paranoidsoftware

[paranoidsoftware]

On The Move (skit)

While this blog is mostly about building games and a little game company, I am also concurrently living a life of daring feats and incredible adventures. So every once in a while (and in keeping with golden hip hop tradition), I’ll add a little story about my personal life here.

This is dawn somewhere in the middle of Germany, taken from an ICE train speeding from Munich to Lübeck, taken by me while feeling absolutely glorious.

Let me back up a little. My current big incredible adventure is that I’m moving across the country and moving in with my girlfriend, for the first time ever. As you may have gathered from my previous posts, I’m not particularly good at curbing my anxieties. And this double whammy of long distance move logistics and relationship commitment with a side of opening a business has plenty of opportunities to set the heart aflutter...

It’s true that many mornings these days I wake up feeling scared and anxious and restless. Like maybe it’s all too much for me to handle. Like maybe everything is doomed to failure and why even bother. But (of course there’s a but), once I’m actually moving forward, once we’re looking at apartments and opening bank accounts, once I’m actually signing the application for my business license, once I’m looking out the window of a fast train, the anxiety is gone, replaced by a kind of manic happiness.

It seems the happiest I’ll ever be is always in trains and planes and buses and cars, being on the move, going places, literally and figuratively. At the same time I know that I’m actually trying to be content in one place, to quell the urge to keep running and that I don’t have the strength or desire to live a life on the move. I haven’t quite figured out yet how to balance my urge to run and my search for peace, but I’m pretty sure cautiously optimistic I’m going in the right direction. Wish us luck!

[paranoidsoftware]

Silver Linings

Image if you will the following scenario: You have been following KEPLE for a while, you have like 40 stars hearts unlocked, you install the latest update, excited for new levels and what you get is this:

Not only did your phone somehow end up in your potted plant, but all your progress is gone!

Now image if you will that you’re having Chinese food with your bro all chill and your girlfriend texts you that the latest KEPLE update killed all her progress. Oh s**t.

An emergency rollback in the night and a few hours of debugging later I now know what went wrong and I’ve learnt two valuable lesson.

1. Don’t proguard your level classes if you use the class names as persistent ids. 2. Test the upgrade path before rolling out an update. This one in particular had a lot of changes under the hood and I should really have been more diligent. This isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed this, so I should have known. Last time it was a full-on production app and it happened on iOS (meaning the fix has to go through the Apple review process), so things could have been worse.

Silver linings though: No data was actually lost, just temporarily inaccessible. I still think KEPLE’s storage system is robust. The collected bonus items could have been really messed up by this screw-up, but they weren’t and that gives me some confidence for the future.

But yeah, test your updates, properly!

[paranoidsoftware]

Frustration Management

...or “How To Shave A Yak”.

Making things with computers is awesome. The real world and physics really don’t matter when you’re building something out of nothing and the only limitation is your focus and your creativity. Looking back after a day of being in a state of flow and seeing everything that wasn’t there yesterday is one of the greatest feelings for me.

A couple of days ago I bought my first Mac and iPhone and I started porting KEPLE to the iOS platform. It was almost ridiculously simple and it took less than a day from unpacking the iPhone until the Paranoid logo showed up on its screen:

Making things with computers is also incredibly frustrating. Sooner or later (and usually it’s sooner) something won’t work the way you imagined. You start investigating why and realize that something is broken on a lower level. You need a tool to investigate further, so you find some source code on the internet. Except it won’t compile on your version of MacOS... Nothing can sum this up better than Malcom’s Dad.

The technical term for this struggle is yak shaving. “I’ll go right back to fixing my actual problem, as soon as I’m done shaving this yak...”. I’m starting to think that this barbering work is a necessary evil of getting anything done on a computer.

The problem with yak shaving, for me, is that it kills the spirit. After the rapid success of getting Keple to run on the iPhone I spent three full days figuring out why the sounds weren’t loading. While I was stuck going the down the rabbit hole of issues, I was very much busy. Solving this was at the top of my mind so much that I definitely could not take a break and build some levels. I was digging deeper and deeper and at the same time my root problem had not moved an inch. Solving a blocker like this is a binary thing, it either works or it doesn’t and it’s very hard to see progress as long as it’s in the “doesn’t work” phase.

These days I get to work at home and I only report to myself and that’s awesome. But when there is no one around to commiserate these stretches of yak shaving take a particularly strong toll on me. Working and working without making visible progress is frustrating and I’ve woken up considerably less happy than the days before.

This will not be last annoying thing in the journey that is Paranoid Software. Managing my frustration will be crucial if this is to work. Next time around I’ll make sure to define my off-work times better, get more R&R and try not to get so flustered so easily. What do you do if stuff just isn’t working right?

Was it worth it though?

Totally!

[paranoidsoftware]

Beginnings

Everyone knows that a journey begins with the first step. A harder question to answer is when that step is taken.

Today is my first day as a full-time indie game developer, which is something I have dreamed about for two decades, but never dared to actually do. I have quit day jobs before, but somehow it was much less scary to be unemployed and do nothing than to follow a dream and risk failing. This time around I have promised myself to work on KEPLE until it can be considered a success or a failure, no more limbo! So I have definitely taken a step today, but probably not the first one.

I remember playing Crusader: No Regret with my best friend when we were kids and just being floored by the level of detail in the game: A full motion intro sequence that looked to me like a Star Trek movie, blinking consoles, pipes and levers, robots, elevators, real actors portraying rebels and villains. Everything felt real, a whole universe shipped on a shiny CD-Rom. And the first thing you saw when you started the game was this beautiful swirling Origin Logo, saying “We create worlds” and the title “A Tony Zurovec game”. 

I was hooked! I wanted nothing more than to learn how to create worlds. And I wanted to have my name up in lights like that. I can’t say precisely when that epiphany happened, but 1998 became the founding year of Paranoid Software. The company’s first major release was a game called Lex, which is currently stuck on a floppy disk somewhere (for lack of a floppy drive to read it).

Like any successful product, Lex immediately received a sequel, creatively called Lex 2: The endless war. Just like in the first game, the objective was to reach the exit of each level without stepping on any mines:

Yes Mr. Freud, those are mines.

And just like that, I got my name (and Peter’s, who did the graphics and whose last name I misspelled [sorry]) up in lights:

However, in a tragic twist of fate, Lex never left its floppy disk and thus didn’t have quite the impact on pop culture that I had hoped for. I wasn’t satisfied and I wasn’t done making games.

Now I’m finally actually making games for real for real (okay and paperwork and blogging and writing a thousand impressums). I’ll be using this blog to ramble about anything related to the process, such as news about KEPLE, the experience of working from home and handling the business side of things.

I would love it if you came along for the ride!

Cheers, Bartl