Parade of Rain

Tilt to Live has been unleashed on the unsuspecting public! So far the general vibe has been extremely positive! Adam and I are both pretty excited about getting our first app store game out the door. What’s interesting is the workload went from “lull” to “overdrive” in a matter of days as we ramped up for release and still are trying to coordinate things for a bigger media push in the coming weeks.

You can download Tilt to Live in the app store here. One of the cool things about AGON Online integration is how it’s easy to check leaderboards outside the game. Their community page for Tilt to Live is rather snazzy. We’ll be looking into integrating some of those widgets into our own landing page on onemanleft.com. But that’ll have to wait for now.

We’ve got plenty of ideas in store for Tilt to Live for future updates. So tell your friends, your mom, your dog, your twitter followers! The higher the rating the better! Things are rather hectic at the moment as you can probably imagine, but hopefully I’ll have some breathing room and be able to look back on all of this and write up some (hopefully) useful posts.

We're extremely close to submitting our first title "Tilt to Live". We plan on submitting it this upcoming Friday. After a long and grueling (but awesome fun!) development cycle we've learned a ton. I figured an interesting way to distill our new found knowledge it would be in very short "dev tips" for developing an iPhone game. Today I start out with audio:

Compressing Audio

By the end of development our game weighed in at 16 MB. We wanted to go below the 10MB limit so users could download our game over-the-air. Quickest solution? Compress the audio. Now, we were already using some compression but we have over 60 audio files! The main crux of the problem is we want to be able to quickly compress all our audio to a certain format, build it, look at final build size, and test for quality. For this I wrote a quick script:

Now for a little explanation on my setup:

• I have a single folder (let's call it 'finalAudio') with all the original, uncompressed wave files used in our game.
• The script sits inside this 'finalAudio' folder as well and I run 'chmod +x build_audio' where 'build_audio' is the name of my script so I can just click on it in Finder when I'm wanting to re-export my audio.

What the script does:

1. It removes any folder/file named 'caff' in the current directory
2. it makes a new directory inside 'finalAudio' called 'caff'. This is where the compressed audio will go
3. It looks through all wav files inside 'finalAudio' and runs the 'afconvert' utility on each file and puts the resulting compressed file in 'caff'.

I'm not going to go into the details of all the options you have with afconvert and what audio formats the iPhone supports. There's plenty of documentation online covering that already.

Just an interesting sidenote: we took our 13-16MB game and shrunk it to 6.5 MB using ima4@22000 with 1 channel.

So we're at the last mile (it's a long mile..) of development on Tilt To Live. Adam and I are starting to get some pre-release buzz built up around the game as we put our finishing touches into place. With the holidays around the corner, I will be out of commission until mid January. Marketing is a whole other beast we're trying to deal with and learn as we go.  With a market as vicious and saturated as the App Store, it's been one challenge after another!

As many have stated, to succeed in the app store these days requires a a good bit of marketing muscle. The 'gold rush' is pretty much over and the app store is now similar to any overcrowded market. I've been reading up on marketing in general and also seeking out articles on the app store specifically. App Gamer had a very interesting piece for newcomers to the app store regarding PR and marketing.

Have a great holiday (to those that are celebrating) and see you guys in the new year! We'll be starting off that year with a great game and hopefully many more to come!

...looks like I'll be hitting a bit of crunch time in the coming weeks. Blog entries will probably be dwindling over the next month or so as I try to put the finishing touches on Tilt To Live. On that note:

No matter how much energy you feel like you have and no matter how motivated you are at seeing a project to the end, you still need to take breaks from it. Going non-stop at it for days on end is a one way street to burnout and reduced quality.

I hit my limit on Sunday where I felt if I worked on any more of the game it'd have more bugs than features by the end of the session. Was nice to take the day off and just relax to some good music and video games . Weird how many times I've heard the above repeated and yet still fell into the same trap. It kind of sneaked up on me I guess. Oh well...

Almost there!

As I'm zeroing in on finishing Tilt To Live some of the bigger assets are coming through from Adam and the game size has grown a lot faster than it has in past few months. One of the unstated goals of mine was to keep the game under 10 MB. Why? You are not allowed to download apps, podcasts, or videos that are larger than 10 MB over 3G. You are required to connect to wi-fi in order to do it on your iPhone. Alternatively, you can use a PC/Mac and just sync the said data to your phone/iTouch, but who bothers to do that?

