• Hey Guys

    This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.

    This is a post I wrote on the Fantastic Contraption forums. Someone (OfficiallyHaphazard) asked me a few questions and I ended up writing a whole thing.

    It was an attepmt to sum up this particular life-altering experience.

    The original thread is here: http://fantasticcontraption.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1212&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

    Hey guys.

    Sorry I don’t post much. Sorry I don’t get more bug fixes out.

    This has been an incredibly overwhelming experience for me. Weasel’s bang on in all his answers. But I can offer my perspective. Come with me on a trip down memory lane.

    Imagine yourself a corporate web developer. You are a .Net and SQL server ninja. You hate microsoft but accident and the world have made you really good with their web-dev suite. Which is not an easy thing to be good at.

    So, my young ninja, you decide to move to San Francisco after taking a year traveling in asia. You end up in a job really quickly. There is a ton of work in this city. The job looked really good on the packaging. But after you sit down and start taking on projects you realise most of your day is going to be hacking asp and tweaking existing sites. “can we add another item to that dropdown?”. And every time you drop a wicked prototype for a database-enabled flash front-end on them they look at you like you just dropped a turd on their desk.

    Seven months pass. You are a thoroubread greyhound (who can’t spell) forced to jog beside a fat owner. You are the bazooka swatting flies. You are bored out of your gord. You listen to the entire back-log of “this american life”.

    But then you get this idea. Out of the blue, an idea. A game. Kind of like Armadillo Run, kind of like the Increible Machine. But with a twist. Instead of making an environment that the armadillo moves through, you make an armadillo that moves through the environment. You’re pretty sure this is a good idea. You run it past a few friends who’s opinions you respect (weasel) and they also think it’s a good idea.

    So, what the hell, you’ve got alot of creative energy left at the end of the day. Pretty soon every spare waking hour is writing code and learning flash. No weekends for four months. Hoping to get sick so you can stay home and write code.

    Ideas are considered and rejected, flash is puzzled over and solved, bugs come and go. A game begins to take shape.
    Eventually menus and graphics are made, everything ends up actually working pretty well. And your family and friends doing the beta-testing are hooked.

    Time to put it out into the world. Forget ads. Ads suck. And forget selling it to a portal. You made it, you’re going to host it. So try charging a few bucks for the level editor and mabey it will buy us all a round at the pub.

    And up it goes. You bootleg some bandwidth off of a friend for 10$ a month. Announcing this momentus event are two blog-posts. One on your travel log that gets zero traffic, and one on weasel’s bloggy web-space-thing. That gets alot more traffic than yours but not a ton.

    A few days pass. Life goes on as expected. The game gets a few small blog posts. A small gaming site links to it and the users rate it pretty well on that site. Then, one fateful sunday, you come home to 20,000 users on the server.

    Stumble-Upon has found you and likes what it sees. From then on it’s a roller-coaster ride to over 1 million views in the second month of release (august). This rollercoaster is punctuated by constant server meltdowns. A steady stream of server upgrades and massive database changes are the only thing keeping the hungry behemoth at bay. Even with all your best efforts the servers still spend the better part of some days offline and when they are up it takes 3 minutes to save. People start writing you emails: ‘how much money do you want to put it on our portal?’, ‘how much to make an iphone version?’, “we’re discussing the possibility of a DS version of your game internally. Are you interested?”. Pretty heady stuff. And you’re getting these emails while trying to write asp code at the day-job.

    So the day job has to go. The game is making more money than your day-job is at this point anyway (thank you everyone, and a bunch of it gets kicked back to almost everyone in the credits page).

    The last day of real in-the-office work is August 8th. Just under a month from the day of release. Not that now your life is easy. This is in the middle of the server meltdowns. But eventually you switch hosts, become a reasonably skilled DBA, and things start running smooth.

    But behind the maelstrom crazy things are happening. People are playing the game hard. They are doing amazing things, mind-blowing things. You have now gotten your head around 1 million page views in terms of server resources. But not in terms of actual people playing the game. And mabey that’s a good thing. Mabey you’ll pay a good friend to get his head around it instead. Mabey if you spent too long on the forums or too long flipping through levels and solutions your life will be paralyzed by the idea that _millions_ of people are playing, loving, and hating, your game.

    Can you really imagine what that means? Millions of people? I can’t.

    I know when I went to PAX the Wizards of the Coast guys treated me like a rock-star. I know people at Blizzard play my game. Gaming heroes know Fantastic Contraption.

    And all of it leaves me just stunned.

    It’s hard to think about Fantastic Contraption now. About the things that need improving. I probably won’t be spending alot of time on it. It is wildly succesful as it is. There are things that could be much better. But I might leave those for Fantastic Contraption 2. Or some totaly different game. I can let my imagination go wild and play with game ideas _full time_ now.

    Interesting times though. Even if I don’t spend a ton of time on the game from now on it looks you guys might get the game that you deserve anyway. The polished game with a good level browser and graphics that took more than two weekends to knock out. I don’t want to jinx it but there could be some very exciting news in the future indeed.

  • PAX and Beerfest


    Fantastic Contraption
    Originally uploaded by zemekiss.

    A couple weeks ago we went up to Seattle for PAX. Stephen got a few photos of the event, which for me wasn’t so much about the games and the ravenous Fantastic Contraption fans (no really!), as getting to spend time with our friends from Vancouver. PAX was a bit crowded (60,000) this year and they had trouble fitting everyone into even the main panels in the huge hall. But we still managed to see everything we came for: Colin and Dan played Star Craft 2, I oogled Fallout 3. The highlight for me was the Jonathan Coulton concert. He brought Felicia Day out to sing “Still Alive” and the several thousand people in attendance sang along. I hadn’t realized I knew all the words…

    We headed up to the island after that to spend the week with our families, and remarked over and over on how beautiful Vancouver Island is.

