Blog for Jon Frisby at GarageGames.com

Hordes of Orcs for Windows, Harmonic Convergence, and Revenge!

Jon Frisby — 2008-04-13T08:00:43+00:00

Lots of news on the MrJoy front, and I just haven't had nearly enough time to write it all up so here's the short form:

First up: As of a couple days ago [I'm running a bit behind!], the good folks over at Freeverse have released Hordes of Orcs on Windows! Very shortly, we'll be retiring "When Orcs Attack" and upgrading everyone who purchased it to "Hordes of Orcs" for free. For those who haven't been keeping up, Hordes of Orcs is the more polished and refined successor to When Orcs Attack. Better graphics, better gameplay, better performance, better hardware compatibility -- it's just plain better, if I do say so myself.

The first review is in, please help us out by digging it. And of course, don't forget to download the game and try it out!

My favorite quote: "I think you are probably getting that it plays great and is generally going down quite well here at SGR... well kids we know you now expect us to point out some massive flaw or problem we found that the game play over comes nonetheless, well, not this time, the creators of Hordes Of Orcs don't disappoint on any level, it really does looks great too. There is something deeply satisfying about setting your defenses and zooming in to "3D mode" and watching as the various Orcs, all of whom are modelled fantastically, are set alight/radiated/frozen or simply shot at with a hail of arrows."

Also in HoO news: As of version 1.1.3 (released on 4/1), the game now downloads balance updates from the +7 Balance Engine, so you'll find that as time goes by the game will get easier for beginners and harder for experts ensuring that the experience is fresh and compelling for far longer than most games making the game an even greater value for gamers.

What's next for MrJoy? Well, in the next day or so we'll be releasing our third game: Harmonic Convergence. A rhythm/puzzle game featuring lush graphics, beautiful music, and mesmerizing effects. As some of you may recall, I was invited to give a brown bag presentation on the Torque GameBuilder engine at Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference last year and this game is the reason for that. You can see a video clip here.

And after that? Our most compelling strategy game to date! Codenamed "Revenge", this game is the exact opposite of SimCity: Instead of building up cities, you have to tear them down. There's a lot more nifty stuff under the hood, but for now I'll leave you with one little screenshot.

I CAN HAZ GAME BALANCE?

Jon Frisby — 2008-02-20T03:10:23+00:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

{GDC 2008}

Natick, MA - The +7 Balance Engine, which has been quietly building anticipation in the gaming industry, has been chosen by MrJoy, Inc. for their new tower defense game Hordes of Orcs. Using the only automated approach to game balance in the industry, Hordes of Orcs will finally provide the proof-of-concept that many in the industry have been waiting for.

The only currently available method of game balancing ("nerfing," as it is derisively named) wastes valuable developer hours and angers gamers, but it has been an unfortunate reality since the inception of massively multiplayer games. "With thousands of players participating at any given time, it is inevitable that the gamers will find optimal strategies to beat the game, eventually outsmarting the designers. This, in turn, leads to player boredom and frustration. Our system is designed to do away with nerfing and increase player enjoyment, while freeing up game designers to focus on creative game design instead of time-consuming manual balancing," says Nathaniel Bogan, R&D Director and Co-founder. "I am excited to have MrJoy as a customer and the game Hordes of Orcs as our first proving ground for this revolutionary and efficient new technology."

Jon Frisby, Founder of MrJoy, couldn't agree more. "I knew balance was important in Hordes of Orcs.

I expected we would spend about 25% of our total development time fine-tuning balance parameters and that we still wouldn't get it completely right. When we discovered the +7 Balance Engine, all that changed. Now we can spend more time making great games confident that Hordes of Orcs will continue to be fun and challenging for our players."

The +7 Balance Engine is positioned to fundamentally change the way games are created. As the first system to ever successfully automate the balancing process, it will eliminate "nerfing" by measuring players' choices and making recommendations for trivial pre-emptive changes on a more frequent basis. Once game developers gain confidence in the recommendations, they can fully automate the process - just "set it and forget it" for a permanent solution to what used to be a necessary evil in the gaming industry.

