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The Indie Dozen: Charlie Knight interview(Guardian Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The indie games scene is not exactly short on retro-inspired bullet hell shooters – since the likes of Mutant Storm and Geometry Wars arrived, you can't really move out there without bumping into a Treasure-referencing blaster. However, UK coder Charlie Knight has managed to carve a nich for himself via incendiary twitch-fests like Irukandji and Bullet Candy, and is now ready to release his latest assault on the senses and hand-eye coordination, Scoregasm. Over the summer, he was fixing bugs, adding a workable front end, designing logos and starting to look into distributors for the game. We caught up with him last week to find out how he feels about the title's impending release... So how do you feel about Scoregasm's impending release?Nervous. I've not felt like this about launching a game before – I'm putting it down to the amount of time and effort I've put in over the last two years, and maybe how attached I've become to working on it. My last couple of releases have been two or three week projects, and getting them out there hasn't been difficult because I've not really had time to develop too much of a thing with them, or to feel too personal about them. I guess it's time for me to cut the cord, and stop being so much of a twat about it. Have you got a definite release date?Yes! Well, sort of! I'm hoping to release on the 7th October, and providing I can get everything together in time I'll launch then. What were the key game systems you finished over the summer?The last major bit I had to add was the online scores system, which I'm super happy with. It's by far the best system I've had in any of my games to date (thanks Doug!), and has some cool features that I think players will like, especially the tagging feature that allows you to create your own boards for friends or user groups, etc. And apart from that, it's been about finishing everything off?Over the summer, I've been in what I guess is as close to crunch mode as I get, considering that I don't really do crunch mode. There's a lot more game to this one than some of my previous releases, which have all been pretty arcade-like in structure. Scoregasm is still arcadey, but it's been designed to be played at home, so it's much more pick up and play and there's a whole slew of extra games too. I've had some nice feedback from testers lately who aren't normally shooter players, who said they'd been surprised at how much they've enjoyed it and how quickly they've picked up how to play, which is very reassuring. Can you tell us about your engine?The game is written in Blitzmax, which is a kind of object orientated BASIC/C++ hybrid, and allows direct access to OpenGL which is what's used for rendering on all platforms. Along with this, I'm using MiniB3D for displaying models and creating cameras etc. It's a fairly basic engine, but it's quick and easy to work with, and works well across the different platforms I'm targeting. Where MiniB3D isn't so sharp is for things like particles and 2D imagery rendered into the 3D scene, so I wrote my own system that performs much better, and allows for many thousands of particles/lines/other stuff rather than the few hundred I could get using MiniB3Ds implementation. The game doesn't use shaders as I wanted it to run on everything, even those shitty laptops you get free with phone contracts. The super cool Peter Stock gave me some frameskip code a few weeks ago which I've added in, and although I've not seen it running myself, I understand it plays reasonably well on a 1Ghz Intel Atom netbook, which I'm pretty chuffed with actually! How about audio?Scoregasm is using BASS, which is a pretty decent cross platform library. Mostly I picked this one because the license isn't limited to one game if you're a shareware author (such as myself!), and it can stream audio nicely. You can get some useful data from audio streams with it too, like equalizer values in real-time for audio reactive stuff, although I haven't worked anything like that into this game. The last main bit of the core code is the online stuff I guess, which was pretty much dictated to me by Doug, who wrote the online score API. I'm using LibCurlSSL to communicate with the server securely, and he's build some cool features into the API for people to play with ( for example, the 'find me' feature, tagging for competitions and usergroups, and date range searches). Have there been any real killer bug problems?The final big bug I have to contend with before release is a nasty hardware dependent one – in this case 64bit Windows PCs with ATI graphics cards. This sort of thing can be a real shit, and I imagine more so for indie developers who don't have a wide range of hardware to test on, or the spare cash to just go out and buy a new machine to reproduce the issue. In this case, I've not had much luck with the crash reports testers have sent back to me, and because I don't have a machine that I can reproduce the crash on, it's a fairly tiresome trial and error process getting to the bottom of it. AAArrgh! So what's next?I want to learn some new stuff. I try to make sure I know everything I'll need to before I start writing a game, so that I don't encounter any surprises along the way that could cause a project to stall. I'd like to learn a bit more about modern rendering techniques, as I'm a bit stuck in the past as far as graphics technology goes. Shaders look very much up my street, so I'm really looking forward to finding out what they do! There is a suppressed desire to make some add-on packs for Scoregasm though, so I might do something like that first. I've got some really good ideas for new levels, but I guess it depends on how well the game is received. Right now, I'm working on a website for the game. I'm not a natural web coder, so it's been slow progress getting it to work well in various different browsers – IE I'm looking at you! But I'm pretty pleased with how it's coming along. With any luck, you'll all have seen it – and possibly even used the 'Buy Scoregasm' button – by the time the next Indie Dozen update happens!You can find out more about Charlie's games at his website, cleverly titled Charlie's Games. To find out more about Gamesblog's Indie Dozen project, go here. (c) 2011 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |