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Indie Game The Meetup – A postmortem of sorts

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Hey guys.

So last night Indie Game The Meetup finally happened, pretty much everything went off smoothly and, so far as I know, everyone had a great evening.

This is really just my overview of the event and how I think things went, I’m sure it will be a little more blunt than Andy’s blogpost (if he makes one) will be.

Last nights turnout was great, perhaps a little too great… I’m not quite sure what made the Warwick think they could easily get 250 people in that little room downstairs.. we managed but it was a pretty tight fit honestly.  Myself, Andy and Hannah are thankful to all who could make it, and sorry to hear from you who were, for various reasons, unable to attend.

One of the people who was unable to attend was Jim from RPS, I had looked forward to thanking him for helping to organize funding for the night in person but I’m still very grateful.
On one hand I think it was great that someone as important as Jim would be attending but on the other hand, as the night progressed, it started to become obvious that if we do it again that perhaps its best not to write his name on the meetup pages. Not because he doesn’t deserve to be there.. because he does, but simply because of the number of people who seem to have come only to speak to Jim.I can understand that people had hopes to perhaps get on the front page of RPS, and honestly this is fine, but the night was for meeting people, not meeting a person. I don’t know if many of these people stayed very long after being told Jim couldn’t make it, but I hope they hung around and spoke to other people after all. Perhaps if we do this again we’ll see if we can get Jim to pretend to… well… not be Jim, this way people will speak to him randomly and if he wants to he can still do a writeup about games he liked without people rushing to him just to get on the website, this way he can still have a good evening without being hassled and just eventually wanting to leave.

I just want to say thankyou to all the developers who showcased their stuff, I didn’t get a chance to play everything myself but it looked like you all had a great evening and appreciated the chance to strut your game design stuff. I would like to apologize for making you guys pack up at 9pm, but for reasons that, to be honest, are a little unclear even to myself Andy and Hannah, we only had the venue officially until 9PM due to some last minute changes with some other bookings.

There seemed to be 2 developers who, for reasons unknown, didn’t show up. Not showing up itself isn’t an issue if we know in advance, but we’d had to turn down other developers due to space constraints & in the end they would have been able to show stuff anyway. So for me, this was a bit lame, if we do something like this again we will try and make more space to fit in more showcase people.

I think the nominated drinks people was a fantastic idea, it got many people networking a lot more and from what I could see, no one spoke to someone specifically for a drinks token. I wish I’d been able to speak to more of the experts myself, I didn’t even see Alex Tutty at all in the end, even though he was there.

A few of you have asked me via twitter if there are any photographs or videos of the night. There are a few from early on, but the venue quickly became too busy to take photos.

Despite the few small issues mentioned above, I feel that the night was a great success and that many of you had a really great time. I saw a lot of networking going on as I wandered about, I even got to speak to quite a few developers myself and shall be checking out their blogs, websites and games shortly after finishing up this post.

I’d like to just thank all the sponsors for contributing so much to such a great night, so thankyou, Paradox, IndieCity, Zero Dependency, Rock Paper Shotgun, Multiplay, Indie Game The Movie, Natural Selection 2, Insert Coin Clothing & Autodesk. Without those guys there would have been no drinks tab at all and you’d all have to pay for your own alcohol, which it appears some of you did anyway.

Another special thanks to Hannah and Andy Esser, myself and Andy organized the event initially but then it expanded and Hannah took on quite a bit of responsibility so I just want to say ‘Thankyou Hannah, I appreciate all your hard work last night, thankyou for everything, and Andy too’.

A final thankyou to everyone who came, you guys were all great and thankyou for contributing by simply showing up and being awesome.

Final Notes:

We will be doing something like this again sometime in the future and we hope, if possible to make this a yearly event of sorts, almost like perhaps an Indie Expo that takes place in London. A little unsure on quite how we’ll be going about any of this, but its an idea that’s already been discussed.

Thankyou

Dan Tsukasa

London Indie meetup

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*This information is outdated now, please refer to the EventBrite page*

Hey Guys

Some of you might know that recently myself and Andy Esser/@LeadHyperion of Zero Dependency, decided to arrange a meetup for a few indie developers on Saturday the 29th of September due to everyone being in town for the Eurogamer Expo. Andy put a list together on the zero dependency site here and people began to slowly trickle in. Then Eurogamer themselves retweeted the event and things really took off, we’ve had some interest from several Game Design lecturers from different courses along with some voucher gift cards from Insert Coin Clothing. Seeing as things had already expanded anyway, and we’re starting to look at 30-40 people+ we’ve decided to just go all out and contact a few people to see if we can hire out a section of pub for the evening.

