Leaving Early Access

After almost exactly six months after the initial release Fracture the Flag is leaving Steam Early Access!

FTF has come a long way from that first buggy release back in June! A sincere thank you to all that gave feedback and helped shape FTF into a much better game. The goal of an Early Access release was to get feedback from a wide pool of testers. No game is ever complete or perfect and FTF is no exception. There is always more that could be added and details that could be polished, but there also needs to be a time to call a project “finished.”

Support for FTF will continue but will be focused on fixing bugs rather than adding content. I look forward to taking all that I learned over the last few years and applying it my next game...

Low Poly Renders

Two years ago, I talked my school into allowing me to teach an intro game development class. I still can't believe it and I get a huge grin on my face when I think about how lucky I am. This fall I convinced folks that I should be allowed to run a week long intensive course about making low poly renders with Blender...

Sure I've done enough "box art" for Fracture the Flag to know the basics and produce work that's "good," but I've spent almost no time making non-game art.

Oops.

So in my game dev course I assigned a project where the students had to make box art for a new game. Basically an excuse to work more with Blender and dig a bit deeper into the program. The first part of the assignment was to find a published low poly image and use it as inspiration and guidance.

I joined my students and began to create my own low poly render. I choose Winter Night by Vitaliy Prusakov. I loved the lighting and the simple, but elegant colors.

My result was far from perfect or as tasteful as the original.

Snowy Village

Not bad, but I thought I could do better. Those roofs? Where'd the snow on the fences go? The fence rails are too straight...

I was having so much fun I wanted to do another. So I started working on the view from my front door.

The result is (obviously) highly stylized and somewhat idealized. I think its also step up in overall quality.

Backyard

Creating these images has been such great practice, not to mention great fun. I'm sure I'll make a few more, but I'm dreaming of getting a similar style into Unity for my next game...

I think I've figured out the light baking and textured needed to make it work at 60 fps and I'm pretty excited about it. It would be such a step up from Fracture the Flag's art work :)

FTF: Testing New Features

Recently I've been working to add a two new features to Fracture the Flag - both stretch goals. The first new feature is the addition of defensive watchtowers. The watchtowers can target workers, swordsman, siege weapons and enemy balloons, but won't target enemy buildings.

The towers provide much needed ranged defense against bombers and swordsman. Especially early in the game watchtowers can provide a good deal of security. They'll also easily knock down the new hot air balloon units.

Blender render of the bomb dropping hot air balloon

The hot air balloon unit does a low speed strafing run with three large and very effective bombs. While landing three bombs on a target can be devastating, the balloons themselves are relatively fragile and can be shot down by a watchtower fairly easily. Balloons are a one time use vehicle. After dropping their bombs they will fly off to the horizon.

The addition of the watchtower and hot air balloons (in early play testing) add a degree of balance and more variety to a player's strategy. It's also just really to see flaming arrows flying all over and bombs raining down on your opponents buildings.

A short teaser of the new features can be seen below.

For those who are REALLY interested I did a longer play testing session via Twitch. There are a few bugs and a few things that aren't ready for prime time, but you can see the new features (more or less) fully functional.

Watchtowers - Predictive Targeting

The soon to be latest addition to Fracture the Flag will be the defensive watchtowers. The towers will provide stationary ranged defensive. Something that is very much missing with the current build.

The watchtower script estimates a time of flight, gets velocity of the target, and uses a healthy dose of high school physics to predict the location of the target when the arrow will arrive. There is some inherent error in the calculations as a few assumptions must be made, but these turn out to be minor.

Once the predicted position has been calculated another healthy dose of kinematics is used to create a launch vector for the arrows. This is then turned in to a velocity vector and passed off to the arrow's controlling rigidbody to provide a physically accurate trajectory.

There are some errors in the calculations, such as the time of flight shouldn't be independent of the angle, but one value needs to be calculated before the other... The result can be small errors. The coding also allows a degree of inaccuracy to be added (not shown) for the sake of realism. This quickly makes any numerical errors pretty irrelevant.

Click to Color

I was needing something simple to work on (the day job has turned my brain to mush) so I spent a few hours last week polishing a tool that I've used in the production of Fracture the Flag. The tool allows the creation and editing of color palettes within Unity.

Low poly scene and the 

Click To Color

interface

The use of color palettes along with flat shaded low poly assets allows a significant reduction in the number of materials being used in a scene or project. This can also reduce draw calls and improve performance.

Due to the flat shading models can be unwrapped and the UV's can be stacked. This allows the texture size to be very small - in theory as small as one pixel per color used in the project! This means that by using a 32 by 32 pixel texture a project can have up to 1024 colors contained in a 4 kb file! Ideal for mobile uses or simply keeping a desktop build size down to something reasonable.