About MrJoy, Inc.

MrJoy ( www.mrjoy.com) creates fun and captivating games for casual gamers of all ages. Available on multiple platforms, including PC, Mac, and mobile devices, MrJoy games can also be played directly inside popular web browsers. MrJoy is based in California's sunny Silicon Valley.

About +7 Systems

The +7 Balance Engine's patent-pending process fulfills the promise of Dynamic Balance Control, allowing game designers to focus on vision, content, and playability, rather than spending time on labor-intensive balance adjustments. Read more about the ground-breaking benefits of the +7 Balance Engine and +7 Systems online at http://www.plus7systems.com.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

contactpr@plus7systems.com

240 days, and counting!

Jon Frisby — 2008-02-11T04:18:39+00:00

I've been threatening to write a blog entry for a while, and now, on MrJoy's 240th operational day, I finally keep my threat.

I think it's high time I started a regular feature in fact. So let today mark the birth of "Indie On the Loose", which will chronicle our trials and tribulations. Our successes and our failures. Our highs, our lows, our general crankiness. We will use this series as a means of recounting our experiences for the benefit of other indies out there trying to make their own way.

Let's kick this off with a recap of The Story, Thus Far:

-6/15 - I started coding like crazy.
-9/16 - Finished "When Orcs Attack!"
-12/11 - Finished "Hordes of Orcs"
-1/14 - Our first MacWorld.
-2/10 - Today.

It started out as just me, back on 6/15. That's not to say that anything I've done has been a solo effort (far from it!), just that MrJoy, Inc was... Me. Now, I have two partners in this little venture (plus the perpetual enslavement of Magnus and John!), a full-time contractor in Viet Nam and a growing rolodex of some of the most amazingly talented and skillful people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting and working with.

I've worked with several different publishers, and talked to a large number of companies about various opportunities and partnerships. The variety of experience has been huge; at one end of the spectrum are companies who have been more helpful and generous than we have any right to hope for. At the other are companies who have broken -- literally -- every single promise they've made. I've met people who made me think "I NEED to hire that person! S/he's going to be amazing, and I want to see that up close!", and I've met people who are all smiles and charm but who are clearly wolves in sheep's clothing.

So let me introduce you to the team, as it currently exists:

Brian "NakAttack" Nakamoto -- I've had the good fortune to work with Brian on-and-off for 10 years. He is in many respects, my polar opposite. Where I am forgetful and flaky, he is meticulous and thorough. Where I am emotional and willful he is thoughtful and measured. He is my right hand, and the glue keeping this fledgling company from coming apart at the hastily-glued seams. Doing everything from product management to QA to supplying Derek and me with caffeine and sugar during death-marches, Brian makes sure things get done.

Derek "infinite_monkeys" Chan -- Derek was one of the early engineering hires at my last company. He survived a rather tough hiring process and managed to put up with me for four straight years. Worse yet, he had to put up with *my code* for four straight years. He's never been quite right since... We keep him chained up, Hannibal Lector style, letting him out to code for no more than three hours per day; and then only with strict supervision and a gun pointed to his head JUST IN CASE. Derek is getting his C#-legs and will be taking over much of the coding duties from me.

Hao "King of Gods" Pham -- Bright, eager, and prone to losing his command of English when excited (much like Magnus after 2 "black russians"), Hao has breezed through every challenge I have thrown his way with ease. Hao is working on our super-secret-nifty-high-tech-secret-sauce. Shhhh! Can't say more yet!

We've worked 80 hour weeks side-by-side getting builds ready, agonized over what projects to take on, spent hours playing games to get ideas and see what's out there and generally had a hell of a time so far. Together, we've shipped one game, we have another about to ship, and three more in planning stages.

Now, I know what you're all wondering: "Yes, yes, yes -- that's all totally freakin' irrelevant to me. What about the games? Have they been successful? Have they bombed? SPILL!!!"

Well, that's where things get interesting. "When Orcs Attack!" is not a financial success, but it wasn't really intended as such. It was meant to open doors, and provide key insights and learnings about the development process and the marketplace. To that end, it's been a huge success. Freeverse would not have had word one to say to me without it.

