The nominees for the No Future Contest have been chosen. The fifteen chosen games are going to be displayed on custom arcade cabinets at Visages du Monde (Cergy, France), from 18th September to 20th October, and as part of the Retro (no) Future Festival, with a chance of several €800 prizes.

And To The Tower has been chosen as one of these games!

Wow.

This was… unexpected. I’m not sure what this makes me now – “Professional Game Developer” is still out of reach, since I’ve not made any money from anything yet, but I still feel like being featured in a games festival in France puts me on some higher level than my previous Hobbyist level. Either way, good times!

So yeah, out of 1610 Compo entries I cam 58th overall, and 9th for Innovation. Very happy with that! It’s going to be tricky to beat these numbers in the next LD in August, though… The LD entry page itself is at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11718 , if you want a look.

Meanwhile, the Fishing Jam is underway. It’s officially 20th-26th May, but since this jam is pretty flexible I’m planning on shunting my dates forward to take advantage of the Bank Holiday this coming Monday. I’ve got lots of Evil Plans, but they almost certainly warrant a blog post of their own.

(9th in Innovation? How’d that happen?)

But at the same time, Bitcoins are suddenly being talked about in much wider circles than before. All of a sudden, you can buy pizzas and houses and things using Bitcoins. And that means, even after the inevitable crash, we may start seeing more people on the Internet willing to do business in the things. This is pretty interesting for me, a random digital-distribution games dev with vague hopes of maybe one day earning a non-zero amount of money from making games.

So it’s about time I had some sort of rudimentary system on here for people to give me Bitcoins. If you want to donate some some bitcoins to Altered Tree Games in exchange for some warm fuzzy feelings and not much else (warm fuzzy feelings not guaranteed), you can do so at the following address.

1JtnTB47tjd1RSv2B9SASbVS7kWtunbHDk

After being distinctly not-happy with the last Homeworld UI sketch, I’ve done another one.

Yes, I’ve been playing a fair bit of Deus Ex Human Revolution recently, how could you tell?

It’s pretty late now – I’m going to be distinctly sleep-deprived tomorrow – but it’s been worth it. I much prefer the look of this game, maybe I’ll actually make it one of these days.

I’ve been toying with the idea of making a Homeworld-style space strategy game. I’ve thrown together a sketch of a possible game GUI in Inkscape.

I like the minimalist GUI style, but the trouble is – it only really works well if the rest of the game art style is similarly minimalist. Which works well with plenty of 2D games, but isn’t really suited to a Homeworld-style 3D strategy game. Ah well, still useful practice.

The 7-Day RogueLike Challenge begins tomorrow. And I’m planning to make a game that looks exactly like a roguelike, quacks like a roguelike, fits the Berlin Interpretation definition of a roguelike, but doesn’t actually play anything like a roguelike.

You play as an enigmatic hacker, or possibly a rogue AI – I’ve not decided yet. You create Objects, which look exactly like traditional roguelike ASCII maps, and send them forth throughout the world to seek out and destroy your enemies.

For a change, I’ve got the full gameplay mapped out before I’ve even started coding. I’ll be interested to see how the stealth mechanics work out in practice, though – I’ll be hiding a lot of information from the player, even information about the player’s own units, which could either work well or be really uninteresting. We’ll find out.

The annoying thing is, I’ve got to wait until tomorrow before starting work on the code. Ah well.

A few days ago, Mike Rose made a blog post on Gamasutra, entitled “What we really need is a free-to-play game jam“. Mike’s main point is that we indies and gamejammers should be playing around with different ways to make microtransactions not-evil. This piqued my interest, because I’m a game-jam kind of person, and if there actually were a Free-To-Play Game Jam I’d probably take part.

So, how do we go about making microtransactions not evil?

Well, first off, if we’re not being evil, we can’t put features into the game, onto people’s computers, then lock them down so that only paying people can use them. The spirit of Richard Stallman may not have made much headway into the world of gaming yet, but even cheat-wielding gamers generally like their computers to be under *their* control rather than some company’s control. And once playing around with memory-hacks becomes – potentially – financial theft, something’s gone very badly wrong somewhere. So let’s not do that.

Next off, we can’t require a permanent internet connection for single-player gaming, that’s just silly. There are a lot of people in the world who don’t have anything you could reasonably describe as a “permanent internet connection”. And we’d best not stop making single player, because I *like* single player.

