. Simpler is definitely better, but I feel like I might be able to remove at least one control combo (like holding two things to glide up for example).

Thankfully most of the feedback hit exactly the mark I was going for, with comments like:

  • That was super relaxing
  • It was mesmerizing
  • The sense of speed and feeling you get when you reach the clouds is amazing
  • I could just watch it all day

Like the Adelaide games event before (AVCON), people sat to play and didn’t want to get off. I should have forced an end timer on the demo as people had to wait ages to play in some cases. I was lucky the musician, Rhys, told me to shorten the first level, since even after doing so, people sometimes asked me if they could ever reach the transport structures in the distance. A classic example of the game developer being too good (fast) at their own game.

Quick Notes on Other Games

Since this post is getting long… Quick bullets on other games (I mentioned Future Unfolding above) that were near me and I played in Leftfield.

  • Oniri Islands
    • Great multiplayer iPad game that uses physical chess-like pieces (cute little figures) to move characters around on screen. Great for playing with kids.
  • Flotsam
    • While seeming pretty early days, I’m super pumped to see where this ‘floating base builder’ goes.
  • Four Last Things
    • Very charming, funny writing and simple point n click adventure, using classical/famous artworks.
  • A Place for the Unwilling
    • Intriguing ‘mini-society’ and village full of characters whom you interact with and have influence over/effects on during ‘end times’. Great spooky vibes!
  • Chalo Chalo
    • Super fun party multiplayer game that isn’t instantly recognizable as being hilarious fun, but totally is!
  • Everything
    • Those rolling quadrupeds… I saw some really, really weird stuff happen in this game during the event! I jumped on for 2 minutes, but think I need to have a proper go and hear the narration/music to really get into it.

Special Thanks

…to David Hayward for organizing the event, it went off without a hitch! And thanks to SEGA for sponsoring Leftfield.

It really was an amazing event, surrounded by awesome people and great games! With any luck, I’ll bump into some of my new friends again at another games event… *sniff*!

Edge

I’ve left the best till last! I’m wildly excited to announce that next month (May) EXO ONE is getting a 2-page preview in Edge magazine! So pumped! I’m not a huge games magazine reader, but whenever I do pick one up, it’s always Edge!

Next – Kickstarter

I’ve increasingly gone from ‘maybe doing a Kickstarter’ to ‘probably doing one’ to ‘doing one’ to ‘most likely doing one in May’. It takes time to build up the courage, you see. I’m going to get some advice on exact dates, but that’s my current thoughts. I’ll be announcing an exact date soon, so if this is something you’re interested in, you can sign up to my newsletter below:

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EXO ONE Selected for EGX Rezzed Leftfield!

February 8, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE Selected for EGX Rezzed Leftfield!

Super stoked to announce that last week I was notified that EXO ONE has been selected to be shown at EGX Rezzed, a London games event, as part of their Leftfield indie games collection. EXO ONE was chosen from a record number of submissions and will be featured alongside 17 other games. Check them all out here.

The event will take place on March 30-April 1 and if you happen to be in London, you’ll be able to go play it, complete with the 2nd, and maybe 3rd planets.

This will be the second event EXO ONE has shown at, after debuting at AVCON last year.

I actually attended Rezzed 5 years ago when I lived in London, and met some really cool people, including Chris England from the indie hit Xenonauts. I’d love to attend again with EXO ONE, but the cost may be a bit prohibitive. Spending money on international flights is a slight luxury right now! I’ll be looking into who might be able to take my place so to speak, but if all else fails, it sounds like the Leftfield guys have everyone covered with a bunch of their own people that will be there to troubleshoot/take photos/generally help out.

Crossing my fingers (and beginning some actual planning) for some good coverage of the game. Will see what comes of it! Can’t wait!

