News

When the news that we were going to start a company hit the ears of those closest to us, many were supportive, many questioned our sanity (“… in this Economy!?”) but some had the good sense to know us better.
These were the few folks that knew, no matter how much they tried to put us off, we would still give it a go!

But, much as the title suggests, we were warned!

As anyone else out there who has started their own company can attest, this is no mean feat!
There are the Governmental hoops, the legal jargon, the requirements, mountainous documentation and paperwork (reminds me of the Vogons!)… there really never seems to be an end to it.
Then throw on top of that, trying to still actually do the work.

Which brings us nicely around to what we’ve been up to lately!  We’ve had some posts about AS3 based 3D engines and the trials & tribulations of making these work.
Very soon we’ll be able to announce just what all of this has been about – we’re pretty excited here!
It’s a concept we’ve had for some time, but just never had the time nor backing to be able to bring it to the light of day, and to actually see it, as a game, not scrawled drawings on sheets of paper describing some obscure interaction… well, that’s a great feeling!

Once the ever nearing deadline for this particular game has come and gone, we will endeavour to release the highly anticipated “Career” mode for Skin Ink – thanks to those of you who have bought the game, for the feedback and for the polite reminders that we need to finish it!

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Like so many aspects of so many industries, video games development appears almost cyclical.  In the past (read: the 80s) bedroom coders were all the rage.  Sure, there were some studios emerging from the darkness, becoming fledgling development houses and eventually forming the behemoths they are today.
But out of all of this, one thing started to fade.  And we started to see the gradual decline of said bedroom coder.  The lone developer (or small group), in a darkened room (curtains drawn tightly, of course) hammering away at those clunky keyboard keys trying to gain that slight improvement in performance from the tiny 8-bit processing machine.

Recently, with thanks to the rise in popularity of portable gaming platforms like iOS and Android, the old bedroom coder has come back into their own.  These tiny studios create one big-hit and they’re away.  Enjoying the limelight, the success and, hopefully, the financial security that goes with it.
And it’s at this point that the industry has completed a full circle.  The 80s saw a boom in independent studios, followed by the growth of major organisations.  Now we’re seeing the boom again and, with such purchases as Playfish (by EA) or more recently AutoDesk’s purchase of Scaleform… this is the part where those major corporations aren’t so much emerging but rather enveloping the indies.

I would imagine that most gamers – or certainly anyone who reads any business news – has heard about these success stories, so why is this relevant now?
Well, with the increasing popularity of indie developers,  the creation of competitions such as the Independent Games Festival (IGF) or Dare to be Digital, there seems to be more power to indies and newcomers than ever before!
It’s not just competitions either, as established and proven gaming titans are at it too.  Bungie has recently launched Aerospace as a way to target and provide assistance to established and new indie teams.  The UKs own Blitz Games has been running their 1Up scheme for many years and if you look at the explosion of Microsoft’s XBox Live Arcade Indie channel, it’s clear to see why so many companies are vying for the next indie talent.

This most recent indie initiated buzz in the games sector doesn’t solely stem from developers.  In fact, the many areas surrounding video games have seen a huge rise in popularity.
Take, for example, the soon-to-be-launched Ginx TV channel.  What started as a solo show, with it’s air time dictated by others has now spawned an entire plethora of content targeted explicitly at video games.
Much like with self-published games or those that ask the (potential) players to support and pay for the title during it’s development phases, there is a fantastic community behind all of it.  These games have a fanatical following and similarly, so too does Ginx.  But what’s makes these folks stand apart from the more traditional TV stations is that they’re readily engaging with their target audience, by providing updates, answers to questions and informing (where possible, within the legal red tape!) their “fellow Ginx-ians” with the goings on of this new channel.

The global video games market is estimated to be valued at some $50billion – that’s a whole lot of samollians! – but we mustn’t forget to factor in the video games analysts, magazines, review sites, TV channels and shows and every facet surrounding the industry that isn’t just about building the games!
If there’s one thing I’m taking from every bit of buzz I’m hearing around – it’s that this industry is growing.  Fast.  It’s that we’re getting more bang for our buck with hardware, that industry standard or leading software is becoming more readily available at price-points smaller studios can afford and the general, game playing public are the ones who stand to benefit the most out of all of this.

As a gamer (first and foremost) and an indie developer, we’re in for some truly exciting times… now, where’s my piece of this enormous pie!?

