Indie Game Dev: Platforms

If I were publishing this game, what platform would it be on? Android. Fade to black.

I'm completely serious, but let's see how I arrived there.

I'm just doing this for fun and to build out my pipeline, at least for the first project. So it's not going to be a huge, serious piece. No 3D augmented reality, no social media presence, no infinitely scalable backend hosted out of an old missile silo.

Console is out, they don't give those SDKs to just anybody, and I don't own any consoles regardless. Ouya is dead, and sadly I never bothered getting one. I'm not going to cobble something together with a Raspberry Pi, that's not the project I'm looking for right now.

PC is of course do-able, but it's harder and less fun than you might think. If you're just making a game for yourself that's one thing, but if you have any designs on publishing down the road, you have to face the nightmare that is Other People's Weird Hardware.

I really just want to bang out a quick little game using a simple system. I want something that could be published via Somebody Else's Platform, in case I change my mind and go that route. I'm a mobile guy and I (mostly) understand that space and those systems. So it's gonna be iOS or Android.

Either platform is theoretically fine, I'm equally familiar with both. Let's do pros and cons.

iOS pros:

• C-like native code -- I don't mind Objective C, it's quirky, and I like quirky
• Lots of framework support

I had trouble thinking of any others. Cons:

• Objective C is probably going away in favor of Swift, and I'm too tired to learn another language today, so very tired
• It's a closed system
• You have to have a Mac, and what's more, you have to build and debug with XCode
• You can't build and run an app on your own device without a developer's license
• The license is $100 USD / annum
• The code signing procedure is bonkers complicated, and you have to renew 3 or 4 cryptographic keys/certificates/profiles every year
• IDFA and various other monopolistic practices
• The approval process can be a crapshoot

Android pros:

• Open system
• You can develop and build your apps on any platform -- including OSX if that's your jam
• Once you've built that APK, you can install it on any Android in the world, nobody cares
• A developer's license costs a one-time fee of $25 USD, and you don't need it until you want to distribute the app on Google Play
• You create a single production key once, and signing is all automatic after that. Google will even hold the key for you.
• Advertise with whomever you want. Collect whatever data you want, provided you adhere to the laws of the countries you're publishing in
• Is there an approval process? There is, but I've never seen a rejection. Seriously, never have I ever
• Crash reports that you can symbolicate yourself

Cons:

• Java. *Sigh*. This is mostly mitigated by the NDK, but if you want to interface with any OS services, you're probably doing it with Java
• App permissions are a bit of a moving target

As you can see, I'm no fan of iOS, and the "privacy" shenanigans over the last year have not helped that one little bit. I love Woz, but everything else Apple can be launched directly into the sun.

So... Android. Fade to black.

Indie Game Dev: How I choose software and systems

Most game projects start with an idea, a design, and that seems sensible. But there's nothing better for me than having the whole pipeline worked out so I can start executing on those ideas right away. A big part of this project is having everything exactly the way I want it, so that means I'm building that pipeline.

Where to begin? There are a lot of choices, and they can be paralyzing. I've always started with the deal breakers: the things I absolutely will not do, not use, not put up with. Having some part of your workflow irritate you day after day is not sustainable, so discard those things up front, and keep them out of the ecosystem if you can.

I have lots of deal breakers, so it's easy to whittle the list down quickly. I'll discuss some of them in greater depth in later posts about specific topics.

• Java - it's a necessary evil in places, but if the stock install doesn't satisfy a given system or tool, I'm not going to use it.
• Requiring an IDE to build a resource. Make CLI tools for that, my CI/CD server doesn't have a mouse.
• Not generally a fan of obscure/discontinued tools, languages, or resource formats. The documentation is usually thin, and good luck finding answers on Stack Overflow.
• Also don't much care for Git. You heard me.

Once you've called out all your deal breakers, a swathe of additional tools will be eliminated because they involve those deal breakers. Embrace the constraints, they'll set you free.

With the distasteful stuff out of the way, you can turn your attention to things you really like, and let those things drive your next set of decisions. If you can't have a little fun, why do any of this in the first place?

• I love C and Lua. I like small languages in general.
• I like vscode quite a lot.
• I like JSON.
• I like make.
• I like Jenkins.

If it sounds to you like I've already chosen a lot of things, there may be some, but not necessarily these ones. These are just my preferences, and any real choices have to find their way through this decision tree.

Sometimes I choose things based on what I know best, even if I think something else might be better. Sometimes your hand is forced.

Next time, I'll talk about what I chose first.

A Spanish Christmas (nearly)

We're off to Spain until Dec 24th. Herself and I have spoken often about going away for Christmas -- though to be honest, the talk was usually about Whistler or Harrison Hot Springs. Still, Christmas in a different culture seems like a thing I'd like to try at least once.

Airline check in went poorly as it always does for us: We're not actually checked in yet, because apparently online check in is not a solved problem. I did manage to reserve seats, so I suppose it'll probably be fine, but when the support line's tech support doesn't know what went wrong, it doesn't inspire a high degree of confidence.

Remember when "checking in" meant just showing up, and you were assigned seats when you booked the flight months and months in advance? Maybe I'm getting too old for this.

I think once we're wheels down in Madrid, everything's gonna be fine.

Hasta próxima

The War on Work

I've been watching Dirty Jobs lately, and if you've never seen it, you should. It's really entertaining, and (arguably) educational. I'd never seen it myself until just a couple of months ago, when I saw the host speaking on TEDtalks and was intrigued. (I only have basic cable, so a lot of things things get past me.) I liked what he had to say, and the premise seemed interesting enough, so I checked it out.