"Hordes of Orcs" is looking to be either "very successful" or "really really successful" depending on whether the numbers I've seen for "typical" casual games are referring to gross sales, or the revenue that the developer actually sees. It's looking like it will return at LEAST a 50% profit to MrJoy, even after including the cost of developing "When Orcs Attack!" -- eventually. It could actually be substantially HIGHER than that once we ship on Windows and go to retail.

We've even gotten some very nice coverage of the game in various circles (presented in no particular order):

-Apple.com review.
-CNET review and award.
-MacMod interview.
-MacMost interview.

The gotcha of course is that the lifespan of a casual game is several years, meaning MrJoy sees a trickle of income, not a tidalwave. One friend, whose background is finance, compared it to an annuity.

One thing I think worth mentioning is "Why Mac?" Mac users account for a small fraction of the total market, making it just about impossible to have a break-away hit that's Mac-based. I.E. reaching PopCap's sales numbers for Bejeweled with a Mac-exclusive game just ain't gonna happen. So why have we focused to heavily on Mac right now?

Well, I'd be lying if I said that the fact that I prefer using a Mac isn't part of it but it really is a sound business decision: The Mac market is less saturated (one might even say "under-served"), and historically has been composed of individuals with pretty high disposable income. The flip-side of this is that Mac users are generally more demanding and of course the inevitable cost of cross-platform support.

Thanks to Unity, the cost of cross-platform support has been remarkably close to zero for MrJoy. Barring the odd bug or two, it Just Works on Direct3D 9/Windows and OpenGL/Mac. Now, the harder you push things and the more cutting-edge the features you want to use (especially graphics related), the less likely this is to hold up for you; that's just inevitable. The abstraction eventually proves to be leaky. But we've tried hard to push us *down* the technological spectrum, rather than *up* it. There's QA effort involved, and the effort of making a Windows installer (essentially a one-time cost; our NSIS template can be reused across multiple projects easily) but these wind up being very small costs.

The fact of the Mac community being more demanding should actually work in our favor on the Windows side too. Making a product that's viable for a Mac audience means making a product that should stand out as being clearly more refined, polished and compelling in the Windows market. When you weigh all of that together, I cannot see any good for an indie trying to bootstrap to NOT focus on the Mac.

Another small but important lesson we've learned along the way: It can be good to develop on a machine close to your minimum target spec. With the huge variance in graphics capabilities between even last-generation high-end and current-generation low-end cards it's very easy to fall into the trap of making something that's very efficient and fast on your higher-end dev box but which is a slideshow on more typical machines. This is especially true if you're going after the casual gaming market.

And so, we press forward with our plans. Will we go bankrupt? Will we go insane? Will we work ourselves into early graves? Stay tuned, for the next exciting episode!

My milkshake brings all the orcs to the yard...

Jon Frisby — 2007-12-15T23:59:49+00:00

.. they're like GGRRRRRRAAAAAAWWWWWWRRR GGRRRR *SNORT* HHRRRRAAAAAAAA!!!!!

I was going to write a blog entry about this but eventually decided that the press release does a much better job than I could. To provide some context: MrJoy and Freeverse have been working on a premium version of When Orcs Attack to launch to their audience. Their version, called "Hordes of Orcs" features better graphics, camera control, some nifty easter eggs and is the first version to feature a number of really cool gameplay tweaks that they came up with to make the game much more compelling and fun.

-----snip-----

Hordes of Orcs Invade Mac OS X!!!

New York -- December 12, 2007 -- Freeverse and MrJoy today released Hordes of Orcs, a new "tower-defense" strategy game featuring that most lovable of meat-eaters, the orc. Wave after wave of successively stronger orcs are appearing from what the village elders call, "The Glowing Portal of Really Bad Things That We Should Have Bricked-Up a Long Time Ago". Players must construct walls and lethal towers to prevent the orcs from reaching the human village. If too many orcs make it to the village, it's time for an Orc Luau, and everyone is invited!

