| - GAMEFARM - xbox live indie games creator |
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BLOG News, updates, game development thoughts --Jan 18-- Lootfest hasn't been selling anywhere close to the other block building games. Maybe people dont wanna try anything that isn't FPS, maybe it would need something like the yogcast to spread the news - who knows. I've got some network crashes (like all new network games), most of them are problems when people join and start sending data before they are fully synched with the rest. Im working hard on getting out an update within a month. Update will contain bug fixes, airplane and helicopter RC toys, and some more appearance alternaives. Plus a few extra bonus features. --Jan 14-- Lootfest Live Design is out now, hope you like it. Easiest way to find it is to Bing "loot" on your Xbox Video of an early build of Tabletop Live Design. The game is already fully playable in online multiplayer, I plan to release it in about a month. First version will only be working square based board games, but I plan to update it to work with other forms (like hex games) later on. --YEAR 2011-- --Dec 26-- My most anticipated games for 2012 1. Spelunky Been following this creator for a while, the game is gonna be awesome! 2. Grapple Buggy Tried the game during early development, best platform adventure I've played! 3. Retro city rampage An 8bit GTA full with humor. 4. Biochock infinite Maybe finally some fresh news in the FPS genre --Dec 25-- The chances for Lootfest Live Design to release this year look slim. It just failed it's third peer review. It's just small, easy to fix, bugs. Nothing to worry about. An early picture from a small game project I call "Tabletop Live Design".  The main idea of that game is to design your own board games and play them with friends. Probably a small market, but I have a big passion for board games. --Dec 8-- Lootfest Live Design is in it's second approval process, I pulled it the first time be course people found some network bugs. If no bugs shows up, the game should be out in one week. The thing I think the game is missing most right now is more variation in the fighting. I've had a lot of time to think through Lootfest2, I will move the deadline forward to be able to garantee better quality. I will probably spend much more work on creating a intersting generated world, than I initinally planned. A friend convinced me to add my game to IndieDB. I initially planned to move this blog there, but the page is to restricted. I already regret using it, updating this, facebook, the forum, youtube and twitter is already to much work, which I should use on making games instead. --Nov 16-- Lootfest Live Design is complete, and I am running the final tests for the moment. The game will probably be out in 1-2weeks. An update is planned to release about 1month from release, including more RC toys, more zombies, more weapons and improvements to the collisions. Most of which are already half-done but had to be cut off to keep the deadline. I kinda count on the first version of my network becoming a disaster. Its almost impossible to do accurate network tests from my home. Having a quick update will hopefully let me adress those problems with minimum suffering from the users. 
--Nov 10-- Lumberjack sold around 700copies during it's first month. Lootfest Live Design is in its final testing stage now, so there is a high possibility that I will keep my deadline (mid-Nov). Got my first review for Lumberjack (if you don't count Dan's first impression vid). It's short and sweet, he gave it 4/5. --Nov 6-- I am making a brave try to speak english and think at the same time, in my first Vlog for Lootfest. Making it was a mixture of fun and horrifying. Hopefully I will get better at this. --Oct 26-- The release of Lumberjack have been a total failure. It peeked top download, 25 in US and 15 in UK and been falling like a rock since then. I've been depressed over wasting 3years on that game, but now I feel a bit better and try to focus on my next game. Lootfest Live Design now have a official forum. --Oct 22-- Lumberjack was released today, hope you will enjoy it! --Oct 15-- Two fat guys, that runs a gaming community, have started a channel for lootfest. This is fantastic news, and it will give the game a lot of exposure. --Oct 11-- A discussion about pixel art made me create this image in LFDesign. The image is 32*32blocks large. It took me about 3hours to complete, the face is almost pixel perfect from a photo, but the rest I made more or less on free hand to save time, the hardest with that was to not make it look to perfect.  If you wanna make anything similar, I highly recommend a pixel art program a friend of mine have made: --Oct 10-- "Lootfest Live Design" teaser trailer A race inside Lootfest Live Design See Dan Steers reactions to Lumberjack while beta testing it --Oct 5-- The name for my next title is set, "Lootfest: Live Design". There is about 1month of development left. 