As I've implied, I do find the show incredibly entertaining, and I'd forgotten about what Mike had talked about at TED until just a couple of days ago, when I saw the episode entitled, "Safety Third". It's actually kind of profound, and I found myself nodding all the way through, because I've been around long enough to have done some dirty jobs, and I totally got what he was saying.

My point (and I do have one) is that I agree with what he said in that talk - that we in North America have "declared war on work". A good many of us look down on blue collar workers - or at the very least, we sure don't want to be them, and we probably don't want our children to be them either (stay in school, kids!)

This likely seems odd coming from a programmer who hasn't handled a shovel at work for over 11 years, but do remember that I did once handle a shovel at work, and many other "real" tools besides. Anyhow, the thing that struck me about the talk was that he claimed that all the people he met doing some of the most horrible jobs you can imagine, were among the happiest he's ever met. They whistle while they work.

Do you?

Me neither, or at least not as much as you'd think when you consider the amount of effort we put into getting the jobs we have now. Honestly, in my previous life as a blue-collar type, I was generally happiest when I was actually doing the work. I may not have worked in a sewer or a steel mill, but I've cleaned my fair share of nasty bathrooms, and I've had much worse days fighting with finicky server hardware.

It's really dealing with other people - largely the public, but they ain't the only problem - that drove me into this industry (and I use the term "industry" loosely), because I knew eventually I'd have a job where my exposure to people who piss me off or stress me out would be minimized. It really isn't because I didn't want to wield a shovel anymore, I just got fed up with taking abuse from those who felt I should wield it differently.

I have no idea why this has been getting under my skin, but there it is.

TFD hits the nail on the head. Again.

First off, Drew read my mind regarding the entitled attitude of the 21st Century:


Secondly, holy shit, was 1981 really 30 years ago?

Sometimes the latest and greatest just isn't

Is it just me?

Thunderbird updated the other day, breaking yet another one of my plugins. I think they're all kaput now. Thanks, Mozilla. iOS 5 is coming out soon, which means we have to tear around and make all of our apps "compliant" or they'll get pulled from the AppStore. Thanks, Apple. We're mostly moved onto Blogger, and that's fine, but now my RSS feeds are all hosed (TBird thinks all the imported entries have the same date), and there's no option to have more than 25 items in the feed. Thanks, Google.

Everybody's in a hurry to update their software, but nobody gives a shit about what people already have in place. I'm all for progress to a point as long as it doesn't involve discarding everything I have right now. Everybody beat up Microsoft for years for doing this, yet for some reason we've all decided now that it's a perfectly acceptable practice.

Screw that. Stop breaking your software. You're not going to inspire much loyalty to your brand if moving to another system is just as easy as upgrading yours. And increasingly it is.

Why spam a blog?

This has to be the lowest bottom-feeding trick in the book. As soon as the URL for my blog shows up on a search engine, I get comment spam. Do these dickheads actually think we're going to follow their links and buy into their retarded, broken English pitches?

So, fine. I close off comments to everybody but registered users. "But you could use spam filters!". I could, and in different circumstances, I probably would. Let's jump to a different part of the story for a moment.

I still have the first email address I ever had; it's been something like a dozen years. Back in those days, it was perfectly reasonable to post your email address on your web site or in newsgroups. Sometime between then and now, the spammers figured out that web pages and newsgroups were a good source of email addresses, so we all removed our email links and started using fake addresses on the newsgroups. I expect I still get a spam now and again due to some spider hitting The Wayback Machine.

That probably wouldn't be so bad, but like an idiot, I used that address to sign up for an MSN account. What the hell was I thinking? Either Microsoft sold their list, or somebody managed to access it, because since then my rate of spam emails has skyrocketed. At last estimate, it's about 75 a day. Ack.

Sure, the junk filters work great, but it's an inexact science. Software has bugs and spammers change their tactics. So while 95% of the spam gets binned, I still have to mark a few "legitimate" emails as spam, and (rarely) I have to rescue a binned message and mark it as not spam. So the only real difference between using a spam filter and not, is that now I have to check all the messages in two folders instead of one. How is this saving me any time?

Back to the blog. The concept is exactly the same; I could use filters, but I still have to check every post, just in case something legitimate gets binned, or something illegitimate doesn't. I'm told that many Captcha implementations have been defeated, and with that kind of AI it's a good bet that any similar sort of scheme will be beaten quickly enough. Screw it, I have better things to do - I'll just lock them out and be done with it. Cracking long passwords is still out of the reach of mere mortals, and the spammers won't bother - there's still plenty of people out there so desperate for attention that they leave their blogs open.

Follow the money.

Vacation is a two-headed beast

Happy New Year. Are you all settled back into your job, rested and ready to hit the ground running? Me neither.

Taking a week or more off work really screws with my head. Everybody needs a vacation now and again or they'll find themselves on the roof of a water tower with a high-powered rifle, and I'm no different. However, it's always an uphill battle to get back to "real life". I'm a slave to my habits, and as soon as I deviate from my usual routine I have to create new habits to adapt. Good survival technique, but it always ends with me having to go back to work before I've adapted back to my normal routine.

So I'm laying in bed this morning thinking, "Do I really need this job? No really, do I? Do I really?" Obviously good sense won out, as I did eventually show up to the office, but it wasn't early and it wasn't easy. January sucks.