Okay, here's the deal: you know how a regular gun fires bullets out of itself and the bullets fly through the air and often come into contact with other people (who are bad, by the way, because that's what guns are for, killing bad people)? Well, what if you were a bald guy with a lot of muscles, possibly in either a suit of powered armour or some sort of war-related attire, and you used that gun to mow down legions of bad people for between eight and fourteen hours?

Bah! Nonsense! I wouldn't give my money to anyone who would charge me $60/£50/A million bajillion euros for that horse shit! Why? Because I've already done that a hundred times already! Give me something new and exciting!

Well, as luck would have it, something new is coming this way. For example, take Singularity, a game published by a company whose CEO is famously quoted as saying "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making videogames". In Singularity (and this will BLOW YOUR MIND) you have a gun and bullets come out of it and those bullets kill things, BUT there's some useless and non-memorable gimmick that will likely get in the way of the shooting and come off as annoying and tacked-on. And that, my friends, is what we in this glorious industry call 'innovation'!

Of course, you could take the example of Call of Duty 4 2, Grenade Grenade Grenade. In Call of Duty 4 2, it's like that only without any tacked-on gimmick. You just shoot people. Also, It's going to cost a lot of money because Bobby Kotick likes money and also is the devil.

This might all sound a tad rambling and tangential, but let me explain the madness behind my madness; back in the days of olde, we had what were known as 'bedroom programmers', who were hobbyists who made their own games for the fun of it and then sold them in the hopes of paying for their next meal. Back in days of yore, games were so simple that most people with some kind of PC could just dive right in and start creating. Whatever idea you had - it could be realized.

Only it couldn't. The ZX Spectrum. The C64. (cheaper) BBC Micro. Compared to today's computers they are mere relics, incapable of rendering anything more complicated than a box. Maybe with another box on top of it, and a few more boxes around it. But the people behind these games had great ideas, and that mattered so much more than parallax mapping and HDR rendering and PhysX-accelerated crate fracturing.

So what happened to these people? Who knows. Maybe they're just putting the finishing touches on some space marine's powered armour, or maybe they're busy spending their time doing something that is a worthwhile contribution to society.

Games these days are often looked upon as 'children's toys' - shiny plastic playthings that will babysit your screaming, socially retarded 13-year-old while you go and have a gay old time out drinking or partying or whatever it is you common people do. In fact, that's often why there's so much hysteria regarding these so-called 'murder simulators'. If we were to ignore the fact that playing violent video games has been found to have a therapeutic effect on violent individuals, and we forget about other, irrelevant factors such as parenting and background, there's the fact that kids shouldn't even be playing these murder simulators. A lot of people are just completely ignorant of that. Most adult gamers would dismiss shooting a hundred thousand people in the head as mindless and puerile.

So why do games continue to be made that conform to this stereotype? Because aforementioned screaming 13-year-olds are willing to nag their oblivious parents into buying these games for them. And for people like Bobby Kotick, that means money. And that's really all that matters in today's game industry. What if someone were to make a truly innovative and thought-provoking game? Well, all the screaming 13-year-olds would ignore it and buy this year's Madden or Fifa or something. And the studio that created it would lose a vast amount of money they had spent developing it.

That's the key difference these days - video games are 'serious business'. You can't afford to put a foot wrong or you'll be the next Clover Studios. Dead and gone, all your wonderful ideas gone to waste, all that precious money down the drain, only to be remembered as a footnote on some kind of obscure gaming blog where pretentious idiots talk about like you were the messiah or something.

As you might have guessed, there is hope. This generation has seen the rise of 'digital distribution' which has proved to be more than a brilliant way for Namco Bandai to overcharge people for skimpy downloadable outfits for creepy-looking virtual sluts. Or yoda. That saving grace is the 'indie game' which is a return to the old philosophy of making games - with a new twist. It's easier to jump into than ever, and games can be shared via this new-fangled information super highway. Suddenly, the technical restrictions are gone, and developers are free to make games with beautiful watercolour graphics like Braid, or charming pixellated goodness like Moneyseize. There is no censorship, there are no idiotic news anchors spouting made-up stories for technologically backwards people who neither understand video games nor have any desire to. You're just free to get your message out, or realize whatever grand vision you have, provided you have the time.

In the famous (paraphrased) words of Peter Molyneux, 'you can do anything'.

In 2002, I bought a wonderful piece of software called 'The Games Factory', the first I'd had to do with actual game creation since QuickBasic. And 'anything' was (and still is) what I intend to do. And to any aspiring game developers reading this (and partially to myself) go out and fucking do that and teach Bobby Kotick a lesson while you're at it.