Having a 10MB limit on an "unlimited" data plan sucks, but I'm not here to discuss that. This limit possibly poses a constraint on iPhone developers who want their games to be widely available. I just started digging into this, but haven't really found anything conclusive on downloading habits of iPhone users beyond a few small-sample surveys and articles.

In either case, the question I wanted to answer was:

Do you stand to lose a significant amount of potential sales/downloads for apps over 10 MB?

I decided to do some unscientific data gathering and some manual data mining with good 'ole excel :].

The Process

I fired up iTunes and after fumbling about in the iTunes app store I was able to get to the Games top 100 free and paid section. This was actually my first time digging around in the itunes desktop app store, as I download and buy 100% of my apps and podcasts directly from my phone. Connecting my iPhone to my computer is a rare event indeed...

Not having released a game yet on the app store I didn't have any data on hand that'd prove useful for this. I took a rather low-tech approach and just consulted the all mighty top 100 lists of the app store. I took the top 100 games in the paid list and the free list and compiled them separately to try to find two things:

• How many 10MB+ games exist in the top 100?
• How are those 10MB+ games distributed in the top 100?
  

So the caveats to using the top 100:

• From my understanding, I'm only seeing the US top 100?
• It's not representative of the HUGE library of other apps that are still somewhat successful but not the over-night hit sensation that a lot of the upper rung apps are
• I don't have a good idea of the size distribution of games that aren't in the top 100, so I may be missing the big picture. So any experiments seeking to find a distribution has a very limited view "window" of what is actually going on.
• This data includes iTouch devices, but since they lack 3G this could possibly skew the data.

The Results

First, I'll explain what I thought the results would be. Before doing any of the number crunching I hypothesized I would find that the most successful apps are under 10 MB and any app that happens to be over 10 MB would be weighted towards the lower rungs of the list.

Let's first take a look at the free games in the app store. Below is a table showing the number of apps above 10 MB split into top N lists.

We find in total that there are only 18 out of the top 100 free games that go over the 10 MB limit. Not exactly conclusive, but it shows that majority of top 100 free games are available over the air (OTA).  As you decrease the size of the list the number of 10MB+ games starts to dwindle naturally, but when you look at the percentages the amount of those 18 stays relatively the same until you hit the coveted top 10. The only 10MB+ free game in the top ten is Real Racing GTI, a promotional game for Volkswagen that weighs in at a rather hefty 59.3 MB!

Now how does the distribution of these "heavy" games look in the top 100 free list?

Hmmm...The distribution of 10MB+ games is pretty even all the way up to the top, with a slight dip in the mid section.

Let's look at paid games.

One thing I didn't really account for in my original hypothesis is a difference between paid and free games. 53 paid games are over 10MB! While by a slight margin, the majority of paid games seem to ignore the 10MB rule and go for broke! Egad! This above table completely refutes my original hypothesis that most successful apps are under 10MB (Wow those last few sentences sounded super nerdy...). This is assuming you equate that success = number of apps sold * price of app = more $$$, where as in the free model this kind of breaks down. Anyway, moving on to the distribution of paid game juggernauts...

Interesting. While the paid app list has a majority of 10MB+ games the bulk of them live in the top 20-40 section, again, only by a slight margin. The stand out number here is the top 20 section. It appears games that are under 10MB here still win out the majority, so maybe there still is some relevance to my original hypothesis but to a much lesser extent than I imagined.

Probably not as useful, but in case you're curious here's a simple area graph plotting top 100 free and paid game sizes, there are some monster sized games in the top 100 so that is encouraging! Click it for full resolution.

The Truth Revealed?

Looking at the free games market the results decidedly point to a more "logical" trend, in my opinion, on how games are being designed. Yet, when you look at the paid games market you find that:

• Developers don't give a crap and make what suits them (Hurray freedom!)
• Consumers don't seem to give a crap either on how big it is when they are paying for a game. Maybe they even irrationally prefer bigger (in physical size, not content) games for their dollar?