Unwrapped model in Blender

The editing of these textures within Unity also allows the artist or developer to quickly adjust colors of models in a scene while lighting and image effects are shown in real time. This speeds up development time as there is less back and forth between Unity and a photo editing program.

Click To Color will be available on the Unity Asset Store:  https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/72930

All the features of Click to Color can be seen in the video below.

A potential work flow using Unity and Blender is shown in the second video.

Unity Object Swapper

A while back I found myself looking at a Unity scene with several hundred trees that each needed to be updated and the connection to the prefab had somehow broken... Rather than spent hours replacing each one I spent almost as much time writing an editor extension to do the same thing.

I'd forgotten about the tool, until a student of mine ended up in a similar position. Which made me revisit the tool a do just a bit of fine tuning.

Screenshot of the editor window

It's a pretty simple script, but handy all the same. If I find the time I might add it to the Unity Asset Store as a free asset. Until then, assuming this looks like useful, you can download it from this link (box). There's no documentation, but it should be pretty self explanatory- the search is case sensitive.

Testing Single Player Combat

The next major goal for Fracture the Flag is adding to the single player challenges with the addition of some basic combat oriented levels. The new levels will continue to be time based - how fast can you take out the AI base. It will not be a full blown single player campaign - as a solo dev it’s just not possible to pull that off so I won’t promise what I can’t deliver.

Testing of the new scripts was recently done live on Twitch. The stream was also reposted on YouTube.

 AI bases will have a functional economy to support their attacks on the player’s base. If there’s no ammo then the siege weapons will fall silent. If build points run dry the AI can’t recruit more workers or swordsman…

 The AI will not be capable of adding new building or siege weapons. The AI base is largely static, once a player destroys a building, siege weapon, or flag it’s gone. However, workers and swordsman will be replaced.

 The AI is capable of both offense and defense. Sending groups of swordsman to attack buildings and delivering bombs to the base of flags and other buildings. Defensively swordsman will patrol or stand and guard. Siege weapons will also fire if you get too close.

AI Controlled Bombers

There are lots of little bugs and plenty of balancing to work on. So no promises on a release date. The first release will likely be on the beta channel as many scripts have been adapted to allow the AI which will then need testing to ensure multiplayer didn’t break…

Release Date and First Video Review

Fracture the Flag is the first game to be released by One Wheel Studio. The release date has been set and the last minute tweaks and optimizations are being made.

FTF will be available on Steam June 9!

 Fracture the Flag will be priced at 2.99 USD. Prices may vary with your currency.

Also! The first video review has been posted by eNtak. The video shows some of the main features of FTF and plays a little of a single player challenge. Don't just take my word for it. Watch the video...

Getting Greenlit on Steam

The intent of this post is to share both my experience with Steam Greenlight as a solo dev and the data from that experience. I am happy to share more data if I have it.

I am a solo developer, or at least I’m a just one guy working in his spare time (not sure that makes me a "developer" yet).  I started working with Unity and Blender a little over two years ago with no real thought beyond “Hey, this looks cool.”

Oh, the wild ride that is Steam Greenlight! 

Steam Concept

Fracture the Flag is the result of twelve months worth of my spare time. It’s the first and only game that I’ve made. I have a full time job that pays well enough, but why not swing for the fences with Steam Greenlight and see what happens? Maybe I could upgrade the office? Or buy a new mountain bike? And I’d be competing with things like the “Toilet Simulator” so how hard could it be?

Being cautious and curious I setup a Steam Concept page, just to see what would happen. I knew the traffic would be a small compared to a true Greenlight page would be, but it still seemed worth my time - and it was.

For the first few days the Concept page was getting 4-7 hits a day and almost entirely “yes votes.” Even that small trickle of traffic died down after 4-5 days. Now almost 3 months in only 90 people have visited and a bit over 30 of those have voted the game up. This resulted in a fantastic yes to no ratio of 97%, but not much else to get excited about.

My stats matched up with Quiver of Crows data which was Greenlit back in January. I was feeling cautiously optimistic. 

I put in some more work, finished a second level that was, in my opinion, better looking and more interesting than the first level that was featured on the Concept page. With this and a few other visual details added I put together a second and updated game trailer.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-NOCxpiP4&w=640&h=340]

Steam Greenlight

So off to Steam Greenlight I went…

Once the small fee had been paid and the page was setup I was terrified to push the publish button. I double and triple checked the screenshots and that the video played.

Was everything as good as it could be? No. Did I know how to make it better? Nope. 

The first few votes came in. Oh no... Way more no’s than yes’s. Not good. It's over. Next game?

