Unseen Things
Adventures in Freelance Development
Beta Gameplay Video
Jul 16th
Just a quick blog post to direct people to the gameplay video of my new Unity3D game, Sparky the Road Clown.
More updates coming soon!
Running over clowns? There’s about to be an app for that
Jul 7th
It’s July, and we’re only days way from launching our new game, Sparky the Road Clown on Facebook and iPhone. We’ve already done a “soft launch” on Facebook, which means we’re letting a few people play the beta and we’re opening that up to more and more people as we add in and finish out more things. We’ll be opening it up to the world and sending the app off to Apple for approval within the next 2 weeks.
It’s great to see people who haven’t seen or played the game yet figuring out the key to knocking Sparky into the open railroad car at the end of the street, or better yet, knocking him way over the trains off the edge of the world (oops, gotta fix that). I’m getting some really good feedback from gamers and non-gamers alike. I can’t wait for everyone to see and play Sparky, but the world will have to wait a little bit longer. While I can’t wait for absolute perfection, I do want to wait for the right balance of quality and timeliness.
Here are a couple of new screenshots — the first is our excellent ngame loading screen (as usual, done by the talented Chris Magee) and the second is a screenshot showing off the new train cars, sky/background and Sparky taking one right in the face.
Unity3D + dimeRocker = iPhone + Facebook
Jun 25th
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m using Unity3D as my development environment, and I’m planning to deploy to iPhone and Facebook. I’m using Unity3D on my PC to create the application that I’m then moving that every so often (one way) to Unity iPhone on the Mac. While this isn’t an optimal workflow, it’s still not bad at all if you’re planning to deploy to a platform besides iPhone (like say, Facebook). In a few months (weeks?), Unity 3.0 will be coming out and it will have a single, unified development environment and I imagine that what I’m doing now will be much easier, but when I started development on this project in the fall, that wasn’t an option. I did realize pretty early on in the process that I wanted to deploy out to Facebook and that it wouldn’t be that much more trouble (and I was right, thankfully). In March, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference), dimeRocker began making themselves known to the world. It sounded like a perfect match for me — it works with Unity, and they provide a series of addons to integrate your Unity3D game to Facebook.
Facebook version is free, iPhone version is $1.99
Jun 18th
Sparky the Road Clown was going to be an iPhone game from the beginning, and part of my marketing plan was to buy some ads on Facebook. The more I learned and worked with Unity3D, though, the more I realized that it wouldn’t be that much more difficult to create a Facebook version if I planned it that way from the beginning — so that became the plan. While I don’t think charging people just to play the game on Facebook would work, charging for extra content within the game on Facebook is not at all uncommon (see: Zynga) and that’s the model we’re going to follow, but only to a degree.
The game will be finalized on Monday, June 28th, and sent off to Apple and launched on Facebook at the time. It will be $1.99 on the iPhone, but it will be free on Facebook. Some people have questioned the logic behind this, but I’ve spent some time thinking about it, and I think I’ve got a reasonable model in mind.
As I talked to people about my pricing model, people had questions like:
- So why $1.99 on iPhone and free on Facebook?
- Free on Facebook?? How is that fair to iPhone users who pay for it?
- Will they be exactly the same? Isn’t the free version going to hurt the sales of the paid version?
Clowns, and hammers, and cars! Oh, my!
May 28th
The great guys over at Unity recently posted a Car Tutorial, complete with racetrack and lots of options to tweak. I haven’t been happy with the physics of our car yet, so I started going through it to see how they did what they did… I got a bit sidetracked. I woke up yesterday just before 5am and had an idea about hitting the clown with a big hammer… why not, right?
So I spent all of yesterday and most of today and got that working, as well as our car model in their racetrack scenario (using that environment as a testbed) and had Chris (our graphics guru) come up with a hammer… and here are the results. Now, instead of just driving your car straight at Sparky the Road Clown, you can choose to drive past him and try your luck at whacking him with a big hammer that’s mounted to your car instead.
World, meet Sparky the Road Clown
May 21st
After many months of development, it’s time to unveil (or should I say unleash?) what I’ve been working on with the help of several talented friends. Sparky the Road Clown is a game for iPhone and Facebook and will be released this summer. The premise? Well, Sparky the Road Clown is an ex-rodeo clown. A tough old bird that has gone a little bit cuckoo, if you will.
I mean, sure, clowns are funny when they’re making balloon animals at the party, but what about at 2am, in a dark alley?
Good thing you brought a car.
Here’s a first look at our antagonist and an early screenshot from the game…
Moving from XP64 to Windows 7 64-bit
Dec 5th
This is documenting my switch from Windows XP 64-bit to Windows 7 64-bit. While I loved xp64 dearly and used it for years, it had gotten cluttered over the years and I’d run into a number of issues and just got fed up with software and hardware not working with it. In it’s defense, there were no other options at the time if you wanted to use 4GB of memory, and the graphics programs I was using for most of my work (Maxon’s Cinema 4D, NextLimit’s RealFlow and RandomControl’s FryRender) all supported 64-bit software and therefore the extra memory, so it was a no brainer. And in it’s defense, it’s been a great workhorse of an operating system and there are drivers for just about everything now, even my Line6 Pod XT Live, which didn’t have 64-bit drivers for a long, long, long time. I think a lot of hardware will have Windows 7 64-bit drivers now since Vista 64-bit has been out a while. Vista 64 was Microsoft’s first “official” 64-bit operating system, they still maintain that xp64 wasn’t an official release, which gave manufacturers a good excuse to not make drivers for it, but the main people who were using xp64 were the power users — the guys doing graphics, music, video and other processor and memory intensive stuff like that.
It’ll be spectacular
Nov 17th
I love helping people solve their problems. For the last 2.5 years, I helped a bunch of great (and wacky) people solve their problems at my day job, and really had a great time doing it, but now it’s time to help some other people with their problems.
I’m a programmer. I don’t like to use fancy titles like “solution developer” but that would probably be more accurate. I’d call myself a coder if that didn’t confuse people quite so much, but I don’t think that tells the full story, either. So why have I quit my very stable 8:30-4:30 government job with solid pay and benefits in the midst of the worst unemployment and some of the worst economic times in recent history? Because I see opportunities. All around, I see opportunities. Companies are still trying to make a profit, and where companies are trying to make a profit, opportunity exists. Many companies are reluctant or unable (due to hiring freezes) to hire new people right now, but they still have goals and dreams and desires that they cannot attain with the staff they currently do (or do not) have. That’s where an independent contractor (or freelance developer) comes into the picture. Companies are still having problems — some new problems and projects, some old problems that have lingered for years.
Their problems are my opportunities.
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