The more people that can make it the better, I was thinking of a sort of Open Mic and people can contact myself and Andy and discuss if they’re interested in giving a presentation of their new games or, well anything really.

The event is pretty informal and anyone within the indie or non indie games industry is welcome to come along, I haven’t yet started looking at pubs to host so if perhaps anyone has any suggestions please run then by me as I’d love to hear what you all have to say.

I’ll update this post with more news as we get it, so far we’re emailing out all to all sorts of awesome people so we should have some more updates on a list sometime soon.

*Update*
http://www.thewarwick.co.uk/gallery/crystal-lounge.html
I’ve been out today and looked at a few pubs in London and come up with this pub here, we get the whole downstairs if we have around 80 people, I’m imagining we will have around 30 people, honestly the downstairs is large so the more the merrier really.
Anyone else interested let me or Andy Esser know and come along.

This pub isn’t final I’m going to place pubs in here as I find & like them, Soho seems quite far from the Expo itself (its roughly 15 minutes by tube) but its surrounded by a bunch of tube stations covering several tube lines and then there’s also Charing Cross so this is good for the out of town people. I’ll be visiting the O’neils close to the Expo soon too.

The list thus far, there are quite a few more that haven’t updated the list but will be making it anyway.

Thanks

Dan Tsukasa

Kodama – Another small update

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Hey everyone.

We’ve been a little quiet on the update front recently, we’re hoping to show Kodama at the Eurogamer Expo on September, submissions are some time in August so we’re really trying to push our way into that at the moment.

Kodama himself has been redesigned, hers an image of the new Kodama, its not in colour and its a sheet with several new designs in them.

Myself and Abel have been busy still creating things for Mori 2.0 which sadly leaves a fair part of Kodama in pieces. Mori 2.0 is the glue that brings it all together, sadly we’re hand making the glue and sewing together the individual fibers of the game, this makes everything work fast and smoother but its also taking us some time to complete.

There will be another update soonish, I’m meeting more regularly with the artist and she also has a little more free time to work on things.

Dan

Kodama – A quick update

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Hey everyone.

Thought I’d give a little information on how Kodama is going at the moment.

The concept art is all complete, I’ve since touched up one of the concepts myself as Dani’s idea of the stage was a little more ‘volcano like’ than my own.
The stage is here, its Yomi, or hell/Jigoku.. Yomi or 黄泉 or 黄泉の国 (for those of you who wish to know the kanji) Is the Japanese word for whats best described as ‘land of the dead/world of darkness’. Here’s a small Wikipedia entry on it.

According to Shinto mythology as related in Kojiki, this is where the dead go to dwell and apparently rot indefinitely. Once one has eaten at the hearth of Yomi it is impossible to return to the land of the living. Yomi is comparable to Hades or hell and is most commonly known for Izanami‘s retreat to that place after her death. Izanagi followed her there and upon his return he washed himself, creating Amaterasu, Susanoo, and Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto in the process.

 

And here’s Dani’s (and my edits) take on the place (It’s not as good as the ones Dani did of course).Other recent Kodama improvements have been on the more technical side, I’ve been designing a new editor for Abel to create. So I’m creating the layout and tools for it and he’s actually making it all work so its not a bunch of pretty pictures. I use Photoshop a LOT so I’ve become quite attached to the interface, so I’ve been designing the new which we will call Mori 2.0, to look slightly closer to Photoshop to accommodate myself and Dani’s photoshop experience.

I’ve no snapshots of Mori 2.0 just yet,, so instead I’ll show a shot of the old editor that I’m currently using. The background, sun and fog as of yet don’t animate, neither do the reeds, the ground dirt is temporary, it does NOT belong to us, I’m not entirely sure where I found it, but I believe it was on a forum somewhere and I’ve been using it whilst I test things because I like it.
Dani is still working on some floor tiles for this area to fit the background and be similar to the concept art.

Sorry for blurring some of the text out, but we’ve named them with some really obvious names that would spoil the surprise of the game before we release the trailer.

*Update*
I thought I’d put this in here to show this same area in polygon mode in the editor, i cropped it down so its easier to see though.

Kodama is still going strong, in fact we’re hoping to showcase the came in a gameshow sometime soon, I’ll bring more news about that closer to the due date.

It’s now almost midnight and I have to be up for my dayjob in 6 hours and 17 minutes, so goodnight and please comment if you have any questions or opinions.