EXO ONE 2016 Wrap-up + 2017 Plans

January 9, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Back from Holidays

So I’m back from a couple weeks of holidays where I pretty much didn’t set foot in my office or in front of my PC. I really like doing these breaks, as my office is both where I work and play games, and I spend a lot of time locked away in here! It’s good to have a complete mental break and just do something different. Instead of creating alien worlds, I really got into making under-water ones, so before getting to it, here’s a 90L aquarium (the first I’ve owned) which I’ve just planted out:

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2017

2017 marks almost 1 year spent developing EXO ONE, which is slightly terrifying! What on earth have I been doing, then? How has the game progressed from then until now, and what have I done since AVCON in July? I often ask this of myself in fits of despair, before reminding myself I am only one person, who can barely code…!

EXO ONE in Jan/Feb

Slightly slow and floaty back then. I’m not sure how this existed long enough for me to get a video of it! Remember, this was recorded mostly for my own records, or to be shared with plugin developers to highlight bugs etc. So it looks very rough, it’s recorded in the Unity editor, features the use of cheat/debug keys, etc. I wouldn’t suggest watching these all the way through! They’re unlisted as well, and I don’t really want them being featured anywhere, so please don’t share them or embed/etc.

April

trueSky (volumetric clouds/sky lighting plugin) is now integrated and this was an early version where I’m trying to highlight some issues, so this is mostly for seeing how the graphics have evolved.

I would say that from Jan/Feb through April/May a lot of time was spent getting used to using plugins like trueSky and Map Magic, as well as increasing my C# coding skills.


Here’s my EXO ONE AVCON application video (a South Australian comic/games event). At this stage you can see I’ve made some pretty quick progress, and spent quite a bit of time on the art style, as well as adding the glide mode and a 3rd Person Camera plugin. In some ways I look at this and feel like the game hasn’t progressed in 8 months(!), which in some ways is actually the case, but in reality, a lot of other stuff went in that is somewhat invisible, and includes a bunch of the following:

  • tweaking camera plugin code to suit
  • rewriting physics code so it runs properly on all machines
  • writing the EXO ONE story, and rewriting it, and rewriting it
  • getting voice actor tests, voicing the entire story myself (for testing)
  • creating a tutorial level
  • trying a range of gameplay variations/abilities
  • going in circles a little bit on the goal/objective system
  • taking forever to decide on the game’s name
  • updating terrain numerous times for FPS, view distance, plugin updates

June > September

July was the month I released the game announcement, contacted a bunch of press, created the exo-one-game.com website, press release and teaser trailer, which required a fair bit of work:

Afterward, I…

  • Added Master Audio plugin, rewrote some audio code, re-did how I handled sound per-scene
  • Lots of code optimizing and rewriting (again, I’ve only learnt to code this year, really)
  • Created multiple biomes for the starting planet so it varies as you traverse it
  • First pass on trying to figure out how ‘going in any direction’ could work with the objective monoliths

This is more or less how EXO ONE looks today.

September > Now

Since September I’ve been working on, and slightly going in circles on a few different ways of doing objective/goal/HUD stuff to communicate what the player’s objective is, what’s happening, etc.

The tutorial level got a big upgrade as well, and of course since then I’m wondering whether to throw the player ‘right into the game’ instead of having a specific level, which isn’t really revisited, and requires custom content and code etc. This is just one example of the kinda stuff that gets made and then thrown out!

I’ve also been experimenting further with gameplay by adding/removing stuff like gliding up or “pulling up” (not just gliding/falling slowly), energy/powerup systems, lightning strikes and stuff like that. You can see the lightning stuff below, plus a WIP HUD/objective marker system.

Testing and Sharing Builds

After a run of a couple months where the game couldn’t be built due to the correct checkbox not being checked (long story), I have started sharing some pre-alpha builds with a few people, and plan to expand this by probably one person for each build I release. I’m doing this so that I don’t quickly expose too many people to the game, therefore removing them from a pool of people who have never played before. I think this is pretty valuable as new players have less preconceptions. So if you think you should have a build by now, don’t worry, you’re still on the list, I’ll get to you eventually.

Improvements for 2017

There are certainly a couple of things I’ve noticed I am particularly bad at. The worst habit I probably have is becoming somewhat obsessed with the visuals, so much so that I’ll carry on tweaking what should have been a completed planet, when I should be doing other things. This was partly my fault, but also partly because of changes I was making to try and extend draw distance, speed up framerate, and from changes to trueSky and the way it would light the scene. With such limited resources I was probably spending a lot of time trying to reach an impossible goal of a) looks amazing, b) has infinite draw distance c) has plenty of objects/plants/grass d) runs fast.