--Sep 22-- I've made a update to the graphics in Lootfest. The creation part itself is more or less complete, there are still some work left with the toys and enemies. I will submit my first playtest of the game in about one week, it's gonna be interesting to see what reactions I get.  Lumberjack is suffering from a build in bug in XNA, the release will be pushed another 2weeks, that sucks. Here is a reaction from one of the reviewers "No problems here. What a horrific game! Pass =)". --Sep 2-- I am announcing my next game. It's working name is "Lootfest Creation", it will basically be a game like Fortress Craft. My initially plan was to have a creation mode inside Lootfest2 and then a updated one in Lootfest3 etc. But since I was told that save files can't be moved between games, I had to cut it off to a seperate game. Lootfest Creation will contain advanced voxel creation tools (copy/paste and more), hordes of zombies, fun toys and a combined split screen and online gameplay. Planned release is early November. (This will be on the expence of Lootfest2, which planned release now is February next year). 
--Aug 25-- Lumberjack have started it's passing into the Xbox review process, takes normally a week. The game still have a problem with the music, somehow it have some unexpected noise. I've spent about one month, trying to figure it out, but the game is already way past it's time budget so I had to give up at last. The only "fix" I manage to do, is lowering the volume on the music to just hearable. It's very depressing to fail like this, but it's going to be a big relief to finally release it after 2.5years of work. Lumberjack have way more features than Lootfest (they share a lot of code, it's about 90% the same), but many persons don't like the cartoony graphics. It will probably not be as popular as Lootfest, I am guessing that it will reach top 7 best selling and will get around 2k sales the first month. --Aug 22-- Lootfest reached 10k sales this weekend, I have a trial-to-buy convertion rate at 28%. I feel very lucky, but at the same time I worry a lot about letting my fans down on Lootfest2. Maybe my only chance to make a living out of this. I should release Lumberjack now, but I still have some problem with the sound, I guess it is some problem with the mp3 compression that don't cooperate well with the XBOX. Last I gotta hype "Raventhorne" on xbox indies, I played it a lot in playtest, must be one of the best beat em ups I ever played. I specially love how anti-buttom-mashing it is, buy it! --Aug 19-- People ask me how I do the "voxels" in the game. Basically it is a runtime generated mesh that I create a surface with, giving the illusion of blocks. In more detail, I start off with a grid (byte[,,]) of numbers, each number is a material and zero is nothing. I check each position, if it have a material then I check all it's neighbor blocks. If anyone of these are zero I will place a polygon there, reprecenting a face. All shadows and such are made by changing the vertex colors. The Primitives 3D example is a good example of how to create generated mesh. I am pretty sure that Minecraft use about the same method as I, specially be course it is known to not use any hardware acceleration. But I think Fortress Craft is using shader effects to create their shadows instead, which means less control but the light changes can be instant. --Aug 17-- I had thoughts about also releasing Lootfest2 on PC, I've been in contact with two "Steam"-like services, Indie Pub and Beamdog, they both gave me thumbs up. I know steam is very selective, so I haven't even bothered contacting them. I see two major problems with a PC release, the game is pretty boring to play with a keyboard. Second, I have no experience at all with PC network programming, which will be the most work I have to put down on the convertation. Positive is that I can have a server supported high scores, at least until I get tired of hacker attacks. --Jul 23-- Loofest patch1 got out today. In Lootfest2 I've now added "drop-in" cooperative online gameplay. I am pretty new to networking, and read a lot about it before I started. I can already call bullshit on some advices I've got. They say the game have to be constructed for network from the beginning. I've been working on my engine for 3years without network in mind, and it only took me 2days to get it working. Software is soft, calling it unchangeable is just stupid. Also I often hear that the "Network Prediction" is the hardest part with network programming. For me that was the easiest part, I just recieve a goal position for each client object, then I move it 20% of the length toward the goal each update. Its a bit floaty, sure, but few games are better. Another feature