Thanks
Dan

Kodama – The touchup

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Hey guys.

Remember this stage?

This was/is the opening stage for Kodama, the concept here (as lovely as it is) has now been redone to fit the style of all the other stages, in order to keep a certain style throughout the game itself.
the new concept however looks around 80% to how this area should be looking ingame, so thats really helped.

So this is the new concept, I think you’ll agree that it looks a little more ‘used’ what with the path on the bottom left hand side and all.

I’m interested to hear any opinions on this, what you think worked better in one concept and not in the other, and I’ll try to take it on-board.

Thanks
Dan

Thirty-six Views of Yokai

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Hey Guys.

There’s a new piece of concept art to show, as the title suggests its a little reminiscent of a particular piece of work by a particular artist.

As I’m sure you can guess, this is an ocean stage and its one that we’re currently in discussions about the best possible approach to the gameplay and programming design.

This stage is going to be quite unique, I can’t say how just yet as we’re still working on it, but players are going to find something different about this stage in comparison to the others.

This is one of the last concept pieces I’m going to be posting, I don’t want to ruin every stage and some concept art will contain some pretty big spoilers story wise so I’m now being very selective about what we do and don’t show. That said, there will be some more concept art coming soon, and that one will also be quite something different.

Thanks

Dan Tsukasa

Kodama has More Concepts

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Hey Guys

So, I’ve got some more pretty concepts to upload here, I’ll try and give a little information on them if I think they need it.

Anyone who missed this post by Abel detailing out some behind the scenes programming changes for Kodama I’d recommend giving it a read, its quite short but its helping push Kodama long faster.

As I said before, these concepts are in no way evidence that Kodama doesn’t yet have any stages, it is however evidence that we are completely remaking all of our art. I’ve previously mentioned how we’ve had an artist or 2 in the past and for whatever reason they were unable to stick on the project, this means that we could use their artwork for the stages they did complete, however it seems kind of strange to do this as 3 different artists means 3 different styles, although we do have a style specific to Kodama not everyone artwork is going to seamlessly blend with everyone else’s. So Dani has gone through and re-concepted quite how she thinks each stage should work, I used the time in-between artists to tie up a few looses ends with visuals that bothered me a little, meaning that now I’m happy with everything from colour scheme to final shape.

Starting with the cave, this is the 2nd area of the game and here you see a few characters that foreshadow a gameplay section, so anyone with a keen eye should be able to spot something in the background and say ‘Oh I’ll get to see that soon!’ and be correct. I’ve always dislike when I see something really cool in a games background and assume its foreshadowing for future events… and then nothing comes of it. (currently though I can’t think of a game where this has happened).

The cave stages are also where you really get to learn the games mechanics.

Yokai Cave

The swamp, once you exit the cave you stumble onto the swamp, this is a whole different gameplay experience to the cave, with multiple paths, creatures jumping out at you from within the water and more. The swamp drops the claustrophobic feel of the cave stages and feels more open, you can take the low path or the high path through it, each path has its own trials and its own enemies. I’m not yet going to reveal quite what enemies you can expect to find in the swamp, but anyone with a little knowledge of Japanese mythological creatures should be able to guess quite easily.

Swamp Stage

The Swamp Village is a small settlement on the edges of the swamp, no one lives here anymore and its pretty clear its been this way for a very long time. This stage is riddled with dilapidated houses, fallen tree’s unstable straw roofing and hidden areas. Here we expand on the games mechanics a little more, showing a different use for the same mechanic whilst at the same time really playing about with the traditional running and jumping mechanics.

Abandoned Swamp Village

Currently all these stages are fully designed and running, I’m now making some rather large edits to the swamp stages puzzles and platforming sections because the concept gave me some new ideas on how to push things farther than before.

We’ve got other concepts already but I’m trying not to show absolutely everything just yet, I don’t want to spoil the surprise of some stages, i know some people may think that its best to show all the concept art, I feel that some of the stages would be best left as a surprise as they’re in a very different direction to the stages shown so far.

Thanks

Dan

 

Yet another engine change

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As some of you may know, Kodama initially began as a desktop flash game. Later, it evolved onto a native game using haXe, this way we’d have more power. Then, we decided haXe was too limiting so we moved onto XNA.

Now we’ve decided XNA is… a bit too general purpose. Let me expand myself. What I mean is, XNA just gives you the basic stuff you need to make your game: rendering functions and the like. But then you need to build state management, sprite management, collision management (unless you use a physics engine like we do), etc.