So that narrows things down a bit. Next off, nothing that enforces a big multiplayer gameplay rich/poor divide. Call me a Socialist, but we have enough social inequality in the real world already without spreading it out into other worlds. Oh, and don’t force non-paying people to expend vast amounts of time grinding instead, because then you have a financial motivation for making your game not-fun.

And one of the big problems with microtransactions at the moment is that the “micro” seems specifically designed to deceive people about how much they’re actually spending. A hundred lots of pretty-much-nothing is still pretty much nothing, right? Wrong, it’s now “actually quite a lot”. So none of that.

We now have our constraints. So how do we, within those constraints, charge people recurring amounts of money?

Well, for single player, if we’re not requiring a permanent internet connection and not putting locked closed code onto people’s machines, then all we can do is charge people for one-time downloads of extra content. This would traditionally be called “DLC”, or sometimes “buying a game”. This seems a bit unadventurous, but logically it seems the only not-evil option.

Now for multiplayer. Here we don’t have the same control-over-their-machines problems that we do with offline singleplayer, because you’re exerting control over your servers rather than their machines. Trouble is, if we’re not allowing gameplay advantages, then that just leaves cosmetic changes, which seem a bit pointless.

One thing I’ve heard proposed somewhere, though, is a free-to-play competitive multiplayer game, that allows anyone to play unranked, but requires payment for ranked games. This could be seen as “just another cosmetic change”, but it’s the sort of cosmetic change that people care about. So this one could work nicely, without being evil.

Or alternatively, we can go one stage further out, and do what I was going to do for the last October Challenge – have the microtransactions pay directly for the game development itself. As in, once X amount of money is in the pot, we’ll release feature Y for everyone for free. This could work nicely within an open-source ecosystem, while still getting money to the developers. I’ve no idea whether it’d work in practice, though – but that’s a question for another blog post, this one’s too long already.

The other week, while I was on holiday in London, I had a look round the National Gallery. And as I wandered around, I found myself paying less attention to the art, and more attention to plotting out game mechanics for an art gallery construction/simulation game. Funny how that happens…

The plan is, you start off with a small room with one painting, a steady stream of people wandering in off the street, and a big ol’ government grant of lots of money. You have to buy priceless paintings and sculptures at auction, carefully picking which ones will get you more visitors. Having a gallery of entirely Impressionist paintings will keep the Impressionist-lovers coming back, but won’t pull in as many new people for future expansion…

And if I were feeling DLC-minded, I could point out all the opportunities for adding extra styles of art at later dates (a DeviantArt dlc, maybe?)

I reckon this could work quite nicely as a tablet game as well. Maybe I’ll end up using this idea later on in OneGameAMonth. Anyone know any good Android game libraries?

(People in that mockup image from Danc’s Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Tiles, used under a CC-BY license.)

I’ve drawn up a big detailed plan for the future of Among The Storms. Most of it’ll probably never happen, but I will throw out at least one post-jam polish update at some point. Hopefully before we get to the end of the month and I start work on game 2 of OneGameAMonth.

After one irc conversation of encouragement, I’ve been nerdsniped back into working on Static Friction again. The game now works mostly fine on the latest version of the Spring engine (just a handful of things to sort out). The Lost now have a bunch more models and a new overarching plan that I actually like (unlike the last three plans). Someone, remind me in the next few days to throw a release out.

And I now have a midi keyboard, a decent sound card, and a large mound of virtual instruments! I’m a fairly musical person, and I’ve been meaning to have a go at soundtrack composition for a long time, but it’s only recently that I’ve been able to afford most of the kit. I’m now reading through Principles Of Orchestration by Nikolai Rimsky-Korzakov on the train to and from work. We’ll see what happens.

Oh, and month two of One Game A Month is almost upon us. I’ve got an idea, but it’s complex enough for another blog post, I reckon. And I need to get round to installing Fedora 18 now it’s come out. Busy busy busy…

Good news! I have an idea for the New Year Game Jam!

My self-imposed randomly-generated theme is “Storms”. So the game idea is, you have a vaguely-steampunk airship with a fairly large cargo hold, and a valley with various small towns that need different goods. You fly your airship flight-sim-style across the treacherous weather of the valley, get blown to and fro by storms and thermals, and potentially make money buying and selling sprockets and top hats.

And in recent news, my meagre concept art skills haven’t been helped by not doing any art for months. Ah well. Time to go watch some more Feng Zhu videos, I reckon.