I took a deep breathe and the tide changed. Over the next few days the number of yes and no votes started to even out. I obsessively checked the page, cheering when yes’s came in and responding to thoughts or criticism in the comments. As a side note: as the number of comments increased so seemly did the ratio of yes’s to no’s. Interesting.

24 Hours into the campaign the yes/no ratio was at 44% yes's which was well above the meager 31% of the average top 50 game!

I was starting to get excited!

I also began to wonder “How does a game make it to the top 50 with only 31% yes votes?” Wow! How can you drive that many people to your page that aren’t excited about your game? Send a few my way?

By the end of the second full day the yes and no votes had evened out - each at 48% of the total votes cast. This was a pretty good boost to the ego. I’m a first time solo dev working in my spare time and I’m doing better, maybe a lot better, than the average!

These “great” results continued through day 6 of the campaign. Breaking into the top 100 on day 4 and getting more yes votes than no votes!​​

Then the Spigot Turned Off...

I’ve never played a full round of golf in my life, but I know what a dog leg looks like...  And it looks like the bright green line in the graph below.

Unbelievable how quick the spigot of visitors shut off.  The page went from 600+ visitors a day to less than 50! On day 6 I got almost 300 yes votes. On day eight I got 6 yes votes (no typo there). Judging from the incredibly hard to figure out and ever changing  “Cumulative ‘Yes’ Votes” graph this is not uncommon and is pretty much the norm for all but the top 5 or 10 ranked games.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe my game isn’t good enough. Maybe it shouldn’t be on Steam. I can deal with that. There are games that get to 2000 or 3000 or even 4000 yes votes in just a few days. Clearly those developers have done something right. I managed just over 1300 in 6 days...

One of the best descriptions of the (hypothesised) criteria for being Greenlit suggested that Greenlight was not about popularity, but rather is a way to gauge the developers ability to drive traffic and thus sales. If a developer can drive traffic then Steam stands to profit. If the developer can’t drive traffic once Steam stops sending people to the page then maybe the game wouldn’t sell enough copies…

It’s not a flawless, but I can see that perspective.

So What Now?

I'm not sure what's next. I am torn. One minute wanting to move onto the next idea. After all I've learned so much over the past two years. The next minute I still believe in the game... After all its been 8 freaking days! What could I possibily expect?

Fracture the Flag is currently bouncing around in the mid 80's in the rankings. Not bad. Only one round of games has been greenlit since the game hit the top 100. So there is hope, plenty, if I'm honest.

So I don't know. No pity party. Just lack of certainty.  Its been a rollercoaster to say the least.

3 Weeks Later...

I'd all but given up. I was ready to make the next game. I was on the road to a bike race and got the email that FTF had been Greenlit! Wahoo! 

I apparently forgot to take screenshot when FTF was Greenlit so the image below is 9 months after the fact. The votes don't change after a game has been Greenlit but the vistors and followers still do. 

A Little Commentary

As with many other people I am stunned by what gets submitted to Greenlight. After all Fracture the Flag was in the batch of games with the “Toilet Simulator.” We can speculate all day long what the point was, but that developer got way more action than I did - I bet the Toilet Simulator guy isn't talking about me!

When I see games like the “Grass Simulator” for sale it makes me want to cry a bit. I know my game is better and I suspect most people, or at least 48%, would agree with me.

At the end of the day I’m glad that Valve is making the decision not purely based on numbers, but the process is still mysterious. When Fracture the Flag was floating between 91st and 93rd on Greenlight the 92nd ranked game was Greenlit… Ouch.  

From what I’ve read, and deduced from the stats, Fracture the Flag will continue to slowly march up the rankings. It jumped to 83rd once a handful of other games had been Greenlit. It seems likely that eventually the game will be given a thumbs up. If the day ever comes that Fracture the Flag is Greenlit I will no doubt be ecstatic! 

Until that day comes I'm on the slow part of the rollercoaster hoping for one more loop da loop.

There are a few things that I wish were different.

The first would be for some criteria to kick games off Greenlight. Maybe after 2-3 days you need a certain yes/no ratio. Or maybe during those first few days you need to get a certain number of yes votes per day. Something needs to be done to quickly filter the total crap that folks are submitting. Getting “voted off” and then having to wait before resubmitting seems like it would solve many of Greenlight’s problems.

The second would be the waiting. Many if not most games in the top 100 experience the dog leg or drastic slow down in votes.  If games are only getting 10 or so votes a day and (judging by the data) that will eventually push the game into the top 20 overall then why wait to Greenlight them? If 48% of the voters and 36% of the people who saw my page said they’d buy my game then isn’t that good enough? Or maybe bad enough that you pull the plug?

It seems everyone has a plan to “fix” Greenlight that removes the crap but allows their own game to get Greenlit… Maybe I'm just one more of those guys.