So as I create the next planets, I’m going to try and be very careful to lean toward “good enough” and not 100% perfect.

What’s next?

Once I’ve settled on a goal/objective system, I’ll be FINALLY (and embarrassingly) moving onto new planets, which I seriously hoped would have happened 5 months ago!

When most of the new planets are done, I’ll be integrating my self-voiced-terror-bad-narrative and making sure that it all makes sense to players as well.

Some of my biggest hurdles and challenges coming up will likely be:

  • Making a good story when I’m not a writer
  • Handling an infinite sized world, which sorta involves resetting game objects to world zero seamlessly
  • Creating enough unique content in terms of different planets, terrain/landscapes
  • Keeping the game interesting past the first few planets
  • The handful of cutscene-ish type things that go with the story
  • Water and Gas Giant planets
  • And lots more :P

When will it be out?

This is a tough one! Development has already taken twice as long as anticipated, but at the same time, the gameplay and story are relatively simple. I hope once the goals stuff is nailed I’ll be on a content creation super highway of planet creation, which will hopefully only take a few months. Perhaps a few more months for story/cutscene integration and further tweaking that, and then a couple months for testing prior to launch. So 8 months? Give or take 8 months? :P

I will keep you updated.

Thanks for following along, and be sure to sign up to the newsletter  to be notified of future blog posts and updates. Alternatively, follow me on Twitter, or Facebook.

EXO ONE Nov 2016 Development Update

November 10, 2016 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE Nov 2016 Development Update

Thought I’d share a quick development update (the first one, actually) for EXO ONE and let you know what I’ve been spending my time on. Things have been moving somewhat slowly, with a lot of ‘background work’ happening that’s not clearly visible on the surface, ie no new planets or anything fun like that! Background work also includes me just doing a lot of learning as well, C# in particular.

Here’s what I’ve been doing + events I forgot to write about:

Greenlit!

EXO ONE managed to reach the top 20 on Steam Greenlight, which is a nice little achievement. It isn’t hard to get on Steam these days, however, so this was just a small stepping stone to getting the game in front of gamers. The real challenge is rising above the throng of games being released on Steam on a daily basis. I wrote about it here.

Story

The story has undergone a number of revisions, and I’d say it’s currently at a 2nd/3rd draft stage. I haven’t talked a lot about the story yet, as it wasn’t really locked in, but essentially EXO ONE will tell much of its story via a narrated voice-over. There isn’t a super complex plot or anything crazy, but I think it really fits. Since the game will be short, I’m not really going to talk much about it either, as I’m wary of ruining it before you play. I can say we begin with receiving an alien transmission, which contains plans for a spherical exoplanetary probe, and instructions on how to open a wormhole.

So I’ve self-voiced a lot of it, just to get a feel for what it’s like to play and listen, which has been quite revealing so far in terms of pacing and how much is enough. Anyone who is on the alpha testing list will most likely get to hear it in all its glory! Don’t worry, I’ll be getting a professional to do the final version, and have done a number of tests with some people already, searching for a voice that fits the bill.

Intro/Tutorial Level

The intro sequence and tutorial level are ready for testing, and if you recall the spherical interior area from AVCON, I’ve expanded that now to include another, larger ‘outer loop’. I may need to continue the tutorial further through the game as I did at AVCON, or perhaps extend it in this interior level to get people more used to using the controls, as it is super short. Testing will probably tell.

tutoriallevel

EXO Speed and Optimizing

A constant challenge I face for EXO ONE is maintaining frame rate with a decent draw distance, while procedurally generating terrain that is smooth enough to glide over nicely. The farther we can see, the more terrain needs to generate while we play, slowing the game. Blending this procedurally generated terrain with any kind of mid/background is quite difficult (for me anyway) as it is always different. I’ll be interested to hear early feedback on people’s frame rates to gauge how much time I need to spend further optimizing this. I’ll also be further investigating ways to draw a mid/background or integrate it into the skybox. HorizonON appears like a possible solution, but isn’t made for endlessly generated terrain.