While the results point to opposite trends on app store game sizes, it doesn't really uncover if developers are consciously shooting for sub 10MB games or simply letting the chips fall where they may in either case. Could free games just not warrant enough budget to make enough assets that grow bigger than 10MB? Are free games specifically targeting "viral" game status by shooting for sub-10MB downloads to allow it to spread more easily? I also find that a good bit of the free games are also "Lite" versions (62 of the top 100 in fact). So it shows that people like to try before they buy at least. With Apple's announcement that they'll allow free apps with in-app purchases, hopefully things will clean up a bit. But that's a different issue for another day.

If you're interested in getting my scrawny little excel spreadsheet with the free/paid top 100 lists to run any fancy shmancy analytics you're welcome to it.

I've made some serious progress as of late with Tilt To Live. The age old saying "I'm 90% done..." is rearing its head and  yet it feels like there's 90% more to go! This is a bit regurgitated, but saw an interesting bit in a post on burnout and motivation at Zen Habits:

1. Achieve in increments. When you only focus on a big goal someday, it’s easy to get burned out by the daily grind. It’s like driving toward a mountain in the distance. You can drive for hours, but the mountain doesn’t seem to get any closer. And spinning your wheels gets real tiring real fast.

The solution is to give yourself a way to measure and record every little step forward you take. Here’s how:

• Get a journal, notebook, or calendar. Writing things down is important.

While I've been doing the above for a while now, I'm finding the advice becoming more critical as I polish up the game and there are only smaller, less visible changes  to the gameplay or code. Along with all the milestone tracking, to-do lists, and time logs I tend to write down where I stand on the project at a high level almost on a daily basis. It gives me a good "whole picture" look at the game to see what else is coming up on the horizon or if I'm finding myself focusing too much on any single feature. Anyway, back to work... :]

It's getting around that time when I'm spending more time working on the game as I realize how many little things need to be fixed, added, tweaked. I've recently given up most of my weekends now in an effort to get more hours in. I'm currently working 6 out of the 7 days a week on the game in some way. It's mostly game programming, sometimes graphics, web development, emailing, phone calls, or getting business forms and other legal stuff squared away.

This week was a rather productive week on several fronts:

• Got a lot of new art assets from Adam and implemented them
• Feedback from testers started trickling in and the reaction has been positive along with tons of great suggestions/ideas
• Fixed a lot of old bugs that were sitting in the queue
• Improved some memory usage of textures

The week wasn't without it's headaches though. This completion date graph illustrates just how badly I estimated this week's tasks:

The amount of tasks was unusually large for the past week, but the amount of tasks wasn't as big an issue as some tasks taking 10 times longer than I wanted.

The biggest one was getting multi-threaded texture loading on the iPhone working. The hours I logged into getting it working is my own personal testament to how a seemingly simple task can blow up to ridiculous portions when you mention the word "multi-threading". Had I known it'd take this long I would've opted for a more basic solution and leave it to a side project. The bright side is now I can load audio and graphics in parallel along with the main thread being able to continue any animations and such. It took about 20 hours to get it working and debugged, which is somewhat embarrassing haha!

Hair-pulling Threading Issues

It started with me wanting to off load the texture loading to another thread. Simple enough. I've done this before on other projects. It took a couple of hours to learn how to get OpenGL setup correctly to allow this. Then I discovered OpenGL wasn't being the meanie, but a function call from core graphics wasn't allowing me to call it from a background thread (sometimes...ugh). I researched it for a couple of days while finishing up other things, but wasn't able to find anything conclusive. I then decided to take the leap and implement my own PNG loader using libpng as a base.  I mean really...how hard could it be? Hah...hah...ha...

Saying it was frustrating would be the understatement of the year, and last year. I usually try to avoid copy/pasting code as I like to read and understand the API I'm using so when it DOES break I'm not utterly clueless. Libpng's interface is rather low-level and not exactly the cleanest. After reading documentation on it for what seemed forever I decided to start with an example program and modify it to fit my needs.