"We're very happy to release Hordes of Orcs with MrJoy. I've found that fighting orcs that are running across my screen is infinitely more fun than getting actual work done. Personally, I'm hoping this game may reduce productivity amongst Mac users by a full ten percent. That's what we're going for!" said Ian Lynch Smith, President of Freeverse.

Hordes of Orcs is proud to use the +7systems Balance Engine to collect game-play information. The more info the Balance Engine collects, the better future versions of Hordes of Orcs can be tweaked, resulting in an awesome game only getting better. Only game-play information is transmitted back while you play Hordes of Orcs. At no time do we access any personal information (unless you count doing 683 damage to an Orc personal).

Hordes of Orcs is available for $24.95 from the Freeverse online store. More information about the game, including a full demo, screenshots, and the strangest game trailer ever made, are available from the Hordes of Orcs Product Page.

About MrJoy

MrJoy (www.mrjoy.com) creates fun and captivating games for casual gamers of all ages. Available on multiple platforms, including PC, Mac, and mobile devices, MrJoy games can also be played directly inside popular web browsers. MrJoy is based in California's sunny Silicon Valley.

About Freeverse

Freeverse strives to develop and publish seamless software, with a particular concentration on the Mac OS and the Xbox 360. Our developed and published titles have been honored with more Apple Design Awards than any other company. Our original characters have appeared in TimeDigital, Wired, and Animation World magazines, as well as television commercials for Blockbuster Video.

Headquartered in New York City, Freeverse draws upon the talents of artists, programmers and sound designers from around the globe.

###
PR Contact

Brian Akaka
akaka@freeverse.com
212-929-3549

"Gentlemen, I'm goin' home in my new car."

Jon Frisby — 2007-09-20T01:08:11+00:00

Forgive me if this seems a bit rushed, I've actually spent two days working on it now!

Releasing a game has been a bit like this for me.

As of 9/16/2007, I join the ranks of those who have published a game. That date is 3 months to the day since I left my day job to focus exclusively on MrJoy, and naturally I get upstaged by much bigger news. Darn your black heart Josh William!!! Actually, in all seriousness, the IAC thing is great news for indie developers. The web is the best opportunity we have to put our games in peoples' hands, and most of the big portals are pretty skittish about requiring a 3D card right now. Creating a marketplace of people who are all prepared to play games that are more rich, more complex, and take better advantage of what their machines are capable of is a brilliant idea and I look forward to seeing how IA shapes up!

Anyway, I figured now is as good a time as any to post the obligatory post-mortem while I take a brief respite to catch my breath.

Interestingly, this is not my first game. My first game is still in the works, but has taken a bit of a back seat to When Orcs Attack for strategic reasons. Look for Harmonic Convergence to be released soon though.

I suppose I should break this into several pieces: The plan, what went right, what went wrong, and what's next. It's way too early for "conclusions".

The Plan

An entrepreneurial friend of mine laid the seed of what seemed to both of us to be a brilliant idea at the time and I, having wanted to get into game development for a while dove in head first. Ultimately I chose to go it alone; I decided to take almost everything I have and go all-in. From the standpoint of my development as an entrepreneur this was critical. Nothing is quite as effective at encouraging learning and reinforcing lessons as feeling the pain of having your own money -- your own future -- on the line. This is what I have come to refer to as the fear of being Homeless On The Street Giving Handjobs For Crack (apologies to Matt Stone and Trey Parker).

The idea is breathtakingly ambitious in scope, and I had never shipped even a trivial game before. That led to The Plan. The Plan was, and is, to develop the game incrementally. To build four separate games each getting me part of the way to my goal in terms of technology and art assets and allowing me to test assumptions about gameplay and business models along the way.

I decided that I would take precisely three months to develop each game, and scope the games to fit in that time. I would need myself, one more engineer, and an artist plus a little miscellaneous contractor time. Each game would start with a basic concept for the gameplay, and then become whatever I could cram in within 3 months.