I’ve also found that as I’ve developed the game, I’ve gradually increased the speed of EXO ONE to a point where I feel the max speed is particularly exhilarating, but again, this only exacerbates problems with generating terrain fast enough.

My best ally right now is lots of fog and low clouds, but that presents its own problems too with seeing objects of interest. It is really a delicate balancing act!

Systemzzz

One of the biggest things I’ve been working on (while I also get to grips with C# coding), is both cleaning up the prototype code I started with and adding systems that let us easily switch between levels and play level-specific narration at set times and places. This is all kinda boring so I won’t say much, it’s basically just me learning how to code better and cleaner.

Camera Improvements

I’ve done a little work on the camera so now there’s no longer any low-speed jerkiness, and I’ve added a “look down when dropping down” in gravity mode and “look up when on the ground” so there’s less camera moving required by players. I still face a frustrating issue with colliding with objects, so the first alpha will feature a camera that clips through non-terrain geometry like a boss.

Audio

I’m using the Master Audio plugin for Unity now, which is fully integrated and working well. Some people may remember the audio cut out bug at AVCON, that’s gone now :) So I now have a fully featured audio system that can handle playlists, audio ducking and a bunch of other stuff that would have taken me forever.

There are also some new sounds for rolling across the ground, flying and impacts, which all further increase immersion and the sense of actually being on the ground.

Plugins and Problems

As a solo developer, still learning code, and using Unity with a number of plugins, it has been a very mixed experience in terms of getting support from some plugin developers. Some devs almost instantly get back to me on problems, sometimes with fixes attached and ready to go. Others won’t reply to emails for weeks or ever, leaving me in a really awkward position, especially with my current skill set.

I have mixed feelings on the whole asset store in general, and specifically with regard to the price of plugins and the level of support required. On the one hand, it is brilliant to be able to gain in some cases man-years worth of work already done for you for a really low price. On the other hand, when you offer these low prices, you get a glut of low skill developers (hi!) coming on board and then generating a support nightmare, meaning you can literally bury yourself under the weight of support. The other problem I have with this is that while you may have bought a plugin for $25, that developer’s hourly rate may be double that, so if they end up spending just half an hour writing you an email with a fix, they’ve kind of halved their income whilst reducing time for future updates.

The hardest thing about non-responder or slow responders,  is you’ve got few alternatives or workarounds. You can write the nth “please halp” email, but there’s really no way to reach someone who doesn’t want to be reached. You can switch to a competitor, but you may end up in the same boat, while having to rewrite whatever code integration you’ve done. In many cases there are no replacements or alternatives. Then, of course, you’ve also lost whatever you’ve paid for said plugin (usually only $20-50 but sometimes up to $200) because there are no refunds.

Ok at this rate I should have named my post “my problems with the asset store”! Really I couldn’t make EXO ONE on my own without it, so I can’t complain too much.

Hovering Maybe

I quickly added a little hovering feature the other day, which I’ve left in for now. I thought it could perhaps eventually become a way to cross non-rollable terrain, but mostly it just feels nice to do, which is almost the entire point of the game with EXO ONE. Essentially now when you’re gliding, if you’re near the ground, you’ll get an opposing upward force. It’s not so great that you’ll never hit the ground, though. It can help with a little extra leap off hills too (possibly too much right now):

exo-one-hover

 

What Next?

I’m working on an issue with one of my plugins that stops me from building the game (boom!), so once that is fixed I’ll be sending out an alpha version to testers which contains the intro, tutorial level and first planet. I’m very keen to get people’s feedback on the narration side of it, plus their thoughts on the length of the first planet, general impressions, etc!

Thanks for following along, and feel free to say hello in the comments, contact form or my Twitter @JayWeston.

EXO ONE Greenlight Post Mortem (2016)

July 28, 2016 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE Greenlight Post Mortem (2016)

EXO ONE has been Greenlit, making it to #26 (24 at its height) in 2 weeks. You can check out the EXO ONE GreenLight page here.