Let's not forget that I'm an XCode/Unix newbie so getting libpng/zlib working as a static library in XCode was a nightmare for me. I ended up building from the source against the correct config's and SDK's for the iPhone to avoid the "invalid architecture" warnings. Next came actually implementing the loading. It looked pretty straight forward in all the examples I saw, except I wanted one feature I didn't see in any of the sample code: be able to load non-power-of-2 textures onto the iPhone. All of the game's assets are of various shapes and sizes, and several are non-power of 2. I haven't taken the time to do proper texture atlasing and I wanted the ability to quickly drop any assets Adam sent me into the game's folder and load it without fiddling with size alignments and the other mess.

This is where things started to get hairy because I was seeing issues crop up that weren't necessarily from my code so I was lead astray a lot. The caveat is the iPhone has a rather special way of "compressing" PNGs. It took me a while to understand the implications of this because I could load the PNGs fine but holy shit were they rendering wrong in OpenGL! It finally dawned on me to change the blend function OpenGL was using. Much to my surprise I couldn't find one that would give me the equivalent alpha blending that I got with premultiplied alpha's. And I wasn't about to go back and re-design all the assets. By this time I was pretty comfortable working with libpng and I decided to just write a custom transform function to premultiply the alpha when loading it to mimic the previous technique of loading:

Finally, you can write your own transformation function if none of the existing ones meets your needs. This is done by setting a callback with

png_set_read_user_transform_fn(png_ptr,
       read_transform_fn);

You must supply the function

void read_transform_fn(png_ptr ptr, row_info_ptr
       row_info, png_bytep data)

See pngtest.c for a working example. Your function will be called after all of the other transformations have been processed.

Alrighty, so now I can load things ~20 hours later. Talk about a huge step backwards. Doing the pre-multiplication at runtime is a trade off of convenience over speed. When it comes time to release the game I might consider doing this prior to compiling so the assets are "cooked". But doing it at runtime adds about 1-1.5 seconds from my unscientific tests.

What's amusing was once this was working it took 15 minutes to get multi-threading working. Now I decided to be adventurous and load the audio and graphics on separate threads from the main thread, for a total of 3. Speed tests show it's on average no faster or slower than having both asset types be loaded in order on a single thread *Shrug*. Oh well, if the iPhone ever gets another core then I'll be set . Ultimately, I now have the freedom to toss asset loading on a background thread while the game continues playing with minimal hit to the frames per second.

This  kind of thing is probably a bit advanced and overkill to do for such a simple and small game as Tilt To Live. If I have time (unlikely) over the next several weeks I'll try to put together a complete code listing for those looking to have more control of their asset loading with libpng on the iPhone.

Tangible goals are key to any project. Without them I feel like I'm peddling up a steep hill just so I can peddle up some more. Scheduling and time logs showing time spent are great for statistical and historical purposes, but in the scheme of things can do little to save a project if you and your team lack that motivation needed to push the last mile. Countless indie games die from loss of interest. I've had several of my own projects fall by the wayside as other opportunities popped up that seemed more "fun". As they say, the grass is greener on the other side . But I would argue the overall motivation for those failed projects didn't dropped per-say. It was just that a particular type of motivation wasn't effective at getting that project done, and that the person failed to cultivate the right type of motivation to see it through...

Short Term Vs. Long Term Goals

When it comes to goal setting I tend to write my short-term, concrete goals down in some form. That list takes the form of a weekly schedule and to-do list. The longer term goals, such as "Finish game X" or even loftier ones such as "become a full-time independent developer" or even "Travel...somewhere...anywhere" kind of stay in my head constantly nagging away at me . I find that when I'm not working directly on my game for a period of time the long term goals rear their head and eventually guide me back on course. But interestingly enough, the second I sit down in front of the computer to work my long term goals go out the window and short term goals kick in. This has had some pretty compelling implications on my work habits.

Some weeks I tend to faff about a good bit on YouTube, TED, RSS, IM, and other things throughout the work session. This happens even when I'm fully aware of the devil that is the internet. Now what happened between the time I was driving home from errands all hyped up about getting my game done and sitting down in front of my computer to make that dream a reality? I feel like my long term goals aren't pushing me along anymore once I'm in a position to do actual work. What I'm finding is that I'm constantly looking at my to-do list and reminding myself how great it'll be to finally have a a a good GUI system implemented this week to make the game hopefully look a little more...professional? I'm looking forward that following weekend to have a new build to push out to beta testers. I'm not looking forward to finishing game X on any given week, but finishing feature Y or bug Z. The important distinction here is that those short term goals have tangible results that are more easy to visualize while working.