To make certain that I would hit the 3 month deadline, I set a deadline two weeks earlier -- 9/1, and aimed hard at that. Sure enough, I missed it.

This has meant I've had to do things a bit differently than the usual project management route. Having a design document is a useful tool in most cases but here it would have just been utter BS. Having never shipped a game before, I cannot say what features are "hard" or what features are "easy". Committing myself to any particular feature becomes a huge risk when I have a very very short window of time and virtually no slack in terms of resources. Instead, I relied on the innate pressures of the situation to guide me in the right direction. For example, it was clear that the more time I had to tweak and polish the gameplay, the better the game I would deliver. This created pressure to get things to a playable state as early as possible. Having only three months ensures that the game must be fairly simple that it not wind up being layered with needless complexity that will only appeal to hardcore gamers at the cost of making it less accessible to my target audience.

Features thus fell into three important categories:

1) Features that must be there in order to ship: These are things that are simply fundamental to the style of game. For WOA, the big one here was A* pathfinding.

2) Features that seem easy to implement: A list prioritized to maximize the fun-factor and replay value while minimizing the amount of time/energy/cost of implementation.

3) Nice-to-have features: In other words, features that just won't make it in.

The trick to making an approach like this work is keeping list #1 as small as possible, and learning to jettison things from list #2 very very quickly if they aren't as easy as you hoped. If you become attached to something that turns out to be hard to implement, you will miss your deadline.

Having come from the world of analytics, this was actually a pretty easy approach for me to take. I've learned a lot about identifying and questioning assumptions. When a game designer from a certain notable studio saw an early prototype of my game and said "their feet are sliding, you'll never sell a game without inverse kinematics" I just pointed out that my audience probably doesn't care about that and if they do I'll find out about it real quick once the game ships, and add it into the next game.

A good example of keeping list #2 under control was foliage. I had a great little foliage system in place that let me put 40 trees and half a dozen rocks on screen with only a small framerate hit on my machine (about 12fps off the 60fps I was getting) but it became instantly apparent that much more work would be required to make things playable on my minspec: It turns out GMA950 is extremely vertex bound, and increasing the vertex count 21x by adding foliage just wasn't gonna fly. So, it moved from list #2 to list #3.

A further key to my plan was having the right tools and the right people. The tool choice wound up being a very short list: The game must be web based, ideally with the possibility of a download version as well, and I wanted it to be 3D for a variety of reasons. My options ultimately came down to jMonkeyEngine and Unity. I chose the latter for the much much smoother art pipeline and prepared a fallback plan for what to do if plugin adoption became a critical bottleneck. Always always ALWAYS have a fallback plan for everything. If you don't have a fallback plan for something, THAT will be the thing that falls through.

As for the people, that's a more complicated -- and far more important -- question. It wasn't enough that they be good. It wasn't enough that they be economical. Their skills had to complement mine, and we had to be able to work together effectively. Basically they needed to be good at everything I'm bad at (an awful long list) and patient enough to not kill me along the way. I went with Magnus Blikstad for the artwork, John Seguin for the sound and music, and I'm still looking for an engineer. That's not to say that the other contributors weren't critical to making the game happen -- they absolutely were; they just didn't have to put up with me for three straight months. Gareth Morgan did in a day what would've taken me at least two weeks on my own. Tom Long made it possible for me to ship my game despite the fact that I got Magnus going way too late in the project and there was simply too much for him to get done in the time allotted.

What Went Right

The people. I have been awe-struck at the results the people I've worked with have produced. I throw them the most frustrating curve-balls, often due to my poor project management skills, and they simply adapt. The plan for game 1 was just on the wrong side of crazy and they made it happen.

The tools. Not having to drop into C++ was crucial for me, especially without a more skilled engineer on board. Being able to use Mono instead of a slow and/or limited script language, or C++ was a HUGE win. Having a smooth art pipeline was even more important. Magnus gave me source art that would lead to a 105MB download version of the game if I used it as-is. Getting this into a 5MB web player would have been a challenge if I had to go into Gimp and resize textures by hand. Unity's ability to control import sizes for textures, adjust mip-mapping, auto-generate normal maps, control what type of compression is used for textures, and so forth with just a couple clicks made it possible for me to carefully tweak and adjust and control where I wanted to sacrifice space for visual quality and where I could get away with trimming things down a notch. As a result of this, the web player hovered in the 4-7MB range throughout the entire development process.

