It’s running over clowns and available now in the app store — what more do you need to know?

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I haven’t posted much here lately because I’ve been very, very busy with a very, very neat project called BadgerSpot.  It’s an augmented reality location-based social networking app.  I know that’s a mouthful, but here’s the short version: Anywhere you go, you can use it to create a virtual message board tied to that location.  That’s the core functionality.   We’ve also got some fun characters that jump out of boxes (that will tie into a character collection function not too far down the road), a large gun you can put on your arm (well, that’s what it looks like, anyway!) and a number of other fun things in the works.

Screenshot of us keeping our graphic designer in check with our augmented reality gun in BadgerSpot.

What can you do with a BadgerSpot?

For now, after printing out the “markers” from the website, you can create a new BadgerSpot anywhere that you go and use it to leave messages for friends, the owner, other patrons or even leave a message for yourself so that when you go back to that amazing hole-in-the-wall restaurant a year from now at your favorite vacation spot, you can remember what you got last time that you enjoyed so much.   That’s the BadgerSpot side of the app.

What’s a Paper Companion?

After launching the app. when you select Paper Companion instead (the other “side” of the app), you select your publication and then you can use the app as your “secret decoder ring” for various forms of print media.  We currently have two newspapers active within the app — the Memphis Flyer and Kansas City – The Pitch, although we’re working on deals with several other newspapers around the country and a few other types of publications that we’re not quite ready to disclose!  If you’re in one of those areas, or have the “demo paper” PDF (available upon request, presently), then while you’re reading your paper, certain ads will show up with extra images, audio sound clips and even video!  If you thought print was dead, then you haven’t seen an augmented reality newspaper through the eyes of Paper Companion.

What can I do with Paper Companion?

Imagine browsing through your local newspaper and being able to hear a clip of the band instead of just seeing a picture of them or watching a short video of someone doing dough tricks at your local pizzeria while looking through the paper, and you’ll start to get an idea of what Paper Companion is really all about.  If you’re logged in with Facebook through the app, you can also leave messages or comments on various stories that the newspaper is running.  Here’s a video showing how to use Paper Companion:

Who made this crazy thing?

I did the software design, architecture and programming of the software.  Troyan Turner of The Danse did most of the layouts and many of the graphics.  Chris Magee of Fuse9 did all of the character work, 2D and 3D, within the app.  Madeline Ward of The Danse is our CEO and has helped shape and mold the idea and the app from the beginning, as well as helping business owners understand how they can benefit by being in our app.  The design of and ideas for the software has been a collaborative effort from the start, with all of us participating in that process.

Why on earth should I download it?

Because it’s entertaining, because it’s new, and because I made it.  :)  Just kidding!  There’s a lot of neat stuff in there now, and we’ve got a lot of neat stuff planned for the future — character collection, scavenger hunts, more augmented reality you can wear (like the gun marker that’s available from our Facebook Fan Page) and a whole lot more.  If you’re a local business and want to attract and retain more customers by having custom content and interactions with those customers in your store, we can help with that, too.  BadgerSpot has been and will continue to be a fluid thing where we’ll continue to offer different kinds of content for different people.  The core will remain the same — cutting edge technology, fun characters and a new way to interact with other people and/or customers.

The app is free, so please click here to download the BadgerSpot app if you’ve got an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPad 2.  After that, you’ll need to be in a place where a BadgerSpot Marker is on the wall or you can print out (or you can use your monitor/iPad to pull them up) the markers from this page, and then you’re ready to use the coolest new iPhone augmented reality around.  You can find even more information at the Official BadgerSpot Website.

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last several months — working with some talented friends on a really cool project.  Oh, and for the record, Sparky the Road Clown will be coming out of hiatus very, very soon.  We’re sad that dimeRocker went away and took the web version of Sparky with it, but I’ve already got the codebase updated with the newest version of Unity 3D and running on my iPhone and iPad.  I’m focused on getting what I’ve got into the app store as soon as possible, because I don’t want Sparky to sit idle for another year while I get busy.

Why feedback?

As programmers, we get so wrapped up in seeing an app evolve from a vague idea into into a real game that we often miss a critical element of the process — user feedback.  It’s essential for you to get your app into the hands of people as early as possible (even earlier than you think!) to get feedback from them.  It’s been said that “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” — and while our end user/test subject certainly isn’t the enemy, it’s pretty likely that they’re not going to use the app the same way that we would.  The longer you’ve worked on something, the more it becomes second nature — just like years of Photoshop use builds a strong and fast proficiency with Photoshop, all the time you’ve spent working on your app will often blind you to basics or things you missed (like the word “test” in the text field for the user to enter some data — oops).

