The Escapist has done a story about Kingdom of Loathing. Thought ya'll might be interested in reading it since it has helped inspired my business model. Stumbling Into the Kingdom of Loathing
There are no subscription fees to play, and unlike many other browser-based games, the interface isn't cluttered with Google ads. The seven full-time employees who keep the game running make their living entirely from donations, with a little extra coming from selling merchandise.
See parents, it isn't as crazy as it sound!
About the Author: My name is Philip J. Ludington, MrPhil is a nickname I’ve been called for years. I make computer games; my one-man studio is Mr. Phil Games. My blog is called MrPhil Makes Games where I write about my games (duh) and sometimes about programming. I love playing strategy games, and write reviews for them at PC-Strategy-Games.com. Thanks for visiting.
That's right Ludum Dare 12 is Aug 8-10. Check out the website: Ludum Dare What is it? It's a game development contest. You have to single handedly create a game that fits the announced theme in 48 hours! It's a real challenge but wonderful fun. The LD48 forces you quickly cut to the bone of an idea and discover if it's fun to play or not. The rule that makes it extra challenging for me is you have to do the art yourself!
I'm looking forward to participating again. Battle Magic is a product of Ludum Dare 11, who's theme was minimalist. Ludum Dare is a part of my "Evil Plan A" to never be employed again. It'll be my secret skunk works laboratory for game ideas. If I'm successful at creating a game and some of the judges find it fun then I'll have my next project. The LD48's time constraint has the wonderful side effect of creating games that aren't too large. This makes it possible to release 3 or 4 games a year. At that rate even a small amount of success will be enough to keep me from having to dust off the resume.
If you haven't heard about this very interesting experiment by Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Firefly fame) go watch it now, it's good!
Everyone gather around, I have a HUGE announcement to make: I am officially working full-time on Mr. Phil Games! My last day at my old day job was June 30, 2008, so technically it started last week on July 1st, but with the holiday for 4th of July etc it was more like an extra long weekend.
The Goal
My goal is have my game Battle Magic from the
Ludum Dare 11 ported to SilverLight and available to play by Oct 1, 2008. There has been a lot of talked recently about the game industry transforming from a product or retail business to a service industry. So I’ve decided to experiment with that idea, and Battle Magic will be free to play. My salary will come from ads placed around the game and donations from fans. I plan to reward fans who donate money with unique in game items.
My reasons
I think as an indie it’s much easier to build up a fan base if your game is free! Once you’ve proven the games worth, players are naturally keen on supporting the game and the reward is a thank you, an extra cool thank you. I know I’d be beside myself if Sid Meier’s put a special item in a game just for me!
My inspiration
The donation system seems to be working very well for
Kingdom of Loathing (KoL.) KoL’s creator Zack “Jick” Johnson rewards players who donate $10 with a “Mr. Accessory” which gives an attribute boost to the player. There is also a store where you can trade them in for other interesting items. I’m hoping that my version of “Mr. Accessory” will allow players to switch to full screen mode. This is a very interesting feature of SilverLight and will effectively allow loyal fans to ignore ads.
The Long Term and Conclusion
This is all one big experiment. It has been a goal of mine for years to be an indie game developer. It is part of the reason I moved to Vermont (lower cost of living.) I’ve spent many hours researching, planning, and experimenting. I’m not sure about the long term plan, but my goal is to create a lifestyle that allows me to create interesting and fun games, pay my bills and be happy, wish me luck!
As you can see, something weird is also going on with the website. I'm experimenting with Squarespace as a potential new home for Mr. Phil Games.
I've decided to enter the Ludum Dare this weekend. So, in honor of the Ludum Dare I put GalCon back as the feature game because it is a Ludum Dare 8 (aka LD 8) child.
Here's my first post over at Ludum Dare Link to Ring.Insert(My.Hat)
I'm excited to have the chance to join this time. I’ve completely cleared the weekend and should be able to spend 100% of my weekend sleeping and gamedev-ing. Might even have a couple nights this week to do some warm-up!