What Went Wrong

The people. The engineers I wanted to hire didn't work out for a variety of reasons (!@#$%^&* immigration policy!!!), so I was left on my own to do business administration, business development, AND coding. I did not get a lot of sleep.

The tools. As amazingly productive as Unity has been, it definitely wasn't problem-free. This was mostly due to it being a beta. I hit a critical show-stopper problem with particle effects where the only effective workaround I could find was "don't use them". This ultimately turned out to be a bug in Mono, but I lost roughly a week to fighting that issue alone. OpenAL wasn't terribly cooperative either. The nature of the game is such that there's a huge variance in polyphony. There may be one or two towers and a handful of enemies or there may be dozens of towers and dozens of enemies. Even if OpenAL hadn't been buggy, this would have quickly become indistinguishable noise. Unfortunately that was made worse by OpenAL trashing heap when it got overloaded. This led to a rather last-minute effort to make a sound manager that would give me explicit control over polyphony so I could "fake" things. Sound effects DO get louder as the number of things that want to play them increases but they do so at a much slower rate than they would if those things each simply called Play() independently, and there's a cap on how MUCH louder they can get. I lost positional audio as a side effect but that's not critical for this game.

On top of the technical hitches, my ignorance of the realities of 3D development made things quite challenging at times. I added point lights to many of the projectiles only to discover that things came to a screeching halt on my relatively high end video card (GeForce 8600M -- laptop card, but much higher end than my target minspec). Turns out that having a few dozen lights casting shadows against a few dozen enemies does terrible terrible things like increase the number of draw calls from ~400 to about ~6,500. *ahem*

QA. I didn't devote nearly enough time to this. I assumed, wrongly, that because the game was very simple and limited in scope that I could do this on the fly. Three point releases in 24 hours were the net result of that. Oops.

What's Next

I'm spending the next two weeks doing the business administration and business development tasks that I should've taken care of along the way and then I dive into game 2. Along the way I'm hoping to hire an engineer (send me a resume if you're interested!). I've got about 4 different distribution opportunities to follow up on, and I need to dig up as many more as I can!

So game 2 starts development on 9/30, with the goal being completion on 12/15 and a hard deadline of 12/30.

I AM CODER, HEAR ME ROAR! *SQUEEK*

OH GOD!!!! THE ORCS ARE INVADING!!!!!!

Jon Frisby — 2007-09-17T05:49:36+00:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce the initial public release of MrJoy's new epic tower defense experience: When Orcs Attack!

There will be a web based version as well shortly, pending the release of the Unity 2.0 Web Player. In the meantime, enjoy the download version and please forgive the very spare product page -- we'll spiffy it up with screenshots and the like soon but in the meantime everyone involved in the project could use a good night's rest.

mrjoy.com/games/6

Be gentle; the payment processing isn't automated yet so I have to process entries into the license server by hand and there's probably a few bugs left (just drop me a line!) but it's been tested on various combinations of Intel, ATI and nVidia hardware under MacOS X 10.4.*, Windows XP, and Vista so hopefully it'll be OK.

5 days, and counting... (Or: We Likes Numbers!)

Jon Frisby — 2007-09-11T09:44:26+00:00

Windows

MacOS X

This update fixes some terrain rendering glitches under DirectX 9, and some issues involving non-U.S. locales. Also tweaks game balance a bit more, checks for updates, and has a high score menu. In other words: 100% Feature complete. Proper Windows installer to follow in the next build.