Starting From Nothing

I began the Greenlight process with practically zero fan base. The games I’ve made prior were on different platforms in different genres and from different companies. Perhaps outside of family, friends and old work friends, I might have had a dozen or so fans following me on Twitter (maybe).

I released a teaser alongside a game announcement press release on GamesPress on the same day the Greenlight went live, and I hand emailed every games website I could find who had covered similar games to EXO ONE. I would direct most of these emails to a specific author, mentioning in some way, shape or form that I was aware they either liked the genre or had reviewed a similar game. I received two replies from probably 50 emails, both saying essentially, “looks interesting, let us know when there’s something playable”.

Here’s the teaser I made using 100% in game footage. Music was by Rhys Lindsay, which, since it was made for the game, really fit perfectly with the mood I wanted.

This netted a total of about 500 views on Youtube in the first week, which is ok, I guess. Clearly not a hit or anything, however. I put a ‘vote now on Greenlight’ annotation at the end, and figure I can swap that out for whatever I’m promoting next!

Within the trailer, I spent exactly zero time showing my Exbleative company name or my own name and instead went for opening directly to a mysterious looking structure behind some pretty clouds, then went from there. The game is all about the vibes, so I pushed that mystery/melancholy angle as hard as I could while splicing in a little bit of gameplay.

While it would have been nice to see the video do so well on Youtube that it brought in Greenlight votes, it did at least singlehandedly take me to #26 on Greenlight, which I’m fairly proud of. I got some really positive feedback on Twitter from some people too:

Games Press

I used these guys to handle my press release since they had a reasonable fee, Gamasutra used them and so does most of the industry it seems. I also just really wanted to cover all my bases. They were super quick on email and I felt like I was dealing with real people, which was nice. You can see below how many views I received compared to the average, and compared to the best (who already have huge followings). I think if I had something playable, or perhaps just more gameplay footage, this would have been more helpful.

gamespress

Here’s the press release itself.

You can see I did almost twice as good as most ‘average’ press releases, and really not too bad even compared to big name releases like Minecraft and The Walking Dead.

After sending my press release through Games Press and hand emailing everyone, I appeared on around 6-7 websites from several countries, which was nice, but it wasn’t exactly a feature on Rock Paper Shotgun or anything. For the most part, I got some repostings of my trailer or quick write-ups that used the press release pretty heavily. I need to mention here just how grateful I am for these, don’t get me wrong! For all I know, I got a lot more traffic from these sites than I thought. It *is* a mystery to me where half my traffic came from (see Google Analytics below).

In the future, I may be writing any releases in a more ‘reviewer’ tone, which might sound more natural if copy pasted. But of course, actual hand-written reviews are slightly better! I put down the lack of coverage again to just not having something playable people could get their hands on. Even with what I think was a quite good trailer, it’s still just a trailer and low on the gameplay and story as well.

2 Weeks on Greenlight

The game followed a straight line trajectory that barely seemed to accelerate or slow, until the last 2-3 days where we hit 24 then 25 then settled on 26. I assume this would be due to the top 25 having a steeper trajectory of yes votes than EXO ONE, therefore making them perhaps unbeatable without outside press coverage or a larger audience. But I don’t feel any of this matters much, I was very happy once we hit top 50. Greenlit is Greenlit!

Here is said, straight line graph:
GreenlitStats2
Interesting, all the different trajectories! You can see for some reason even the #5 item isn’t Greenlit yet, after 30 days. I’m assuming the lines disappear once a game has been Greenlit! I’ve also spoken to fellow devs whose games did not even reach the top 100 (not even get 50% there) and they were Greenlit. The mystery process remains, I suppose!

Some more Greenlight stats:

GreenlitStats3

 

GreenlitStats2a

The yes to no ratio looks nice, and I think it is decent, but the AVG TOP 50 also seemed to change a lot from day to day. Sometimes I’d see stats like the above, most of the time it was similar to mine, and sometimes it’d be higher than me, around 63:37. I mostly lagged the Favorites and followers most of the time compared to the top 50, perhaps again due to the lack of clarity on what the game was.

