Senzee 5 Stolen!

My domain, senzee5.com, was stolen!

Now it points to some Japanese SEO company, a bunch of jerks. It had expired, I guess, end of July and it wasn't set to auto-renew and it looks like I missed the emails and they snatched it up.

ARGHHHH!!!

I'm at paulsenzee.com for now..

Cholera

They talked of the days of the cholera in Santiago Miahuatlán, a village fifteen minutes from the city of Tehuacán de las Granadas in the southern edge of the state of Puebla close to the border of Oaxaca. In those days there were wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, small children, mothers and fathers just gone. The water was unclean and there is no deliverance from water. In all they said one-in-four perished in this town, but I did not believe it. It could not be that in the 1990s a medieval epidemic could wipe out a town like this with not a peep heard elsewhere.

It may be true. The gobierno underreports cholera outbreaks. The tragedy was unbearable to this place, whether one in four or one in forty, because compounding its numbers is only a multiplying of infinity.

Miahuatlán's torment could be seen in the still dirt streets, the ramshackle homes at the periphery, the dust-blown open market and in the Catholic church of broken walls that stood as the once-elegant headpiece of the town square called the zócalo. Among the agave plants that bowed to the dusty earth, cacti stood tall - like the people here themselves - even encumbered with the weight of overripe red pitaya fruit, round and wet with a taste and texture almost like watermelon.

Three years after the epidemic, sweat soaked our shirts as we raced again in the sun past men with straw hats plowing and harrowing new milpas and breaking up dark soil beneath the pale dust. We slowed to saunter at a reverent pace as we walked those streets near the graveyards, where from time to time other men with straw hats, muscled from years of labor, would stand quietly with calloused hands and infected nails clutching their deep-lined faces or kneel at wooden crosses and weep.

Ambition

The Relic (iTunes) was released April 14, 2011 to disastrous reception. It sold well at first but sales fell off after the crushing reviews. The most common complaint was the control scheme but there were many others as well. For now, I have an update ready for the controller and some collision issues. I will update Crystal as soon as I get hold of the new build and submit the update then. I'm also working to update other aspects in the meantime.

It is a disappointment. Many people wanted to play The Relic. The game was ambitious from the start - especially given the resources I had to develop it. However, to make it in the App Store, you have to have an ambitious game and I knew that. You also have to have a polished game, and The Relic - as it is right now - is not that.

In any event I'm committed to The Relic and little by little, with each update, it will fully become the incredible game that's hidden a bit below the surface. I recently read this article in gamesindustry.biz (which may require registration/login) about indie project budgets. The author maintains that to make a successful indie mobile game you ideally need $100k in resources. The Relic was developed in my bedroom after work hours. There were long periods that I didn't make progress on it at all because at the time I was working insane hours at my day job. To date, I've spent less than $3,000 on it. I haven't yet recouped that investment but we'll see what the future holds.

The Relic holds a great deal of promise and although it was made and will continue to be made for obscenely little money and resources, we will see it grow into something tremendous.

The Relic

In the App Store April 14, 2011!

The Relic is a 3D Gauntlet- or Diablo-style arcade RPG developed by Axolotl Studios (aka me) and published by Chillingo. It runs on iPhone and iPad. It's taken some time to develop but it is currently in submission with Apple and will be released within the next few weeks. I'm proud of it. There are those projects that you create that turn out far better that you had hoped and this is one of them - for the most part. Like all your creations that you know intimately, you know its flaws. One big disappointment was having to cut multiplayer.

Multiplayer is not in this release. I spent months working on it and got it working reasonably well but the architecture was a mess and it was hard to fit the rest of the game around it at that time and it was getting later and later. I was starting to believe myself that the game would never be released, so we cut it. I intend to get it in in a future update.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

The two things with the most impact in this world are love and death. Attachment and detachment. We all die. Yet in this era, there exists a mere possibility that even death itself may yield to the relentless advance of technology. The Relic explores the concept of immortality and of mastery of the biological in an unexpected, although pretty minimalistic way. I want to add more depth and nuance to the story in future updates.