And I built that. But I felt it was too primitive and that it could be improved performance-wise and usage-wise. That’s why I decided to stop reinventing the wheel and look for something which already implements all this stuff.

Kodama hasn’t moved from XNA. It still is XNA. But now we use an engine which works on top of XNA and makes things easier for me. It’s like what FlashPunk does on top of AS3. I’m talking about FlatRedBall. So now we’re going to use FlatRedBall, which, despite of the name, can do very powerful things. I mean, have you seen A.R.E.S.?

What does this mean? To Kodama as a game, this means we’ll get more performance and eye-candy: awesome particles, some post-process effects, and 3D like camera with parallax, zooming and rotating (although I’m not sure we’ll use the rotating feature :P ). To Kodama as a project, this means I can do stuff more comfortably from now on, which will mean increased productivity from me (honestly, my productivity in Kodama and in everything as well left a lot to desire). Yay! I’m excited.

Hopefully that’s the final change. If everything goes as expected, Kodama should be released using the FlatRedBall engine. We’re still using Farseer as the physics engine though.

Can’t wait to show you more mechanics and technical stuff from Kodama apart than constant engine things!

May the odds be ever in your favor!

Kodama – The concept

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Hey Guys

So, Today’s update contains a little piece of concept art from our artist Dani, I know many of you might be thinking ‘surely concept art is something you do much earlier in production?’‘ you’re right, normally it is. Kodama has taken a slightly different route, mostly due to having changed artists a few times now, our game itself is all really set out and playable, puzzles,enemies, bosses etc are all there, however everything currently looks rather ugly.

The screen shot shown in the post before was Dani’s art test, she’s never worked on games before and we both thought it a good idea to see if she can easily grasp the way we put together our assets for our editor, and as you saw, she did. Though the artwork in that concept isn’t exactly how the stuff in the game will look, as for this she had no specific scene to create for. The concepts are a way for both myself and Dani to really solidify the visuals 100%, I spent a long time getting the perfect references for the concepts, I’ve attached 2 of them to the post.

Let me know what you all think, naturally these are concepts so they’re rather sketchy in comparison to the final game artwork. Concepts will be finished next week so then its onto the really fun stuff, the in game graphics, we’ve got a new Kodama design in the works too, being animated as I type this very post, so I also look forward to revealing the new Kodama design and explaining quite why it changed to dramatically.

Thanks
Dan Tsukasa

Kodama Artist and Art

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Hey Guys

My plane landed a few hours ago and I finally have proper internet again (^____^;”)

Whilst I was on holiday/visiting my other half, I spent a lot of time working on Kodama, sorting out puzzles and level designs, trying to get the perfect mood for certain stages.

Some might say that if I spend my holiday working, that I don’t quite understand the concept of ‘holiday’, this isn’t true… holiday means I get to finally do what I want to do, and what I want to do is work on Kodama and get it all finished.

Changes

Team Ekko have decided to do a kickstarter to help raise funds for Kodama, this has been something that, as a team, we’ve been deliberating for quite some time, making sure Kodama turns out to be everything we wanted is whats most important to us and if a kickstarter can help that along then we will happily take that route. Naturally it means there’s many things to prepare before this can happen, which is what I’ve been doing recently.

How have you been funding Kodama so far?

So far Kodama has been funded by me, though as I’ve now taken on an incredibly talented artist for Kodama I’ve decided that funding everything myself isn’t quite as feasible as I’d like to think.

Who is this Mysterious new artist?

Her name is Dani and she’s primarily a Matt painter, Kodama will be her first game project and she’s more than excited to take part, she’s fallen in love with Kodamas concept and mechanics and has so far been producing some fantastic work.

Can we see something?

There are a few things I could show, but for now I’ll show Dani’s initial art test, please understand this shot does not represent the final quality of Kodama and these pieces will not be included in any part of the game itself (most likely), they exist purely to gauge if the artist could work to our specifications, and she could, the results are very nice.

In the next week or 2 Dani will be producing some artwork to really nail down some areas whilst going back and editing others based off of the changes I’ve had whilst I’ve been away.

Some of the things to be created in the coming weeks are as follows:
- Bakekujira (Ghost Whale) stage.
- Yomi Stage (sort of like Jigoku/hell but more of a barren wasteland than a fiery pit)

 

That’s all I’m able to type now, its 2:33am and i can feel myself floating upwards… which is my queue that 6 hours sleep in 2 days is probably not the best thing in the world.

More updates to come soon.
Thanks
Dan

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