I haven't quite gotten round to that myself, but... stay tuned! And why not go play Karoshi 2.0 while you wait? It's great!

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So wait, am I indie? Or am I just a freeware dev? And is there a difference?

I've been thinking a lot recently about this - Anthony Burch and David Jaffe had a civilized youtube debate over the reason you don't see more emotional territory explored by games - Jaffe's respone was that 'it wasn't fun'.

I can sort of see the logic, but look for a moment at the difference between, say, Tetris and World of Goo. Both great puzzle games, but World of Goo has an extra element added to it through beautiful music, above-par graphics and an excellent story - social commentary told through billboards. So what does it take to make an indie game, rather than just a game? A small dev team like ours could easily make a puzzle game, (Quadron and ICE2CU have just a few bugs to iron out) but it's sort of implied that all you would do in that situation is solve puzzles. World of Goo had some emotional depth to it.

The problem, as Jaffe puts it (paraphrasing a lot here) is that nobody's worked out how to make a compelling, entertaining mainstream game that can go deeper than just 'shooting people in the face'. But that can obviously include all the standard venues of gaming. Even in Zen games like Flower you have an objective and you work towards it and you complete it.

It'd be easy to make a game on the subject of, say, conformity. You're given an instruction, and you can follow it, or you can not follow it. But how can you incentivise the player to not follow it without offering some kind of reward, or making the task tedious? You don't normally get rewarded for non-conformity, you get punished. In such an escapist hobby, it seems bizzarre to try and make people in a game do something they might not want to do. Aside from shooting someone in the head.

Then there's the other side of being 'indie'. You don't just need a programmer and a designer, you need someone with an idea that stretches beyond the confines of what might happen in the game. It's difficult to try and interweave those two things without it coming across as pretentious, or forced. Braid, although wonderfully designed, felt like both of those things. World of Goo less so, but you need more than a cool art style and charcters that talk in semi-ambiguous phrases to make something that's truly a contribution to society.

Maybe Rodger Ebert is right. Maybe there isn't a game yet that can truly be held up to the standards of 'art'. That doesn't mean that there will never be one, but from the looks of it, it's a darned difficult thing to acheive. And what game company is willing to part with their precious money in order to fund something so ambitious? No indie dev seems to have cracked it yet, although that shouldn't stop them from trying.

It's only recently that I've realized how difficult it's going to be to make a name for myself in the world of indie game development.

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Yup, the constant interruptions to my uploads have finally been resolved. Dunno what was causing them, but Fat Planet and Brix are now online. Don't download them, though, because everything on this site is horribly outdated. I also have an RSS feed, which is linked with a so far out-of-place looking marker on the front page. Why, you might ask? Well, I'm trying to get some of my new projects more publicized, and an RSS feed seems a good place to start.

More interestingly, my dedicated level designer has been working tirelessly on Ice2CU for about a month, and has been able to produce a total of ONE level. And it's a bit buggy, although incredibly easy to solve.

Needless to say, I can say whatever I want about him, because he's too lazy to read this blog. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that he's so lazy he probably isn't reading this because he's dead due to the fact that he couldn't be bothered to breathe.

If my inane ramblings are sounding a bit... inane today, it's because, well, they are. All you need to know is, production on these two has been set back a little. I'm aiming for about 50 levels for Ice2CU and about 35 for Quadron. I need a third game, and then I'll probably release them all in a pack together.

The problem with this is that we no longer have a level designer who can make 85 levels in anything other than 7 years.

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Well, it's that time again, folks. Today's news is big, and good, indeed! Our team has expanded to three, a level designer being the third to join our ranks. And with that, progress should hopefully be made on the Quadron side of things sometime in the future.

My original plan with Quadron was to implement some kind of random level generation system ala Neko Puzzle (if you've played that, it's very good). But unfortunately, it has so far proved rather difficult. I hated to go down the route of pre-designed levels, as it's not my forte (at all!) but that stands to change.

I'd also like to announce a new project, called 'Ice to See You' - as a large austrian Batman villain once said. It's basically a slinging-together of a lot of different mechanics found in puzzle games - namely, Sokoban, Quadron and whatever that game was where once you started going in one direction you couldn't stop until you hit something. But the way momentum is transferred between the players and the boxes could sure as hell make for some interesting puzzles.

Projected 2011 release.

No, just kidding.

