It feels like it has been a year since I wrote my last blog post. I don’t know how so much can happen in a single week!
The biggest news, of course, is that the alpha version of Triangle Man is now available on Desura! It has been a lot of hard work to get that to happen, and I’ll go over that more in a moment.
The weekend was a little crazy. Saturday, Tim and I attended the Game Design Workshops again – this time finding a very small group of people who we normally hang out with anyway. We had some really interesting talks about storytelling in games, mostly how to give the players a lot of choice while still telling them a meaningful story. Tim and I then fleshed out a game idea we’d tossed around the office the day before. It still has a long way to go before we even decide to prototype it, but I’m still quite excited about what we could do with it.
Sunday brought with it Sydney’s iFest! This time I was there bright and early (no planes to miss) and I managed to get to most of the talks. I was glad I finally got to attend the talk by Uppercut Games about the sale of Epoch. These guys are seasoned developers, but they don’t have much experience with self publishing and run into the same kind of problems that we do. Tim and I presented our talk and, despite some technical issues, I think we got more of a response than we did in Canberra. Hopefully the talks will be uploaded soon so that you can all watch them.
Tim and I then somehow wormed our way into Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. I finally got to catch up with Gordon Bellamy, executive director of the IGDA. I met Gordon when I was an IGDA scholar at E3 last year – he’s a great person and his positive energy is inspiring and infectious. We watched one of the game design finalists, a team of students from Thailand who have made a game called Verdant Fantasy – it looks great, check it out.
Monday signalled a return to the real world (of work). We were still waiting for our latest Triangle Man upload to be approved on Desura. What we wanted to do was let our Pozible Beta testers in before the public because they had paid for early access and we knew that there were likely to be a few bugs we’d missed. What actually happened was that our upload was approved and made public. Whether this was due to the fact that we are very new to the Desura back-end or the fact that we had such a mix-up with the many different uploads I don’t know. The Desura staff, though lovely, are very busy and it feels a little like we’ve been left to our own devices to work out what is going on. It doesn’t help that the interface changes once you’ve had your project approved for the first time. We’ll write a bit of an “instruction manual” and post it on here and Desura a bit later.
So, the game went public on Tuesday. We decided to keep it quiet and announce it on Friday to keep with our original plans. No one had noticed that it was there and things were going ok. Unfortunately, a rather well known and well loved Australian developer then released their game on Desura – if you haven’t already then make sure you grab a copy of Gamebook Adventures by Tin Man Games. Suddenly the entire Australian industry was sitting on Desura. And they quickly noticed Triangle Man. And then, our amazing friends, who we love dearly, started to tell the world that Triangle Man was available. A few of them purchased it and we then discovered that there was a game breaking bug. Desura quickly pulled the game and we were forced to apologise for the game being pulled, despite the fact we still hadn’t announced that it was available. Everything just happened so fast! To make things worse, Luke and Barnesy were home sick and Tim was working on his uni project elsewhere. So I was in the office by myself, freaking out a little.
Barnesy was thankfully online and he managed to work out what the bug was, fix it and reupload the game. By late Tuesday the game was awaiting approval once more.
I decided to work from home on Wednesday since no one was in the office anyway (yay for everyone being sick). So, of course, the power went out for hours. Needless to say, I didn’t have a very productive day. My room is pretty clean now though.
Triangle Man was approved late Wednesday night (when I once again had power). After testing on quite a few different machines successfully I started to announce that the game was out (finally!). Our friends immediately started to play and give us some great feedback. This continued right through Thursday too. So far I’d like to mention three people who have been the most helpful with feedback: Brennan Hatton, Tim Stobo and Dan Toose. We’ve already started implementing some of the changes suggested and our next update is well on the way to being ready for upload.
The support from the industry is always amazing – we can never thank people enough for the things they do for us!
And if you haven’t already – please go and play our game!
Stats:
- Games I’ve been playing: Not as much time to play this week. I did get in one session of DayZ where we managed to acquire a car. The lag issues associated with the car made the game almost unplayable though – hopefully this will be fixed soon.
- Media appearances: 4
- Tsumea – “Triangle Man by Convict Interactive released for Desura Alpha funding”
- Need Help Write Now – “Interview: Rebecca Fernandez of Convict Interactive Team”
- Desura/IndieDB/ModDB – “Triangle Man released on Desura”
- Capsule Computers – “Triangle Man released on Desura”
- Events attended: 3 (iFest, Imagine Cup, Game Design Workshop)
- Site views: 268
- New Facebook fans: 8
- New Twitter followers: 16
- Good ideas I’ve thought of: Mostly just the ideas thrown at us from other people about changes to Triangle Man – some of which we’re considering, some of which we aren’t. Bullet time for Triangle Man anyone?
- Levels created: 0
- Lines of code written: 0
- Ciders consumed: 7