How do we get the feedback?

Spend time watching them play your game or use your app — chances are very good that they won’t use the app they way you built it to be used or intended it to be used.  Telling them what to do and how to do it is cheating — resist the temptation!  Don’t just watch the app and what they’re doing — spend time watching them, looking at their facial expressions, body language, etc. If they get stuck, of course, help them out, but if most people are having trouble with one issue in the app, regardless of how well you think that feature works, you probably need to revisit it. They’re the customer, not you.

If you don’t ask, you won’t know

You need to be specific with your questions, like:

• What was confusing?
• What was enjoyable?
• What else would they like the app to do?
• Was there any part that they really didn’t like?

These are hard questions to ask, and even harder to objectively listen to the answers, but it’s critical that we do this. The more you do this before your app is released, the better off you, your app and your customers will be. If you’re the only one who ever has hands on the app before it goes out, I guarantee that it will not be nearly as intuitive to your customers as you think it will be.

Who do you ask for feedback?

The best feedback comes from people that may not even own iPhones or play games.  I had some great suggestions from people who don’t normally play games (by their admission) about my Sparky the Road Clown game.  I also had some great suggestions from some hardcore gamers and some pretty casual ones as well.  Try to get a variety of people to give you input.  The more, the better.

Get as much feedback as you can

Check out the Disgruntled Fowl App!

With all of the apps in the app store today, it’s not enough to make one more Angry Birds clone. Or one more block dropping clone. Or one more doodle jump clone. Or one more… well, you get the idea. Seth defines a purple cow as something that’s remarkable — and his definition of that is simply that someone will make a comment (or a remark) about it to someone else.

People think that taking a successful idea and copying it will give them success. In some limited ways, they might see a little bit of return on their investment, but for the most part, you never hear about “that fantastic new game that’s identical to but not nearly as nice!” because most clones are not nearly as nice. The games that really stand out and do well (both in a hurry and long term) are games like Tiny Wings.

Stand out with excellence

Tiny Wings wasn’t completely unique, but it does what it does really, really well. There’s a ton of polish, a ton of character — excellence just oozes off this game. Even if you could copy everything it does and do it the same, the next thing you know, they come out with an update that’s more of the same abstract, hard to define essence that just says “quality”. It seems effortless for them (this is just an example, it could be any game) and you’re off trying to play catch up. Why?

Don’t just copy the movements

Jesse Schell has a story in his excellent book, The Art of Game Design, about an old man who was juggling and someone else who was trying to copy that old man. And they copied the movements, but it still looked “off” somehow and for some reason. The old man explained to the gentleman he was talking to that while the fellow on the other side of the park was copying the moves, he didn’t have the inspiration. The old man had taken the inspiration for this particular movement from a flock of birds that was taking off, and no matter how much the other guy tried, he didn’t have that inspiration — he was just copying movements.

So often as game (and software) developer, I think we end up just “copying movements” from the people who have gone before us, without their inspiration. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re learning game design or development, and can actually be quite helpful to try and learn how to re-create Tetris if you’ve never written a game before, the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily need to see it in the App Store.

The Art of Game Design (and that story, in particular) encouraged me to try to take inspiration from places that it wouldn’t normally be found (like a man who took inspiration from a flock of birds taking flight and turned it into a juggling routine, which I still have trouble picturing…) — I started with an idea about making a game about mowing the lawn. Doesn’t sound very exciting, right? Well, it wasn’t. But it didn’t stay there. The technology that I ended up developing spawned a number of other ideas and eventually morphed into a vacuum robot that was cleaning up a toxic spill on a space station. Terribly original? No, not really, but it’s not Columns, either. At the time I was developing it, I got held up in a certain part of the code and paying iPhone projects started coming in, so I ended up never finishing it. I may still revisit it at some point, because even with the simple playable version I had, everybody who tried it really enjoyed it.

Stand out by being different

I wrote my blog post last time for #iDevBlogADay about the evolution of the idea for my indie Unity 3D iPhone game, Sparky the Road Clown. While I’ve been accused of many things over the course of writing the game, imitation isn’t one of them. And no, I’m not the first guy to make a game about running people down or hurting clowns or even running over clowns (I don’t think) but if there are other “run over the clown and whack him with the big spinning hammer” games out there, I haven’t seen them. Maybe there’s a reason for that… I don’t know if anyone beyond my immediate family with iPhones will buy Sparky, but there’s been quite a bit of interest from a lot of people, primarily because most people don’t like clowns, it seems. Some people think it’s too violent and that it could be insensitive to people who have been in car accidents, and I suppose I can see their point. However, I have to stay true to my idea, even as it continues to morph and change. I’ve got a lot of ideas for things I’d like to add onto Sparky, but at this point, I’m just trying to find the time to finish it up and get it out the door. Too many other exciting (and paying) projects going on, which is a good problem, but I feel bad that I haven’t released it yet and I’ve blown so many self-imposed deadlines that at this point, I’m just saying it’s coming Real Soon Now as is said so often in the game development world. Or “it’s done when it’s done”.