The Art of The Relic

Mark Jones created the character art and most of the animations. Some of the environment art (the tents and market area) was stock 3D art and well worth the little I paid for it. In the future I will use stock art more. I created the dungeons themselves and props such as the crates and barrels and the items that can be dropped, some of the animations, the UI art and the logos. Much of the scene art, the intro, etc. uses art adapted from public domain art sources - that is, famous, old works of art. I used Blender for the 3D art.

The Music of The Relic

Most of the music in The Relic is stock music, however, The Relic includes two songs by indie songwriter and musician Andy Livingston, "Indigo Winter" and "Heavy."

The Code of The Relic

One of the most successful parts of The Relic's engine is the sheer number of animated 3D enemies that it can handle. The Relic engine uses Lua heavily for game-side scripting, but it is organized in a way that does not interfere with The Relic's ability to manage so many enemies.

I'll write more about coding concerns later, but with 438 source files (not including the Lua files), this is certainly the largest software project I've written entirely by myself. It's written primarily in C++ and I did most of the development on Windows PC with Visual Studio and occasionally testing with the iPhone with platform-specific pieces written in C++ on the Windows side and Objective-C on the iPhone/iPad side. As with Indigo Ocho, near the final stages of development, development shifted completely over to the Mac/iPhone.

The Relic (iPhone 4 screens) [on facebook]

Axolotl Studios

Here's a quick update. It has been a long, long time.

I left EA and I'm now working at XOS Digital making mobile apps for all sorts of platforms which is a blast and reasonable hours too.  My latest side project has been my indie iPhone/iPad/iPod dev shop, Axolotl Studios.   For my day job I'm now working at XOS Digital making mobile apps for all sorts of platforms which is a blast and reasonable hours too. I'm currently fighting a lot with BlackBerry.

A couple of years ago now (wow) we/I released Indigo Ocho, a 3D accelerometer-based labyrinthine puzzle game, which is not currently in the App Store, but I do intend to get it back there again. Now finally, I have completed The Relic to be released shortly by Chillingo. I'll cover these games separately in subsequent posts.

Indigo Ocho

Indigo Ocho has been out of the App Store for some time now, and now that The Relic is done, I'll try to get Indigo Ocho back up there.

(Indigo Ocho: more coming soon)

Indigo Ocho [facebook]

Echo

elvira_jones has initiated a conversation with joebob10_.
23:50:00 elvira_jones: how did ur surgry go last wk?
23:50:23 joebob10_: ok they got the tumor out of my head. it was small benine. no pain tho hpy to be hm
23:52:01 elvira_jones: :) good i was worried bout u
23:58:13 elvira_jones: good nite im checkin out
23:58:42 joebob10_: u2 thx :)
The conversation between joebob10_ and elvira_jones has ended.
joebob10 has initiated a conversation with joebob10_.
23:59:59 joebob10: who r u?
00:00:02 joebob10_: who r u?
00:05:48 joebob10: hello?
00:05:51 joebob10_: hello?
00:07:59 joebob10: ([gibberish], 'seriously who r u', 'WTF?')
00:08:02 joebob10_: a;lsdfklj;kasdfkl;j
00:08:02 joebob10: WTF?
00:08:05 joebob10_: WTF?
00:08:05 joebob10: ([gibberish], 'elvira?', 'dude u creep me out', [profanity], 'stop it!')
00:08:08 joebob10_: stop it!
00:08:08 joebob10: im serious
00:08:11 joebob10_: im serious
00:08:12 joebob10: ([gibberish], 'is this a joke?')
00:08:15 joebob10_: alskdfj;asdquoioieruw3482
The conversation between joebob10_ and joebob10 has ended.
joebob10_ has initiated a conversation with docPhillips_.
00:15:12 joebob10_: hey dr p? sorry to bother you so late i didn't know if ur awake
00:15:15 docPhillips_: How are you feeling?
00:18:27 joebob10_: i think im having delusions weird ims from a guy named with my old username
00:18:30 docPhillips_: Oh, yeah.. Hey don't worry about that - it's part of the tests we told you about.
00:19:12 joebob10_: no no this is different he types what i'm going to type in the future before i type it!
00:19:15 docPhillips_: Ok, so the thing is.. Do you remember the form you signed saying that we could use any data we were able to gather from your surgery for?
00:19:49 joebob10_: yeah sure
00:19:52 docPhillips_: Well, we modeled your brain in a computer. I guess Dr. Minsky left it on all night. I'm sorry.
00:23:00 joebob10_: no way
00:23:03 docPhillips_: Yeah, we'll turn it off first thing tomorrow morning.
00:27:52 joebob10_: no u dont understand no this isnt right this creeps me out
00:27:55 docPhillips_: Really, I promise, we'll turn it off in the morning. It won't bother you again.
00:30:04 joebob10_: no ur using my brain???!!! thats not rite at all dude im gonna sue ur ass
00:30:07 docPhillips_: Don't be upset. Look, we'll talk about this in the morning, get it all straightened out.
00:31:13 joebob10_: no im goin to call my lawyer in the morning to get all over this shit
00:31:16 docPhillips_: Julia,
00:31:18 joebob10_: dude wrong chat window
00:31:19 docPhillips_: could you or one of the other nurses turn off joebob10_ please? Thanks.
00:31:20 joebob10_: ?