These figures are roughly a third of what I’ve seen other bloggers mention in the past as a ‘minimum requirement’ to get Greenlit or into the top 50.

Comments

I got quite a few comments like, “this game needs a story or it will be boring”. I imagine this is mostly from people that didn’t read the description. Probably no one will, so if you want something communicated, you want to do it in the video.

I really enjoyed reading the feedback, though, and in one way I’m glad “it’s all over” because I was becoming a serial refresher, but once the campaign was over I missed all the interaction and waking up to check my rank every day (not really, I checked way more than that)!

Discussions

I would have liked to have seen more discussions crop up around the game as well, however, I got practically none. On the one hand people seemed fine just asking questions in the comments, but on the other hand, I did notice other titles receive a lot more than me. Once again I believe the lack of gameplay and story shown was a probable cause of this.

Lists

I’ve read people going to quite the lengths to get on as many lists as possible, but I managed to get on 10 (good or not, I’m not sure?) without doing anything at all. If you are struggling to get into the top 100, you might want to look into getting in touch with some relevant ones.

Google Analytics

I hooked up analytics and apart from noticing some obvious stuff like almost half of my audience being Russian, I couldn’t make sense of the Direct VS Referral stats:

GreenlightAnalytics

Direct traffic went straight to the EXO ONE Greenlight url from (?). Referral traffic was mostly from Steam itself (store.steampowered.com) with a smattering of what looked like people linking to it from Dota2 discussions from streams, CSGO lounge and GamesPress.

If you understand this I’m keen to know, is Direct traffic coming from people clicking a browser link which opens up their Steam client, which appears as Direct Traffic?

AVCON and Newsletter Sign Ups

I showed EXO ONE at a local anime and video game festival here in Adelaide (AVCON) which happened 4-5 days after my Greenlight began. How many of the people who played the game and voted, I don’t know, but there was a little upward blip over that weekend visible around the 17th. I got around 30 newsletter sign ups from the event too, and it may be safe to say a similar number of Greenlight votes.

I thought AVCON may have added some ‘legitimacy’ to my campaign. If someone at Valve is checking to see how serious your game is, having taken it to a festival I can imagine is a bonus. So too would be things like:

  • Getting press coverage/previews/reviews
  • Awards
  • Release date that is less than a million years away (I got a few “this game isn’t ready for Greenlight” comments with a mid 2017 release date)

What Does a #25 Greenlit Game Mean?

If I was an excitable person I might have lept up and down a lot after getting Greenlit, however how this translates into actual success is anyone’s guess. How much does my audience carry over when the game is made available? 190 followers isn’t a huge number, so at the end of the day I feel like this might be the equivalent of adding that many people to my newsletter list. Of course, with the added benefit that I can now release my game on Steam, which is no small thing!

Now I just have to make the entire game, market it successfully, play test it, release the alpha on itch.io, then on Early Access or a full release on Steam… “Ez!”.

If you wanna follow along on the ride and be notified upon release, trailers, alphas and betas, you can sign up here. Here’s the EXO ONE game site.

Also if you’re curious what a number 1 Greenlit game gets, “Scorn” managed 2000 comments (10x mine) and I imagine probably 10x everything else, as well! Once you reach the top 100, I imagine the closer you get to #1, the more vertical the climb required to get there (see #5 above).

Two new animated gifs of EXO ONE gameplay

July 24, 2016 / / Comments Off on Two new animated gifs of EXO ONE gameplay

Just a quick post to share a couple of animated gifs I showed on Twitter recently.

First one below shows most of the gameplay and movement methods available in EXO ONE:
1. Rolling, then 2. “Jumping”, immediately followed by 3. Gliding, then 4. High Gravity mode, followed by more rolling before we go back to Low Gravity to roll up and fly off the hill top into the sky. Then we move back into glide mode where, if we hit clouds, we ‘catch thermals’ that lift us up even higher.
EXO-ONE-MwU3d

The second one is a recently added ‘skipping’ on water while in glider mode:

exo-one-skipping01

This was fairly easy to get going on flat water, and I quite like it, but whether this will translate and work on a wavy ocean I’m not sure. I’ll certainly be trying it out!