Yes, I'm saying I have no idea how Tilt To Live will end up, I can only guess at that. I have a clearer image of how feature Y should work though. Maybe I should chalk this up to inexperience? It just seems so weird to me that there's some sort of internal switch in my motivation based on the context of where I am at or doing at the moment that decides whether short term or long term goals will be the most effective. Realizing this will help push me more to create better weekly schedules so that my short-term goals are more tangible.

This seems obvious when you think about it, but I started thinking about how this applies to other things in life when I came across The Buried Life while listening to an Adam Corolla Podcast (doing laundry at the same time so not completely faffing about!). How many goals do people never see become a reality because they experienced my errand-to-computer dilemma? They got all hyped up about an idea, but when they were on that edge of opportunity they backed away not because they didn't want to do it, but because they simply didn't have any short term goals to push them over that edge? I'll leave at that for now as it's a bit heavier topic that I simply don't have the time or qualifications to fully analyze at the moment. Back to my indie task at hand...

Work in Progress Screenshot of "Tilt To Live"

As I'm approaching the final legs of production (and starting to get my shit together for promotion and marketing) tangible goals are harder to find and smaller. In the beginning, having a playable mock up was a huge step forward that could be completed in a single week. Nowadays it's about getting X animation doing Y exactly correct so it's timed with the audio to give the best feedback for the user. The amount of effort for both tasks is about the same, but the return on investment for me as a programmer is much smaller when doing these polishing tasks. But I know polish on a good game is what pushes it past "ok" to "good" and gets people talking about it.

In a large project, such as indie game, having long term goals are essential to getting you and/or your team to jump on the project. Without those short-term goals feeding your long term motivation, your motivation eventually starves and the project slowly dies.

This week's partial tangible goal list:

By Saturday that list will hopefully be empty, but it's not the empty list I'm excited to see, but the fact that I'll have a first pass of a tutorial system in the game by the end of the week . Looking at this list I can tell my "scheduling skills" were a bit lacking and I know most if not all of the priority #2 cases will be moved to the following week because this week's goal is to implement and polish a tutorial system. Hopefully, this won't translate to another hour long fall through the rabbit hole they call the internet .

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering what task management system I'm using, it is called FogBugz. It's been a treat to be able to use such a robust system, even if I'm a single developer.

I'm currently working on an editor for the next iteration of Gunstyle on the weekends. I find it's a nice break from iPhone development and lets me start the week with renewed energy to work on Tilt To Live again. I'm using wxMax to develop the UI for the actual editor. It's not much at the moment but it's coming together slowly. The editor code architecture is taking a page from the Unreal engine mentality of having your engine and editor be pretty much one in the same. After a little re-jiggering the internals of my framework I can now run a blitzmax game using my framework in a normal graphics window or inside an editor. The code running the actual game logic doesn't have to know which mode it is in unless it really wants to, so it's pretty transparent from the viewpoint of game code.

As for the editor code, that's another beast entirely and it really adds complexity to the code base. I haven't decided yet how "integrated" I want the editor in the game framework I have. Currently, 99% of the editor code lies on the game code layer, above the framework, and the framework just has some functionality for handling the switching between OpenGL window and a wx Application. The reason it makes this difficult is there are a set of opposing goals I'm dealing with here:

• If I want to be able to re-use this framework for future projects, I don't want to pigeon hole myself into a position where the editor is only good at making 2D side-scrolling physics-based maps. This mentality leads to where I am right now with the editor living largely outside the framework and just hooking into it.
• If I want my framework to have a fully functioning editor, this will undoubtedly turn into a "Gunstyle Engine". As I will want to make tools to specifically aid in creating Gunstyle maps and objects. Is that a bad thing? From a time and goal perspective, no. From an idealistic point of view, I want the framework to be 'general'.
• A potential compromise between the two opposing points above is to create a 'generic' editor that exposes a lot of hooks and ability to code in new tools. While a good way to approach this, I'm only doing this for fun and the end goal is to have a fun game to play. As someone with a limited time and constrained resources I cannot take on this approach as it's a whole project unto itself.