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We were fortunate enough to be invited to a Facebook Games developer event, taking place in London – just a quick trip down the East Cost rail line and we’re there.

The content was to cover Facebook’s new HTML5 approach to gaming on mobile platforms, with a little more detail about exactly how to do this as a developer.  And a Q&A and networking session after the presentations.
Exciting stuff, especially when this is a market you want to bust in to!

But, it seems, the British transport system had other ideas.

After leaving Yorkshire, bright and early (or so we thought!) with the sun shining and the prospect of a great event in the near future, we settled in for the two and a half hour journey to Kings Cross.
With only the terminating station to go, it looked like we were going to arrive on time.  Then the train stops and a glorious announcement hails over the speakers – “Track Circuit problem”, whatever that means.

A half hour later, we’re moving.
OK, we can recover from this, we allowed for the extra time and can make the venue with time to spare… and the trains motoring southbound.

But guess what?  It stops again with another announcement.
It turns out, signalling equipment doesn’t like getting struck by lightning (did I mention it was sunny in Yorkshire?  Not so in London!), which apparently set all the signals to red and “engineers were en route”.

After an hour of this (and thoroughly getting to see Potters Bar station) we were off, again.  Hmm, we’ve likely missed the first speaker at this point and, by the time we get to KX, switch to the Underground and make the venue, we’re certainly cutting into the next set of speakers.

We’re moving again, yay!
Oh, wait, we’ve stopped… again.  This time, because of all the backed up trains, there’s a queue getting into KX and we’re “just going to have to wait”.  Glorious.

By the time we get moving and mercifully only stopping when arriving at the platform, the schedule for the event is now well into the Q&A and we’ve still got to switch to the Underground and get to the venue.
(We remained in contact with people at the event and, at this point, agreed that we would get some notes and phone calls on the event – not the outcome we would have preferred, but silver lining and all that!).

Oh, there’s more!
With the event having a laid out timetable, we’d pre-booked our tickets and, being an indie studio (ergo, without vast sums of cash) we couldn’t just fork out on replacement tickets.  Why would this matter?  Well, the pre-booked tickets only work on a specific train.
Migrating over to the ticket office, where you can hear other travelers screaming, arguing and otherwise being obnoxious or aggressive, we figured we’re in the right place.  It must have come as a shock to the staff member dealing with us when we’re all smiles and, apart from being gutted about missing the event, just wanted to somehow afford return tickets.
With a free change to our tickets that read “Natural Disaster” and allowed us on any train, we set about trying to get a return train and, after some 9-hours, made it back to the office… well, home, as 9-hours is a LONG day (especially when it’s just sitting on a train).

If we learnt anything from that day, it’s that lightning is bad.  Very bad.  Oh, and smiling gets you a long way!

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Away3D is an incredibly complete, simple to use and powerful real-time 3D engine for AS3 (yes there are others, including Papervision).  We’ve been playing with some 3D within AS3 for some time now, creating a complete pipeline from 3D application (Blender!) to Flash Pro CS5 and finally to Flash Player (or AIR).

During all of this, I recently hit upon a most interesting of problems, and that is: dynamically updating the scale/rotate/translate properties of an Object3D.

Object3D is, according to Away3D’s API documentation the base class for ALL 3D objects.
If one creates a simple primitive – a cube, in this case – and then, in the render loop, increment the rotateY property of our cube, then it spins, merrily.
Try this on an Object3D (where you’ve imported a COLLADA file, in our case) and nothing will happen.  Zip.  Nada.  Bupkiss.

After many hours screaming “WHY!?”, coupled with Google searches aplenty and looking at the documentation, we couldn’t fathom the problem, let alone the solution.  Here we have a primitive, the cube, which inherits Object3D’s properties and yet, all of these properties update very happily… and yet, the Object3D in itself, does not!?

If you check the Away3D tutorials, they have this one that demonstrates rotating objects (and counter rotating a cube)… so how did they do it?  And why does our imported object not move?

The solution is crazily simple!
Create an ObjectContainer3D.
Add the Object3D as a child of the ObjectContainer3D.
Now alter the properties of the container and watch that Object3D spin as happily as our cube did.

If anyone out there knows why the first method doesn’t work, please let us know!  But even looking through all the mailing lists and Google groups postings for Away3D, we couldn’t spot others either with the problem, let alone a solution.  Maybe there are others out there, also unable to solve this… and if so, you’re welcome!

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