For more stuff like this, you can follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the EXO ONE newsletter.

 

exo one at avcon

EXO ONE AVCON Wrap Up

July 18, 2016 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE AVCON Wrap Up

Adelaide’s video game and anime festival (AVCON) just finished last night and it was an amazing experience. I showed EXO ONE in the Indie Games Room along with 60 other developers over the course of the weekend and had a lot of fun. I thought people would like EXO ONE based on family/friends/colleagues playing, but the response was above and beyond what I could have hoped for! Considering how fleshed out the two planets were in the AVCON build, people played for a really long time and in quite a few cases, would come back or bring friends over to play. Players would quite happily travel in one direction for (I swear up to or over half an hour?) on one planet, I assume mostly because they enjoyed the flowing, physics-based movement so much. I was blown away!

exo one at avcon

Some of the most common comments:
– “It’s really relaxing/hypnotic” from both players and people watching
– “I can fly!!!” after reaching and soaring above the clouds
– “Weeeee!” in the ‘tutorial level’, which is a spherical interior level, where people loved building up huge speed sticking to the outer wall
– “I love the graphics” and “Is this the Unreal engine?” (It’s Unity 5)
– “The sound and music is amazing”
– “How long until it’s out?”

Survey Responses

In an anonymous survey I had next to the game, the most common ratings were 4/5 (60%) and 5/5 (33%).

Here are some answers to “what was your favorite part of the game?”
– It was a very beautiful game. i loved the movements of the avatar and how it looks so much like real life.
– the graphics and physics of the game
– exploring
– world design / the visuals / the graphics
– everything
– Beautiful visuals and unique design
– Beautiful visuals, free reign, satisfying physics
– the atmosphere of the game – beautiful and stunning. I like the freedom you feel with movement, zipping down hills with more gravity then hurling off a ramp.
– Exploration.
– Relaxing – Great Graphics

And some answers to “what was your least favorite part?”
– no impact crator / trail
– Changing direction at low speed with varying viewing angles. Intuitively I’d feel better steering relative to the ball’s movement rather than where the view’s pointing.
– I didnt find many flaws but i think the story should be more open.
– trying to find objective
– unclear of the main objective
– nothing
– some of the sound affects were a bit screechy
– im not even sure
– Lack of direction, though that was probably intentional
– I might not have played it enough to see, but it would be interesting to explore a wide variety of landscapes – more variation would be cool
– Sometimes feeling like I’m not in control, e.g. not being able to stay in one place.
– No objective – Its a good thing though

Other comments:
– It looks and feels phenomenal and super mysterious. I love the massive structures.
– Love the idea
– really like it, music is awesome, really interested of how the final result will be
– multiplayer!
– Loved it – very relaxing etc. Can’t wait to see more – love the exotic landscapes. Would like to see more and explore various areas!
– very echoey voice is hard to understand. I’d love a level with more green and that would look like a nice place to be. Gliding [needs tweaking]
– Very serene. I like the first sound track and the introduction was a good tutorial. Got stuck on left stick in to zoom. Doesn’t feel required.

Takeaways

My biggest takeaways and areas to focus on after looking through the survey answers, and from talking to people all weekend was:
– It wasn’t obvious enough where you had to go. While it’s an open world game, you have to travel to a ‘transport monolith’ in order to launch to the next planet. So that needs to be clearer and more visible at all times. People would either think the launch point to the second planet was ‘just another piece of scenery’, or they would lose where it was among the clouds and rain. Another solid option here is that there are multiple launch points on each planet, so no matter which direction you go, you’ll be able to find one. Perhaps the best way forward is both making it clearer you need to reach these structures, and also having them scattered, so you’ll never feel like you need to remain near the sole transport structure to get to the next planet.
– People also didn’t seem all that interested in the story, however being at AVCON, it was incredibly loud and almost impossible to hear the voices that communicated the story. I’d equate it to trying to play Dear Esther or Gone Home in an arcade (a bit useless).
– 10-20% of players didn’t get a handle on the gravity based movement, or it took them a while to get up to speed. I’m going to include a more in-depth tutorial here which, in real-time, will instruct players on how and when to use it. Still, those players who had trouble would play for extended periods of time just rolling and gliding quite happily, which is good. I suppose there’s also a chance that some players just liked moving more slowly.