So as a result, I'm left with either:

1. A one-off editor for Gunstyle. The code from this editor could potentially be re-used for future games but will be specifically designed to work with the Gunstyle game.
2. An integrated editor in the framework. In my mind, this would graduate the code from "framework" to "engine" code-base as it would introduce not only a set of API's but a basic content-pipeline for creating content for this code base.

The main reason the one-off editor approach caused me to pause is there have been situations where I want to include functionality in the core of the editor (in the framework layer) but it would require me to pull in a lot of game specific functionality into the core as well. So I'm sure this is leading to several less than optimal code design decisions because I'm trying to tackle a game specific editor while simultaneously trying to develop a bare-bones editor.

An example of this is I've added a line tool to the editor this weekend. The line tool creates a physics based line object into the map for Gunstyle. Now, I feel a basic line and box editing tool is something that could be added to the core of the framework. The problem? The framework has no physics functionality. Physics is all on the game-layer. Currently, the 2D rigid body physics engine is home-grown, but physics is one of those things where I would like to switch out from project to project (using Box2D, Chipmunk, or Farseer). As a result, I've yet to roll any physics engine into the core of the framework.

After getting all of that written out in front of me, I think I'll be sticking to the one-off editor route for this project. If anything comes of Gunstyle and it's editor I'll probably be more willing to roll more of the game editor into the core and just go the 'engine' route in the future. But for now, I'm trying to focus on Getting This Thing Done. And coding a generic solution to a specific problem is not the best way to Get It Done.

Some days it takes a herculean effort to force myself to sit down and work on my game. Some weeks it can be destructive to my entire schedule, while others its a complete non-issue. Overtime I've found prioritizing my tasks wasn't enough to really Get Things Done. I needed a way to organize my daily tasks in such a way that would maximize my motivation to actually work that day, particularly after coming home from my day job. By taking my top priority items and then sorting them from easiest/most fun to hardest/most boring I think has helped my overall productivity.

I've resisted the temptation to try to squeeze in and finish off any low hanging fruit when I'm finishing up for the day and leaving it for the next session. Why? It increases the chances that I start on time the next day and get 'into the zone' faster for when I need to really concentrate on the harder bugs and features later into the day. It's much easier for me to come back to an easy fix or feature. Whenever I have a really hard bug I tend to dread working on it before I've even sat down at the computer. Sometimes this can't be avoided as some bugs can take days of work to finally be fixed, especially if you're on a very limited time schedule with a day job and other obligations. I haven't met many people who look forward to debugging some crazy hard bug when they start their day's work. Once over the 'hump' when you've settled into just doing the easy things you can quickly ramp up and tackle the hard problems on your to-do with little fuss.

But when the day (or in my case, the night) is winding down, I try to save away some of those easy or fun 5 minute tasks for the next day to really help motivate me into starting on time. As for other tips on game development project motivation and such, instead of going into other aspects of it I'll just link you guys to a post by Jake Birkett, of Grey Alien Games, that sums it up very nicely for indies looking to get 'serious' about their game development business. In particular, this bit:

I’ve run out of motivation

Well perhaps game programming isn’t for you but some other aspect of game production is? But maybe you just need to re-motivate yourself! There’s plenty of stuff about this all over the Internet. Try doing something that inspired you to make games in the first place - perhaps you need to play some of your favourite games, or boot up an emulator and play some old classics, or read some stories about other people’s success, or make a little fun minigame, or listen to some Commodore 64 tunes or Euphoric Trance music. Whatever gets you back into that space where you really want to have fun making and selling a game! Be sure to REPEAT this process whenever you feel your motivation dip.

Having a plan really helps out as you can chart your progress and see clearly what you need to do next. Also if you feel unmotivated, just START something, anything on your project and 5-10 minutes later you’ll probably be really into it.

That last bit is very important and speaks to the issues I encounter most often. For me, that 'something' is usually a 5-15 minute fun/easy high priority task that needs to get done. Planning this ahead of time helps as staring at a list of tasks and 'cherry-picking' when I'm in a state of lousy motivation usually ends up with me picking things that don't need to get done right away and leaving more important tasks to linger on the list. Game development isn't all fun, but with a little forethought and planning you can really help minimize the mundane feeling parts of software development.