I just bought a PC to use for Vista and ATI testing, so I'll be spending some time over the next couple days working on that, plus other general bug fixes. I'm less worried about game balance for launch than I was though... You see, at AGDC I found a very very interesting company with a very very interesting product:

Plus 7 Systems

I have known for some time that my biggest challenge would be game balance. I allotted 25-30% of development time of When Orcs Attack to it and it's still pretty badly balanced. I came up with mathematical models, even using sigmoid curves to define how much harder enemies get and how much gold they yield but it's still not quite "right". I anticipated that at some point I would need an analytics-based approach to game balance but I just didn't realize it would be as early as game 1. I've also been feeling a bit nervous about how I would implement it since I'm still looking to fill a full-time engineer position (and working 100+ hr weeks to make up for the lack of an engineer) as-is (if anyone is interested -- send me your resume / samples of your work...).

Well, as I was floating around AGDC looking for various companies I noticed a big banner that said something to the effect of "Balance without nerfing". Instantly the clouds parted, a light from heaven shone down on this tiny little booth, and a chorus of angels began singing Ode to Joy. I walked up to the booth as fast as my blistered feet would carry me, and scanned the literature while the gentleman manning the booth talked to another prospect. I confirmed that it was indeed what I thought it was and when he turned his attention to me -- before he could actually *say anything* -- I asked him simply: "How much?"

You see, I like numbers. I like analytics. I know that they are no silver bullet but they are an incredibly powerful tool. I've personally seen fairly mediocre analytics change how a company does business and accelerate its growth dramatically. And here I was faced with a company that was doing exactly what I had already hoped to do.

The long and shot of it is that you feed it game data -- information about the options that were available to players in a game, and what choices they made -- and it feeds back small, incremental suggestions about changes to make. Make this spell 0.5% more powerful. Make this tower cost 1% less. No large changes (and thus, no overt nerfing).
Now, their service is NOT cheap. Think lots-of-cash PLUS royalties. In fact, don't even bother contacting them if you don't have a fairly substantial pile of cash in the bank. Fortunately for me, I am putting a non-trivial amount of money into this venture and so I *do* have some cash to put into something like this.

We (two of the guys from +7 and myself) got together for dinner that evening and hammered out a tentative deal and so I am pleased to note that starting with the first point release of When Orcs Attack, the game will be making use of the +7 Balance Engine to help eliminate hyper-effective strategies, and to help ensure the viability of as broad an array of strategies as possible. If all goes well, players will simply notice the game getting more fun as time passes.

When Orcs Attack!

Jon Frisby — 2007-09-06T16:13:06+00:00

Just to follow up Magnus' blog:
Mac
Windows

The game is currently about 1.5 weeks away from shipping. Got a few bugs to fix, some animations to calibrate and some game balance work to do still but it's just about feature-complete* and ready to go. The download is just a bit on the heavy side, because of debug symbols being included. Naturally this won't be the case for the final release.

* - Ok, so it doesn't check for new versions yet and the high score display isn't done.... (Magnus! I'm looking in your direction!)

When you have a document that is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL and undergoing RAPID CHANGE...

Jon Frisby — 2007-06-12T13:09:35+00:00

Make frequent backups, even if it is 236MB.

Because when you're system spontaneously reboots in the middle of saving a change to said document two days before the big presentation where you need it, there's a good chance you won't get it back.

Fortunately for me, I was quite lucky and was able to repair the file in question -- a presentation produced using Apple's Keynote package. In this case the main copy of the gzipped XML that represents the actual content of the document was gone, but a temporary version was entirely undamaged. And since Keynote uses "bundles" (a MacOS construct where a directory looks acts and tastes like a single file from the GUI -- but is still treated as a directory from the shell), all I had to was go in and rename index-temp.apxl.gz to index.apxl.gz, and I was good to go.

Had it been worse, I would have lost a very substantial amount of editing and new content that I had not yet pushed to an off-site location.

*phew*

-JF

Time for something new!

Jon Frisby — 2007-06-05T15:53:39+00:00

In August of 2001, Ken dragged me kicking and screaming into his apartment and we started a company. Several years ago, he moved on to bigger and better things, and now it is time for me to do the same. So I spend the next two weeks preparing for WWDC, wrapping things up here, and preparing for my next endeavor -- one which I am truly excited about. (And which is, of course, gaming related...)