This will be my second Ludum. Last time was a few back; I think the theme was Growth, so that would make it LD 7. I wasn't able to finish that one because I got hopelessly mired in my graphics code. This time around I'm going to use IndieLib and be able to focus on game play. I really want to walk away from this experience with something visible and modestly fun. I've been working a long time on game development without something visible to show off. It'd be nice to finally get something out there I can point to with pride!
Good Luck,
MrPhil
Mr. Phil Games
One of the gotchas I pointed out earlier was that Validation and Intellisense doesn’t work right for XAML files. A related trap that took me quite a while to figure out is the WPF Designer in Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t understand SilverLight XML! I had to right click my XAML file and tell it to open with the XML Editor in order to make all the errors go away. Even then it still complains about the “x:name” attribute. This is what I think they meant. All quirks, I hope, God willing, will go away with Visual Studio 2008, Glory be to Digital Lord Gates.
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SilverLightDevCampDC
An interesting question is how pop-up blockers and such interact with SilverLight. I personally had troubles with AVG freaking out when I was installing the SilverLight SDK. I finally got it to install correctly after I disable the "Resident shield." I then promptly turned it back on only to have it mess up the creation of a SilverLight project. So at this point AVG gets turned off any time I’m dealing with SilverLight.
For now protection software makers’ are playing catching up and are slowly becoming aware of SilverLight. I’d wager that pop-ups will be a problem for about a year, so plan accordingly.
When Pete Brown was building the Carbon Calculator pop-up blockers where a big concern. His solution was to use a page redirect and query strings. The crux of the problem is if a blocker comes up, then the user has to enable pop-ups, which causes the page to refreshed, thereby zapping all the data!
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Here are several gotchas I learned about at SilverLight DevCamp DC. You might not even understand what some of these are talking about, but hopefully by the end of this series you will.
- Keyboard input doesn’t work right for fullscreen mode
- Blend’s Media encoding fails sometimes
- You need to deploy debug (.pdb) files in order for Firefox to work
- You need to save the root element passed during the onload event so you can do a find controls with it later
- Validation and intellisense don’t work right in xaml files
- Attached properties don’t show-up in intellisense
- Do not start animations in the constructor
- No design time support for UserControls in Blend
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This is an amazing video of a sun flare. The TRACE satellite caught this flare which is what they call an X-Class flare, one of the largest and the kind responsible for blackouts and communication disruption. These loops are generating massive radiation and are estimated to be hotter than ten million degrees!
SilverLight DevCamp DC
This weekend I hauled myself down to DC to attend the SilverLight DevCamp DC. I learned quite a few things so I’ve decided, instead of one really long post about it all I’d do a series of quick posts about the things I learned.
I’d like to send a big THANK YOU to Frank La Vigne for organizing this event and recognize all the speakers because they did this as volenteers:
Apparently I came the furthest for the event and so was given a free copy of the just released SilverLight 1.0 Unleashed. I was quite happy because it was a book I was thinking about getting. If that wasn't surprise enough the book is filled with bright colors!
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nuggest #1
The first nugget I'll share is that a Windows Mobile version of SilverLight is in the works. Apparently there was a working demo at MIX07 and I found a video of the presentation by MLB.com, the mobile part is right at the end.
Links to the rest of the series:
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nugget #2
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nugget #3
SilverLight DevCamp DC Nugget #4
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SilverLightDevCampDC
Millions of people installed SilverLight in the last 48 hours:
Halo 3 ships this week, and no doubt many people will find themselves afflicted with a sudden illness that requires them to stay home one day this week. To help get you ready, watch one of the High Definition Halo3 Videos here (for a lower resolution video click here), and browse the Halo3 Game Guide here. Both are built with Silverlight 1.0.
Scott Guthrie
This explains the early bare bones 1.0 release which focuses on media functionality.
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