Your very own purple cow

Sparky doesn’t have a ton of polish like Tiny Wings, but it’s not Angry-Pocket-Doodle-Columns-Craft, either. My point is that you can make something remarkable — that someone will remark about to someone else — by having a high level of polish (like Tiny Wings) or by being off the beaten path (like Sparky). You can’t go too far off the beaten path or you’ll find yourself alone out there, but it’s good to try something new and go in a different direction. You’ll learn more that way, and maybe even find yourself with your very own “purple cow” in the app store.

This blog post is part of the #iDevBlogADay initiative for indie iOS developers. Click here to read more posts from the iDevBlogADay website.

Forest for the trees

Code Review, Old School

The bigger picture

Your Milage May Vary

When I tell people I’m making a game about running over clowns, I invariably get the “wow, how on earth did you come up with that idea??” look and/or question.  This article will trace the evolution of that idea, the gameplay and the graphics from a silly name to a finished game.

Just a name

The name Sparky the Road Clown is actually a name I’d had in my head for years.  When somebody would cut me off in traffic or something like that, I’d say something like, “Hey, Sparky- nice driving!” or “Watch it, Sparky!” and I imagine a lot of other people say similar things.  Over time, I associated Sparky and road craziness and I came up with the name Sparky the Road Clown and even came up with a little backstory: he used to be Sparky the Rodeo Clown but had since gone off the deep end and became Sparky the Road Clown.  This name (and the concept of rodeo clown to road clown) stuck in my head for several years before iPhones were even around.

Unity 3D and the birth of the idea

I got involved with iPhone development pretty early on with a group that had a game almost out when the app store opened.  A few months after that, in early 2009, I bought a macbook, iPod Touch and sent my $99 to Apple to start developing.  In the fall of that year, I discovered Unity 3D and started working with it.  I kicked around a few ideas, but I kept coming back to Sparky the Road Clown, trying to figure out what kind of a game I could make from a name like that.  My first thought was a clown standing in the median yelling at the cars as they drove past, but I didn’t see how that would be much of a game.  Then, I thought maybe it could be like Frogger where the clown was dodging cars.  Then I came across a great Lon Chaney quote about clowns:

“A clown is funny in the circus ring. But what would be the normal reaction to opening a door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there? A clown in the moonlight is not funny.”

That quote helped solidify the basic idea — car vs clown.  I considered calling the game “Die, Clown, Die”, but everybody I talked to thought it was much more entertaining to focus on and call the game Sparky the Road Clown.  So with that, I had the idea of a clown in a dark alley, late at night, with the player driving a car at the mocking clown.  I pulled up Cinema 4D and started working with some of the built-in content to try and mock up the rough idea.  Here’s the result, from October 13, 2009:

Warning!  Programmer Art Ahead!

The graphic designer had nothing to do with the preceding graphic!

I used Cinema 4D to do this basic mockup in a very short period of time — it gave the basic idea of a car, an alley and clown (well, a french clown, but it’s all they had in the stock 3D objects).  From there, I talked to a good friend of mine and sent him a very rough sketch.  Thankfully, he is a talented 3D character artist and he did wonders with the concept art and resulting 3D model and animations.

Do I really need to point out which one was done by the programmer and which one was done by the concept artist? Yeah, I didn't think so.

So we run over the clown.  Now what?

I knew I needed more than “let’s drive into the clown!” so I talked to another talented friend who does voiceover and audio work in Memphis and asked him, “How is your angry, disgruntled clown voice?” and if he was interested in working on this project with me, and he was happy to help.  So, at that point, I had an angry, cigar-toting animated clown who mocked you until you ran over him.

Running over the clown was pretty entertaining, but only for so long.  My game needed more depth.  I started with the idea late one night that I’d give points for various parts of the car that hit the clown, with more points going to the more difficult parts — like if you whack him with the back fender, that’d be worth a lot of points because you’d have to REALLY work that to make it happen.  From points, that went to multipliers so you got 1x for the first piece of the car you hit (they were separate colliders within Unity 3D, so I could tell what was being hit), 2x for the next piece of the car, and so on.  That got old pretty quick, too.  One day as I was working on the car physics (which continue to haunt me), I was going through Unity 3D’s “arcade style race car set up” tutorial to see if there was anything I could glean from it, and on a whim, I thought it’d be fun to put a large rectangle on top of the sports car in the tutorial and have it spin around like a big stick on top of the car.  It was a lot of fun.  So I immediately bugged Chris (the artist) about making a “big clown hammer” for the top of the car and sure enough, he came through again.