Industry Broadcast: Podcasts of Senzee 5 Articles

A Senzee 5 podcast (Audio Article #34: Concurrency in Game Design + Why Use C++?) is now available at Industry Broadcast (http://www.industrybroadcast.com/) read aloud by Ryan Wiancko. There's a lot of really great stuff there, so get over there and check it out!

The audio article posted combines my entries Concurrency in Game Development and Why Do We Use C++?

Industry Broadcast is the result of Ryan's great idea to offer insight from game developers in audio format. He says -

I was toiling over one disappointing aspect of almost every one of my days: That being that I have so little time outside of my 16-20 hour work day to be a human being that I never am able to sit down and read enough of the articles being published online about the games industry. Occasionally my RSS feeder throws something at me that I just have to make time for but for the most part I see the headlines of features and articles and have to regretfully click away and focus on the 65 new emails sitting in my mail box. I thought ‘God, if I could just have an LCD in the shower with me I might actually have the ability to digest the plethora of useful information regularly being shared by the top minds in our industry.” And then an even better idea struck me: If all of this material was available in Audio Format then I, as well as fellow developers, could be listening to these amazing articles whilst working out or doing the dishes, or or or.

Ryan also maintains a personal blog here.

Underengineering Undead

We learn more from our failures than from our successes. In A Developer's Life Stages, the first stage is The Underengineer, in part inspired by this poignant failure.

As a college freshman in late 1992, I started making an Ultima VI-like role-playing game.

In researching this post, I went through my journals from that time period to try to figure out exactly how Undead failed. One glaring issue is that ~75% of the journal was about girls, with the remainder divided among writing music, painting classes and working on the game. While totally expected for a distractible teen, given the difficulty of the task and a rapidly approaching deadline (discussed later) it's not a good indicator of eventual success of the project. Nevertheless, software development is a human activity and must coexist with other human activities. Initially, I was more interested in producing an Ultima-esque demo that would get me a job at Origin Systems.

I met a classmate in my speech class at school named Alex Kapadia. Alex had some experience with sound programming and was a game fanatic. I showed him what I'd built, he was thrilled and we began collaborating. At the time, we were playing a game called Solar Winds distributed by a small shareware company called Epic MegaGames before it shortened its name and became known as the world-class developer of Unreal and Gears of War. Each time the game ended, up popped an ad by Epic requesting developers to send in their games for publishing. We sent Undead to Epic and awaited a response. We didn't have to wait long. In early summer 1993 we knew that we would be working with Epic. We sent several versions to Epic over the following year. As it started to gel a bit, we began working more closely with them.

JOURNAL 12/06/93: Talked to Tim Sweeney (president of Epic MegaGames) today. Wow, he knows games. He gave me a lot of good suggestions. He's looking into an artist and musician for the game. He was talking some intense MONEY!!!!!!!!!!

Tim estimated that the game would make Alex and I $40,000, which was an unfathomable amount of money for me as a 19-year old.