    The next weekend was Beerfest – for many Victorians the event of the summer. The Northways got us tickets for Friday (the day for true beer fans) and together we went and sampled many an interesting brew. My favorite this year was Tin Whistle’s Peaches and Cream.. I guess the beautiful day put me in a girly mood because all my picks were the light fruity ones. :) I think Hugo’s Super G was better than ever; somebody else has got to pick up on putting ginger & ginseng in beer because I couldn’t bring myself to enter Hugo’s bar to order it now that their restaurant is closed. Oh – we never guessed Andy’s mystery beer!

    I came back last weekend but Colin stayed in Nanaimo for another week. I got back just in time to catch the end of the Power to the Peaceful festival and concert which had the most amazing clothing vendors and some very odd food. Then the San Francisco Opera put on Opera in the Park which I went down and got the perfect seat dead center and just slightly up the hill. I sat and knitted – I’m learning to knit! – while I listened. Culture!

    Then I spent a week playing Spore while Colin was away. It’s… well it’s not a gamer’s game, which is what I was hoping/imagining it would be. But they did an excellent job of taking four games that are traditionally hardcore and made them successfully casual. I would have enjoyed if the difficulty slider increased the complexity of the games, but obviously they had enough on their hands with this endeavor. I think they’ve done an amazing job, particularly on the UI which feels absolutely natural, and in integrating the tutorial into the gameplay. And I just can’t get enough of designing my little creatures!

    Colin gets back today – huzzah!

  • Best game you can play with one button

    Now that I’m an indy game developer I’ve been playing alot more indy games.

    Alot of interesting games are very simple. And I kept having this intermittent idea of having an award for best game you can play with one button. The idea being that the one button game is the simplest interface possible.

    Then lo-and-behold today I found it.

    Strange Attractors 2: http://www.ominousdev.com/games.php

    Has two buttons but you can turn one off. And it’s super fun. Making it the best game you can play with one button.

    (plus it looks like Tron, so, default winner)

  • Administration

    More in the series of articles about writing Fantastic Contraption.

    With some measure of success comes some measure of administrative problems. The game is up and everyone loves it and all the press is good and the world is generally being my oyster. So that’s awesome.

    But remember how I made this game in my free time? And how that is limited? Well development has dropped off to a slow trickle. Because all that free time I used to use to write code I now use to wrangle servers and write emails and put out fires.

    Turns out having a massively popular flash game with login accounts, saved contraptions, a thriving board and a pay version generates alot of random little tasks.

    Luckily Travis Stone is taking care of the hosting problems. So when the database went down today and when the hosting company is dragging its feet over upgrades he takes the brunt.

    But when that happens there are also a bunch of PayPal payments that fail. Well, the payments don’t fail. I get the money. But the user is obviously never registered as paid. So I have to go correct all of those manually and write sorry notes to people if they’ve been waiting for a while.

    Also it turns out there are just a ton of ways to buy things with PayPal. And I don’t support all of them as gracefully as I should. And my PayPal code is in PHP and I kind of hate PHP and don’t know it very well. So there is alot of trialing and erroring while I try to get all of that working.

    And then there are the wonder-mails. The random emails of wonderous or possibly wonderous offers or events. Like job offers and offers to do things with the game and the like. Some of those are just awesome (thanks Pez for hosting the music for us!) but alot of them require negotiation and carefully worded replies. Which sucks up more time.

    I think I spend more time replying to board posts about future development than I spend actually doing development.

    But things are just going so peachy-well it’s impossible to complain. I’m not bitching, I’m merely cataloging. So the next guy knows what to expect.

  • Administration

    This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.

    More in the series of articles about writing Fantastic Contraption.

    With some measure of success comes some measure of administrative problems. The game is up and everyone loves it and all the press is good and the world is generally being my oyster. So that’s awesome.

    But remember how I made this game in my free time? And how that is limited? Well development has dropped off to a slow trickle. Because all that free time I used to use to write code I now use to wrangle servers and write emails and put out fires.

    Turns out having a massively popular flash game with login accounts, saved contraptions, a thriving board and a pay version generates alot of random little tasks.

    Luckily Travis Stone is taking care of the hosting problems. So when the database went down today and when the hosting company is dragging its feet over upgrades he takes the brunt.

    But when that happens there are also a bunch of PayPal payments that fail. Well, the payments don’t fail. I get the money. But the user is obviously never registered as paid. So I have to go correct all of those manually and write sorry notes to people if they’ve been waiting for a while.

    Also it turns out there are just a ton of ways to buy things with PayPal. And I don’t support all of them as gracefully as I should. And my PayPal code is in PHP and I kind of hate PHP and don’t know it very well. So there is alot of trialing and erroring while I try to get all of that working.

    And then there are the wonder-mails. The random emails of wonderous or possibly wonderous offers or events. Like job offers and offers to do things with the game and the like. Some of those are just awesome (thanks Pez for hosting the music for us!) but alot of them require negotiation and carefully worded replies. Which sucks up more time.

    I think I spend more time replying to board posts about future development than I spend actually doing development.

    But things are just going so peachy-well it’s impossible to complain. I’m not bitching, I’m merely cataloging. So the next guy knows what to expect.