Clowns and cars and hammers, oh my!

The colorful spinning mallet on top of the car was the final piece of the puzzle.  That added an entirely new aspect to the game — how far can you knock the clown?  I change the multiplier to denote how many different objects in the game you’d hit so far and it didn’t reset every round, so if you hit a new barrier/train/building that you didn’t hit before, your multiplier goes up one more point.  Score is tallied by distance you’ve knocked the clown in the current round times your current overall multiplier.  It’s still a work in progress, but I’m much happier with the gameplay where it stands now as opposed to where it stood a year ago.  The graphics continue to evolve as well as shown in this side-by-side shot from last June and last December on the Facebook version.  The iPhone version of Sparky is a little more low-res, the iPad version of Sparky looks pretty close to this Facebook screenshot.

As I get ready to send the game off to Apple after working on it almost a year and a half in my spare time, I’m excited and anxious.  It’s come a long way from the vague idea/name that I had in my head, and I suspect it’ll continue to evolve.  No quality game is ever fully developed on paper — it has to go through playtesting and have feedback and be tweaked and changed accordingly, with nothing held sacred.  We haven’t had nearly enough time to implement the various mini-games and other things that we’ve got planned, but we’re going to go ahead and unleash it on the iOS world anyway.  With new projects starting up, I’m worried that if I don’t get it out there now, it’ll turn into the dreaded “never quite finished, never quite released” project and I’ve worked too hard on it to give up like that.  Whether people love it or hate it, hopefully they’ll smile a little bit when they play it and whack the clown with the big spinning mallet.

This blog post is part of the #iDevBlogADay initiative for independent iOS developers.  Click here to read more posts from the iDevBlogADay website.

1. Make Game

2. Don’t release it

3. Profit!!

Wait, that’s not how that scenario typically goes, right?  Well, stranger things have happened…

The Name and the Game

It all started about a year and a half ago when I started working with Unity 3D and had a name in my head — Sparky the Road Clown.  I wondered what I might be able to do with a name like Sparky the Road Clown such as, would it be a game like frogger but with a clown?  Would he stand in traffic and mock cars as they went past?  That was my initial idea, but it didn’t sound like much of a game.  Eventually, I decided that it would be a showdown between clown and car in a dark alleyway.  My 6 year old son was a big part of the inspiration, and the initial conversation went like this

me: do you like clowns?   him: nooooo

would you like a game about clowns?   nooooooo.

what if you were running them over?   <pause> yeeeaaah!

From there, I got in touch with a couple of talented friends who were happy to bring my vision of clown vs car to life by doing the artwork and doing the voicework with me doing the programming.  The gameplay itself continued to evolve over time to where it’s at now, which is still based on the “joust” type premise — you get one shot at the clown per round.  You hit him, or you don’t, and the round is over.  Score is based on how far you knock him each round (either by hitting him with the car, or with the large spinning mallet on top of the car) multiplied by how many unique items in the level that you’ve knocked him into over the course of the game so far (that doesn’t reset each round).  But all that’s not important right now.

What is important for the focus of this post is that A) it’s nearly finished and B) while it’s not released yet, it’s still helped to earn some income.  As for A, we should be going to the app store within the next few weeks.  Sparky the Road Clown will be on iPhones and iPads and everyone will be able to get their coulrophobia treatment for their favorite iOS device.  As for B, technically, it’s been out on Facebook since June, but that’s been in closed beta and pretty under the radar.  And the game hasn’t sold any copies, so how has it made me any money?

Experience Pays

Experience, of course.  I started working with Unity 3D back in late 2009 with the plan to publish my game out to Facebook and iPhone.  At the time, using Unity 2.x, that was not really an easy task — Unity iPhone was a completely separate product, and I was doing most of my Unity development on the PC and then moving it over to the mac and Unity iPhone.  Towards the end of last year with Unity 3 being released, that got a lot easier.