JOURNAL 12/08/93: Today Dan Froelich, musician and composer for Epic called me. He lives in Kansas City (that's crazy!) and works for Informix. He told me a lot about how the game publishing thing works. After finals week, we'll get together.

We did end up getting together, Dan, Alex and I at Manny's, the finest Mexican restaurant in Kansas City. He told us a lot about Epic and the business of developing shareware games. He also brought beta copies of Epic's Xargon and Ken's Labyrinth, developed by wunderkind Ken Silverman.



JOURNAL 12/15/93:

From Tim Sweeney (via E-mail):
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 04:28:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Tim Sweeney <70451.633@compuserve.com>
Subject: RE: Undead & Pinball
To: PSENZEE@VAX1.UMKC.EDU
Message-id: <931215092823_70451.633_fhg40-1@compuserve.com>
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
--
Thanks! It's great that you and Dan live in the same town. I hope you'll be interested in working with Dan - he's been with us on Jill, Kiloblaster, Brix, Solar Winds, Adventure Math, and Xargon and his experience working with these projects would be helpful in addition to his music! I'm looking forward to seeing more of Undead! It's the best "first" game any author has shown us. Judging by your coding and artwork, your game has great potential and you have tremendous potential as an author. Undead still has a long way to go in developing a story, creating all the artwork, and turning it into a fun, unique, and successful shareware game, but it looks like you have the perserverence to see it through to the end. Keep up the great work!

-Tim, Epic MegaGames
(3:22 AM - normal business hours for we game developers) :-)

A House of Cards

In late 1993, we believed Undead was going to be an enormous hit. The possibilities appeared endless. Even so, I was starting to deeply fear that I wouldn't be able to finish it. Undead had grown in complexity so much that modifying it was becoming difficult. It was approaching 20,000 lines of C and assembly and because it had no higher level architecture to speak of, I was losing my ability to understand it. Disparate pieces were tightly coupled. There was no layering of subsystems. Significant numerical values were hard-coded everywhere. Every line of code I added made it harder to work with. It was like going from troweling wet concrete to chiseling hardened concrete. This was a classic case of underengineering and I was unequipped to fix it. I was scared. Instead of confronting that issue, I began obsessing over the art - most of the development time was now spent in DeluxePaint getting the art just right.

JOURNAL 03/02/94: Undead is gaining bugs as I try to fix it! Argh. And it's having memory problems -- specifically, not enough static memory.

Worse yet, I had a deadline that I hadn't yet shared with Epic. In a year, more or less, I'd be leaving the country for two years without access to a computer. Now, I suspect I could have fixed Undead's woes given enough time, but I didn't have that time.

Man on a Mission

I grew up in the Mormon (LDS) church. Although I left the church many years ago now, at the time I was devout and determined (and expected) to become a missionary (I'll write sometime later about why this was the right choice, despite my eventual leaving). Around March 1994, I called Tim and told him that I had committed to leave for a two-year mission to central Mexico sometime around September. Understandably, he wasn't happy. I'd naively assumed (wishful thinking) that I would be able to get everything done before leaving in the fall. He knew better.

JOURNAL 03/26/94: BAD NEWS. Tim Sweeney got the copy of Undead. He told me he thought it was fantastic, but that there was no way on earth I was going to get it done before August. In addition, he said it would be absolutely obsolete when I got back. 03/27/94: I didn't realize how upset I was about what Tim said about Undead not being done until I woke this morning and I had been having nightmares about it all night. Of course he's right and I knew it anyway.

Obsolescence was always on our tail and we felt its pressure even during development. The style of game that Undead represented was an Ultima VI class game when the RPG state of the art was Ultima VII and in 1993, Doom (as shareware no less!) splayed the writing on the wall for all 2D games.

Perhaps, as a project, this was doomed from the outset for many reasons. The most obvious was my leaving before it was done. Compared to what I build today, though, the game was not at all complex. It should have been straightforward to build it in a year-and-a-half. It's been said that programming ability manifests at a young age, while skill in software architecture comes much later. In the end, I knew the dark secret. It wasn't merely unfinished, it was unfinishable.