AVCON Wrap Up

Thanks to everyone that played and signed up for the newsletter, you’ll be the first to know when the first publicly playable build is available via itch.io.

And apologies to the other developers who took the time to come check out EXO ONE, I just didn’t have time as a solo dev to come and return the favor to everyone. Was great meeting so many cool people for a change, though. I am quite the recluse developer!

P.S. if you’re ever in the market for a solid TV, LG make one which can survive a fall from a table top onto the floor, completely unscathed!

Steam Greenlight

We are currently sitting at rank #52 and on a trajectory (based on the sweet graphs Steam gives you) to enter the top 20, which would be amazing! From what I read recently on Steam Greenlight, I expected votes would trail off quickly after 48 hours, which hasn’t happened.

EXO ONE – Reveal Teaser!

July 12, 2016 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE – Reveal Teaser!

I’m proud to present EXO ONE, a surreal, exoplanetary exploration game. Teaser below:

EXO ONE is on Steam Greenlight now, so please vote and leave a comment. It will be available on Itch.io’s First Access program to buy (500 only to start with) soon after AVCON (Australia’s Video Game/Anime Festival) on July 15th. If you’re in Adelaide, South Australia, you can come and be among the first to play the game at the Indie Games Room at AVCON.

Here’s the full press release:

EXO ONE – Reveal Teaser

A surreal, exoplanetary exploration game in development for PC.

Adelaide, South Australia – July 12, 2016 – Exbleative is proud to announce EXO ONE, a surreal, exoplanetary exploration game currently in development for PC. A teaser video is available using entirely in-engine footage and displays a mix of gameplay and atmospheric shots.

In EXO ONE, the focus is shifted away from traditional sci-fi and space game tropes, such as space combat. Instead, it encourages a relaxed state of flow by using a gravity-based movement system to traverse and explore high sci-fi planets.

Pilot a spherical, gravity powered probe through awe-inspiring, enigmatic alien worlds. Watch cloud formations float across barren, lightning wracked fields. Drop beneath the waves of an ocean world. Ride the peaks of mountain tops and slide down alien dunes.

Upon reaching the first planet, players will encounter a surreal alien presence almost defying explanation. Accompanying the gameplay are highly atmospheric visuals, otherworldly audio and a hypnotic, electric guitar and synth-laden soundtrack.

EXO ONE is and continues to be inspired by the many discoveries of the Kepler spacecraft, and the mysteries of what may lay out in interstellar space for future explorers.

Features:
– An array of unique, open worlds to explore, from traditional terrestrial planets to water worlds to gas giants
– Pilot a probe featuring multiple movement modes. Rolling, sliding, gliding/flying, with control over gravity and anti-gravity.
– Use these movement modes to build momentum, slide down dunes and catapult off hilltops.
– Glide through clouds and catch thermals that lift you high into alien atmospheres.
– Drop beneath the waves of boiling oceans under the glow of distant suns.
– Wind down and travel at your own pace. There are no challenges, wars or enemies.
– Listen to the sounds of the planets and contemplate the alien presence that occupies them.
– A minimalist yet mysterious narrative that allows players to form their own conclusions of the story.

EXO ONE is being developed for PC, with other platforms TBD. The release date is tentatively slated for mid-2017. It will be shown for the first time in Adelaide, Australia at the AVCON anime and video game festival on the 15th of July, at the end of this week.

Watch the teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAiOrl4y5w8

EXO ONE on Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=718608076

Presskit(): http://www.exbleative.com/press/sheet.php?p=exo_one

EXO ONE Website: http://www.exo-one-game.com

EXO ONE
Surreal, Exoplanetary Exploration.
Coming Soon.

Exbleative (http://www.exbleative.com) is Jay Weston, who has worked on titles including Powerslide, Dirt Track Racing, Zombie Outbreak Simulator, Class 3 Outbreak and Unknown Orbit.

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