• 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.

  • Tour de Fat


    tour de fat
    Originally uploaded by mguthaus.

    Rode down to New Belgium Brewing’s Tour de Fat bikes + beer festival in the park today where we drank beer, rode some wacky bikes and saw a couple unusual performances. I much enjoyed The Sprockettes who had an energetic bike themed dance act that culminated in human pyramids and a bicycle being played like a guitar (Colin was impressed). And a martial arts / juggling / dance / rock performance by Nanda which was delightfully strange and original. One of the four performers had a broken foot but they worked his crutches into the act amazingly well.

    They had a free ride area with a dozen or so very strange bikes. Someone caught us in the act of totally pwning the ass-backwards handleless tandem you see here (we’re the ones on the right). The steering was like a tank, or those paddle boats where you turn by having one side pedal faster than the other. Colin wore his new bicycle suspenders which got a number of comments.

    So we salute New Belgium for their taste in free outdoor events, if not entirely for their taste in malted alcoholic beverages (their beers are… mmm… okay).