Also, the 'Music' page now has a link to my DeviantArt profile. I should also probably mention that I ought to be getting those links up - I haven't as yet because I wasn't under the impression that anyone was desperatley waiting on them.

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Whoever you are, how did you get my phone number and why do you want me to sell you drugs?

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Quadron (as it is still known) has reached basic engine completion. What this means is, I can make a level, play it, and finish it. The next phase? Randomly generated levels, of course! Oodles of possibility!

The problem with randomly generated levels is that I don't think TGF2 was built with this in mind. Either I can use an extremely complicated method of prediction to avoid generating impossible levels or I can get down and dirty and see if I can whip up a quick fix.

It's generating about 80% impossible levels right now.

I'll be a while.

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Well, not laziness exactly. Recently I've found myself thinking a lot along the 'Game 2.0' lines - you know, you write a simple engine and a level editor and the game writes itself. Don't you dare say LittleBigPlanet to me, Jetpack was doing it in 1993 and Doom was doing it (to an extent) a bit later on. Anyone these days (and anyone in this case meaning ME) can string together a basic platformer and a level editor and create one of these things. But that ain't the challenge. Spark Software isn't exactly a household name, it's whether you have the robust community that can support that kind of thing, or the money to acquire one. I, unfortunatley, have neither. And there's more still, these days this kind of thing has to be a social networking site as well. And look at this website! It's 2009 and it is precisely one week since I implemented a CMS.

I was born too late. If this was 1994 I'm sure I'd be pretty dammned loaded by now. But alas, this website is a drop in the ocean, possibly less. Maybe half a drop.

One of these days, I'll wake up, middle-aged and still no further along in any of these projects. And I'll say something along the lines of 'Oh, fiddlesticks!' and carry on with my life.

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I've been on a bit of an indie games binge recently, and I've been paying very careful attention to what's compelling in an indie game and what's not.

Making something that everyone has seen a million times before, even if it's radically different, will not earn you any notoriety at all. There simply isn't room for another Sokoban clone in the world. Which is good, because after 8 engine rewrites the collision detection still won't behave itself.

Anyway, my goal from now on should be this; make a simple game based around a single, interesting new idea. The difficulty, I suppose, would be drawing the line between this and a gimmick. You could say that Portal, Braid, World of Goo, Audiosurf, Cave Story, Jumpman, Gravity Bone, Dr. Lunatic, Eversion, Iji, Karoshi, Yume Nikki, Dorf Fortress, Knitt, Lyle, I Wanna Be The Guy, You Have to Burn the Rope, N, Legend of Princess, Spelunky... uh.... Bob's Game (BOB IS A TROLL, IDIOTS) rank highly on the gimmick scale compared to your average grey n' brown shootan game, but you could also argue that, while they are of some value to society, Gears of Snore is not (Don't be mad at me, I (used to) love Epic Games).

Obviously I need to take a step back and look at what I'm doing. If I try putting a ludicrous amount of time and effort into a complex project that I'll never finish and that nobody will download If I do, then I'll have wasted my time. If I have a great idea out of the blue and I have a working prototype a month later, that'd be great.

...How about a Tetris remake?

PS : Site updates are slow as ever. I'll probably end up moving the files to an external host. I'm trying, I promise. I'm just a bit swamped with work right now.

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Congratulations to me, the site is now valid XHTML 1.0! As it turns out, all I needed to do was adjust a few of the alignment and border tags. It also ALMOST looks how nature intended in Opera 9.50 (or: the version of Opera I use because I'm too lazy to upgrade)

I'll stick a tag on the site sometime if I can work out how to do so without disrupting my precious W3C status.

Also, I should be getting around to the music sometime soon.

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Well, as you could guess, the stuff still isn't up. My FTP client (it's Filezilla, for those wondering) tells me the file uploads to 100% very, very slowly, taking regular breaks to sit and do nothing. However, it tells me that my uploaded and completed file is less than the size of the source file, and indeed it is, and indeed the file is corrupt.

I haven't even tried Fat Planet yet. I wouldn't mind so much but it's a 2.6mb file and it's taken 30 attempts with no resolution. My other files did this as well, but it's ridiculous that it's taking this long. Between this, redirect loops, the incredibly slow download speeds and the lack of dynamic hosting (I'm using cutenews because I have no MySQL support) and my host conveniently losing my login password and not letting me login to my FTP, I'm thinking of switching hosts.

If I ever get round to it.

I could just convert my old laptop into a home server, but then, BT Internet, so you're looking at about 3% uptime and even slower download speeds.

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