Mad Rantz

I’ve been wrestling for a while now with the identity of Lumpy and what types of games we’d like to be known for. I’ve been talking to people in the community a bit and my poor wife can attest to the amount of time I’ve spent trying to hammer out which direction to take. I see a game like Zuma by Popcap making unworldly amounts of money, and it’s a natural inclination to follow suit and try to make a next-gen clone.

Of course, I know for a fact that there are at least two other such clones coming out in the next six or so months. So, maybe not so smart to go there, eh? But the money that is flowing in the casual game market is terribly sexy to someone who has not worked fulltime for his own studio for two years. And why shouldn’t I attempt to compete at that level? Anything I try to accomplish as a studio should be at a high level, right?

I then think about why it is I do this thang that I do. It’s because I want to have fun making fun for people. If I’m not enjoying myself, then I’d be better off not trying so hard to make a success out of something as risky as a game studio. Maybe I should buy and sell real estate if that’s the case.

I spoke for just a few minutes with Jeff Tunnell last week and I took away one important thing from the conversation. I’m not even sure he was aware of imparting this, but I do thank him for his time. He reminded me that a business like Lumpy or 21-6 or Bravetree or GarageGames is a long-term commitment. You cannot expect to make a quick buck and then do whatever you want from then on. You have to invest yourself in your company and grow it.

I was doing this at 21-6, to be sure, and many of the decisions we made there were looking long-term. So, I’m aware that this is a long-term deal. But sometimes you need a reminder, and that’s what is so nice about having good people to talk to in the indie game dev community.

So, what is Lumpy going to do now?

We are going to make games that fill niches that aren’t well-served. We are going to make games with some depth.

We are going to make games that I would buy!

(And then we’re going to sell the hell out of them.

The first game we are currently prototyping is one inspired by the likes of Seven Cities of Gold. It will be a bit more in-depth than that game, similar in scope to the recently-released Pirates! If it turns out to be as much fun as I think it will, we’ll move on to full production sometime in April I imagine. And it will very likely be 2D using the T2D engine.

I’m pretty damned excited and I can’t wait to have something show now.

I’ve been a bit busy these last few days, and my poor blog is paying the price for it. Yesterday I started working for the folks at MVP Online creating some sports games. I spent a bit of the weekend working on getting up to speed with their current codebase. I also spent some time this weekend examining the next steps for Lumpy.

T2D?

The current plan is to prototype a few ideas with the now-released Torque 2D Engine. At the very least this is a nice engine to quickly prototype 2D game ideas. Maybe not as easy to use yet as something like Macromedia’s Director product, but then again you get to think like a real programmer using T2D instead of whatever you have to think like to code up something in Director (kidding, kidding - it’s a cool product I know). I’m not 100% sure yet if we should ship using T2D, though there are some benefits in doing so. However, there are some downsides also, depending on what game we choose to do.

Phil Steinmeyer gives a pretty decent overview in his blog of things to consider if you want to get your game into the casual audience online portals and hit the largest possible audience. In particular having a web-enabled version of our game might prove very beneficial, but with T2D the only real option I see would be to use ActiveX, which is a questionable move (someone correct me if I’m wrong here). I’m also a little (itty-bitty amount) worried about having no fallback software rendering mode. I’m not sure what the stats are nowadays on 3D video cards and casual gamers, but I still wonder how much to be concerned about cutting any piece of the potential audience due to something like hardware requirements.

Of course, some of this concern is predicated on what kind of game we make. If we went for something more for the hardcore gamers, I wouldn’t worry about hardware or web versions of the game. But I’m leaning towards the first game being more casual. We’ll see.

Help, I need somebody…Help, not just anybody…

The next thing I decided is that I wanted to bring on someone to help code things up sooner rather than later. It would be cool if I could include people in the earlier prototype phase of development if at all possible. So, I pinged fellow GarageGames dev Nicolas Quijano to help out. If I can get him to sign the darned business forms (again - kidding Nic, kidding), we’re going to start prototyping the first game idea hopefully this week. I want to publically welcome Nic aboard and I’m really looking forward to drinking with him again at IGC…wait, no…developing games with him at Lumpy - yes, that’s it. Or both.