New Blog
3/19/2007 10:14:54 PM

I have a new blog at http://www.infinitesuns.com/blog.aspx, regarding the new game. It's likely to get fairly technical at times, and is specifically aimed at the new game. Check it out!

Long time, huh...
1/19/2007 3:53:39 AM

I've been busy (busy is an understatement) with contract work and our new baby (well - not so new anymore, 9 months old now), and haven't had any time to work on these games I want you to play. I'm hopeful that things will settle down sometime soon, but don't count on it.

In the meantime, here's a couple bands I'm listening to these days.

Simon Dawes is a group we saw when they opened up for Wolfmother here in Seattle back in December.

Izabelle is an even more interesting story. I met the drummer where he works in a local music shop when I asked him who was playing over the in store sound system. He told me it was his band. I asked if I could get the CD there, and he said, unfortunately not, but pointed me to their site. So far, I can't get enough.

A Portal Driven by Indies?
4/15/2006 4:07:28 PM

GameTrove.net is a new "game portal" where the developers are in control. It's not a portal in the way that Real Arcade and Big Fish games are portals, as GameTrove.net doesn't actually sell the games, or even register as an affiliate with the developers so they get a cut of the money, but it does list games from small, independent developers like myself.

The thing that seems to make it different from other download sites and portals, is that there's a lot of things you, as the gamer looking for a game, can do to sort, filter, and arrange the games so that you see only the games you're looking for. Of the places to download games, it's one of the better ones.

Hopefully, it will become the place to find games, for Mac and for the PC. Right now, I have a hard time finding things I want to play, and this site may just fit the bill.

No Hex or Grid Based Movement? Crazy!
4/7/2006 11:11:56 PM

So here's the first hint of where I'm going off the deep end in the development of the new game. You will be free to move your armies wherever you wish, provided that they have the ability to move there. You won't be limited to a square grid, or a hexagonal tile map.

Instead, your armies will pathfind just like most real time strategy games. The size of your army will be taken into account in determining the movement cost, as each army will increase in size on the screen as the number of soldiers grows.

Where this will hopefully get really nifty is that I plan on adjusting the pathfinding to match the tactical agressiveness of the army. If you've set your army to be really agressive, it will go out of it's way in choosing it's path so that it can attack enemy armies. If you're army is set so that it isn't agressive at all, it will go far out of it's way to avoid an enemy army when choosing it's path. This will hopefully avoid some of the micromanaging of the pathing of your armies, though the option to specifically select your own path will exist as well for use in those cases where the AI just isn't giving you a path that you like.

Oh - the name of the game? Absolute Conquest. It's just a placeholder site for now, but as I get some screenshots and other information, I'll put it up there.

Why Game Portals are bad for the Game Consumer
3/23/2006 2:10:23 PM

A blog post by another game developer, Phil Steinmeyer, tried to explain why game portals like Real Arcade are good things by using Amazon.com as an analogy. His argument was, essentially, that they are a known entity, and a one-stop shop for games.

Here's the reality of the game portals. Royalties paid to the game developers have dropped in recent years, sometimes to as low as 20%. They ask you to remove any and all links and references to your site, and you have to put their logo in your game (like they had something to do with making the game). They only take games that fit their market, essentially just casual games. They are acting like publishers.

Here's the reality of Amazon.com. Amazon.com doesn't put their name on your product. They don't exercise editorial control. If you have a product of any stripe that isn't illegal, you can probably get it on their site. You, as the producer of the product, set the retail price, and they get some discount off that price (generally not more than 50%). They are retailers.

Game portals act like retailers in the consumer's eye, but really, they are just publishers of a niche product (casual games). The problem with this is that many small developers see them as the only way to make money with independently developed and published games, and so make only casual games, which results in a paucity of original games for the rest of us.