From there, with a game released on Facebook and something on my iPhone and iPad that I could show people, I started talking to people about Unity and I saw it gaining traction in the marketplace.  My team recently won a 48 Hour Business Launch competition here in Memphis where I was the sole programmer, and all of the work was done in Unity 3D — I couldn’t have done that without that year and a half of experience that I had acquired while developing Sparky the Road Clown.  I also recently finished up the programming of a Unity 3D project for a large manufacturer who originally wanted to do their project in Flash, but was willing to give Unity 3D a chance.  They ended up with a very nice app that’s practically identical between the iPad and web versions (including rotating 3D objects with selectable sections) and with the same project also being on iPhone (sans the 3D objects, at their request).  That project paid for the iPad and a fair bit more.  With one major Unity project under my belt and a second (the game about running over clowns) close at hand, it’s been even easier to convince someone to go the Unity route, and I suspect more paying projects will follow.

Stick with it

Of course, every unreleased game isn’t going have the same effect, but it could.  Just like boxers are only considered “as good” as the outcome of their last fight, most people are really only interested in the last couple of projects you’ve done.  Being able to say, “I took this from a vague name in my head all the way to a finished, refined product with the help of some talented friends and colleagues” is huge.  Often times, programmers have a reliability that ranks somewhere between artists and musicians (no offense to either group, and I consider myself a musician, FWIW) and the ability to show clients what you can do what you’ve done will often mean the difference between getting a project and the next guy getting that project.  The key is to stick with it and persevere through all of the times when you’re bored, would rather be doing something else, when you’re stuck and banging your head against a brick wall — because all of these things happen with client projects, too.  The people who can do what needs to be done when it needs to be done are the are the ones who are going to succeed in programming and in life.

Has anyone else had similar experiences where unfinished or personal projects have brought them paying work?

Game updates coming soon!

It’s mind boggling to think that you can get 3 tools (Unity 3D, Blender 3D and dimeRocker) and put a game on Facebook with a ton of social media features, including monetization, for absolutely no money out of pocket.  Yes, it takes time and effort — but what doesn’t?  And for a couple hundred dollars more, you can add iOS to the mix (as I have) and you’ve really got some special.  dimeRocker Arcade does take a portion of the transaction, just like Apple’s app store does, but it doesn’t require anything out of pocket.

Anyway, the game is nowhere near where I’d like it to be, but at the same time, I know that if I don’t get it out there and start getting feedback from people all over, it never will be what it could become.  We have a TON of stuff planned for Sparky, including mini-games, more settings beside the current one, more animation and voicework… lots and lots and lots.

But go ahead and swing over to Facebook and check out the game, please.  You’ll have to add the dimeRocker app and allow it access to your name and such (otherwise, they couldn’t show a leaderboard between you and your friends, etc) — but that’s the case with all Facebook games.  I’d love to get some feedback here or over on the Sparky the Road Clown dashboard under the game.

If you haven’t played the game yet — here’s the basic premise: You’re trying to knock Sparky into as many unique items as you can (that makes your “hits” counter go up) and you’re trying to knock him as far as you can (distance * hits = score for the round).  The items that he’s hit doesn’t reset from round to round (so you get a lot in the first round or two, and have to be more creative after that) but it does at the end of the game.

Anyway, click this “Loading” screen below to go to dimeRocker Arcade on Facebook and play Sparky the Road Clown.  Please check it out and let me know.  Thanks!

I plan on doing it again at some point, hopefully with a little yellow hat, the full costume (which I believe my wonderful wife is going to sew for me) and the rest of it.  You can’t see ‘em in the picture, but I do, indeed, have big red clown shoes on.

In game related news, the game is coming along well, and I’m ready for people to start checking it out…

It’s been a little over a year since I started thinking about turning this silly little name in my head, Sparky the Road Clown, into a game.  Lately, I’ve been working hard on the game and I think I’ve gotten it to a place where I’m ready to let people start playing it outside my little circles.  It’s on Facebook and it’s housed within the shiny new dimeRocker Arcade platform, so you’ll have to allow it access your information, just like all Facebook games.  If you just thought to yourself, “clowns freak me out, but apps on Facebook having my info freaks me out even more!” then don’t worry, we’ll have it in some other permutations later on.  dimeRocker Arcade isn’t 100% of what I wanted in my game, but it’s pretty darn close.  I’ll elaborate on dR Arcade more in a later post, but the short version is that I’ve been REALLY happy with the features they offer, ease of integration and communications with their guys.

I’m still planning to have the facebook version ready for 1.0 and the iPhone version in the app store by Thanksgiving.  I’d love for you to give it a spin and give me some feedback, but don’t think what you see there is the end — it’s just the beginning.  We’ve got a TON of ideas that we’ve yet to implement in the game, but I feel like it’s important to get it out there and start gaining some traction.

In any case, if you’re still reading and you’d like to play Sparky the Road Clown then just click on that link.  Do bear in mind that it’s still a beta and there are still some issues to work out.  All that said, though, I’d love for people to give it a shot.