added is creation, see video here: Last I wanna brag, Lootfest have won a price! INDIE GAME OF THE WEEK --Jul 21-- Since I release Lootfest 2½weeks ago, I've got a ton of nice feedback. About ten fan mails a day. But now I finally got mail from the other side. Written by the "Indie game chick" with the nice title "Your game sucked" (you can size up the text with ctrl+scroll): Kairi Vice: "You guys wanted feedback so here it is. Game Review Next time why not try to finish the game before you boot it out on the marketplace? No offense but creating video games requires patience to make sure that they're finished. You displayed none of that here." Fabian Viking: Its true that the game is a vertical slice or beta version, my hope was to bring in money so I could finish it (I need patience and food). Most people think they got enough value of the game for 1$. Thank you for your feedback/review, hopefully you like my next game better. Kairi Vice: After reading your website, I just wanted to make sure if I understand something... you're going to create a working version of the game and instead of putting it as a patch for those who already paid for the game, you're going to fuck those people over and make it a separate download? If so, wow. That's all I can say. You have a lot to learn about the game industry and customer relations. Fabian Viking: Yes I will make it a separate game and fuck all my fans as you say. First, the second game will be so different that I dont wanna take the old game away from those who liked it, and it will also give me more valuable time on the news list. There is a patch on the way for the first game with the most requested features like saving and other tweaks. I learn things everyday, but I am not more part of an industry then the kids selling juice in their neighborhood. --Jul 14-- I've made a big update to the open voxel editor. It now contains animation, copy/paste and nice selection features. In lootfest2 I now got 4 basic magic attacks, fire, lightning, poision and stunn. Lightning is easily the most fun one to use. --Jul 11-- The first patch for Lootfest is complete. The process to get it out on the XBOX is about two weeks long. The patch contains: *Bosses can't walk out of the castle anymore *Players can now buy stuff in trial mode (and that also removes the warp-to-certain-death-bug) *The monsters use less sound *SAVING! (got about 40mails requesting this), the game will only save the character status, the world will always be randomly generated. --Jul 9-- Lumberjack failed the Summer Uprising application, so there is no need to hold on to the game anymore. The game will be released within 2-3weeks. Lootfest touched the #2 place in best sales during one day, but been falling down since then. It's an amazing feeling, and addictive, now I really will fight for that first place with Lootfest2. This week I've been working on a crafting system for Lootfest, there will be a bunch of materials in different qualities. The player will go to crafting stations, like a black smith, and give them materials of choise to work something out with. --Jul 7-- Lootfest have become a huge success! I got bunch of very nice mails from fans and a positive review. Right now I am on #10 in best sales. This means I am blessed with the oppertunity to afford creating more and better games. The two main complaints about the game is the missing save feature and that the gamplay is to short. Also a bug slipped through the playtesting, when people select "buy game" they will be teleported to a boss and get killed instead, which is pretty much the best way to tell a customer to piss off. Don't know if I should laugh or cry.. A patch will come next week with the buy bug fixed and some other tweaks. Will not add save, the world is random generated in such way that it is very hard to save. The next version of the game will have a totally remade world and you will be able to save, I promise. --Jul 5-- Lootfest is out now! Can be downloaded on Xbox Live Indie games for 1$. --Jul 1-- Made an open voxel editor for Lootfest --Jun 30-- Added a game description for Lootfest (click on the box), wanna hear some reaction on the layout before I finish the others. Lootfest is going through a review process right now, with some luck it will be out this weekend. --Jun 29-- I've totally remade my homepage from being a page for programmer friends to a page with more info for buisness/fans. I tried to make everything fit on one page without it being to messy. Working on a nice presentation page for each game on the right side. |
my games
Release around Jun 2012
Out now! 
Out since 2011 
Out since 2011 
Out since 2008 playtest portfolioGames I have have helped develop with extended playtesting   |